An End To Authority

A couple of weeks ago we were driving home from school. I’d taken the car because I had to pick up someone else’s kid, and so had put on hold the dicing with fate/death/stress that is the daily bike ride. It’s barely more than five minutes in the car, but barely more than five minutes is more than enough time for the conversation to get round to bad words. Which is one of their favourite conversations after all.

When they talk about this stuff, it’s always pretty mild. They never use the swear word in any sort of proper sentence structure. For example, phrases such as ‘Fuck me, my day was a complete bastard,’ are still alien to them. It’s just the words themselves, and the suggestion of them.

School days for six year-old boys are split between playing football and skulking around the playground in wee groups, the amusement coming when every now and again one of them will say ‘shit’ and the rest will dissolve into fits of giggles. The end-of-the-day report usually goes along the lines of, ‘Today we won 19-2 and Billy said fuck.’

The girls are different of course, and not just because, in our case, they’re all two years older. Girls don’t skulk around playgrounds. They stand in little collectives in corners, (they get it from their mums standing in little collectives at the school gate), wondering which one of their friends they’re going to bitchily exclude from the group for the next fifteen minutes.

So there we were sitting in the car and the conversation started up about some kid who had said the ‘sh’ word of the ‘f’ word or something, and the situation in which he’d used it, which of course is never, ‘David said Miss Peabody is a sack of shite’, but far more likely to be, ‘David was just standing there doing nothing and he said shite and we all laughed.’

It’s one of those minor but ever-tricky parental moments. The first time someone says ‘Billy said a bad word...’ you can’t jump on the conversation and tell them to stop talking about it or there will be no Boomerang for six months. So you let it go. However, you don’t want them to be still talking about it in say six hours time, which you know they will be if they get the chance. So you have to give them some leeway, and then stop them at a moment of your choosing. Or, to look at it from the kids’ perspective... you have to ignore the discussion, which makes it look like you’re condoning it, and then suddenly you tell them off at a completely random moment. Which is probably the moment that you’re getting annoyed about it, and from nowhere you sound harsh and angry. Happens all the time.

On this occasion, seeing as we had a non-family member in the car, when I made my completely random assertion that the conversation had gone too far, I didn’t pick up the hand-held flame thrower that I keep in the glove compartment. Instead I spoke sternly to them. They laughed and edged the conversation a little closer to actually saying the rude words in question, whatever they were. I said some more stern stuff, this time, so I thought, with a bit of an edge, just to imply that, although I had never done it before, this might just be the time when I press the rear seat ejector button which we’d had installed by the Peugeot garage the last time the car was in for its service. My serious, enough-is-enough tone, the one that suggests firm but reasonable authority, the tone that you hope carries weight and gravitas.

They smiled and looked cheekily at each other, but the conversation died and I thought I had triumphed. A few more smirks and then the other girl in the car, the non-family member with, more or less, freedom to say what she wanted, said...

‘You sound like Shrek.’

Giggling all round, and that, in such a small and seemingly insignificant moment, was the end of all parental authority.

Worse, my Scottish accent sounds like Mike Myers. Must be time to go home...