I used to have a fairly foul mouth. It came from several years of training horses and muttering under my breath and was exasperated by a year working at a feedlot with 18,000 head of cattle and all male co-workers.

I could swear like a m-f, yes I could.

I could also castrate about 200 bulls a day, so there.

Once I had my son, I knew I'd sorta have to clean up my language. I didn't really want my son walking around at school saying, "no, bitch, I didn't do my homework." So I cleaned up the verbage at home. Because of this I've developed looks that say exactly what I want to, without actually saying them.

But I digress.

Much to my dismay, last summer my son learned to use the F-word. It's not as though he could use it properly in a sentance or anything (although it was tempting to teach him how to say 'effin' liberals') but more like a word used for shock value alone.

He only said it once around me. And yes, I smacked his mouth. Not hard... just with enough of that shock value to get through to him.

But apparently he had become very good at using it at day care whenever he was mad at a teacher. The believed he had gotten it from one of the other kids, a particularly sad case who had a crap family life. White trash mom and white trash dad sort of kid that you look at and want to take home and scrub his grubby little body down and give him a hair cut and feed him candy because he gets none of that at home.

But I think he might have learned it from me on a beautiful sunny spring day.

On said day, I decided to walk from our house to the local bookstore to try brainwash my son into loving books as much as I do. (it's working, by the way)

We came to a crosswalk, waited until it turned to walk and started across. Suddenly, a man turning left at the intersection (whose signal was not on) suddenly veered across the intersection and - seeing us - slammed on his brakes.

He stopped INCHES away from my left knee, with my hand on the hood of his car. My son had been on my right side and in defense, I had flung him a foot behind me, while still holding his hand... though he was now sitting on his butt in the crosswalk.

I slammed my hand down on the man's hood, proceeded to pick up my son and stomped around to the driver's side door.

This small man with thick glasses and a handicapped sign hanging from his rearview mirror rolled down his window about two inches.

Not quite enough space for my fist to fit through unfortunately.

I screamed a stream of foul-mouthed obsecenities at him with my son clutched on my hip. I jabbed my finger at his window and called him ever name I could possibly think of in my shaken brain. My son was completely silent, obviously sucking in my diatribe like only four year old sponge-children can do.

The man did the only thing he could have done, he squeaked a sorry out the window and drove off as I stomped over to the curb, clutching my son. Only then did I cry. Several people had been stuck at the light while this was going on and rolled down their windows to ask if we were alright. I nodded and continued to walk towards the bookstore, knowing I needed to sit down, hug my son and drink a strong coffee.

And that, I believe, is how my son really learned how to use the F-word.