I swear very rarely and rather poorly…or comically…when I do. I was reminded of this last night. My partner and I went out for pizza, and I was spouting off about the number of hours I’ve put in at the office this week and about my expectation that next week won’t be much better. I dropped a swear word somewhere in my rant which I only noticed because Reed’s eyes momentarily widened as he listened to me.

“I’m sorry work is so rough on you right now.” His comment was softly spoken and sort of quiet. Unusual for him.

I started to laugh. “I’m not that angry.”

“Are you sure?”

I was sure. I don’t think about not swearing; the words simply aren’t part of my daily vocabulary.

You won’t be surprise to learn that expletives were forbidden by my parents when I was growing up. My mother didn’t even want to hear my brothers and I using the words “darn” or “crap” because they were just substitutes for “other words” as she put it. We were told to find a more “Christ-like” way to express ourselves. Sort of a “What would Jesus do?” mentality even though that phrase had not yet gained popularity.

To this day, I’ve heard my mother use a swear word exactly twice. My father – once. In each case they were angry, more furious or frustrated than I’ve ever known them. For my mom, the swearing preceded a sort of break down. She was under stress and moved to another state to live with her parents for a couple months. Certainly, I learned to associate profanity with excessive emotion…and even then it was immoral.

We lived in the bible belt south where adults generally didn’t swear in front of kids. Our next door neighbor didn’t hold back though. He was the high school basketball coach and he swore liberally…but only when talking about black people. Even now I feel for what some of the kids on his team must have gone through. One of my more memorable “conversations” with him was when I was about 14. My father had gotten a new boss at work. The family was just moving in to town and my parents invited them over for dinner. They were black. My parents were trying to raise us in a colorblind world, a difficult thing to do in the south at that time. At home we were schooled that everyone is the same in God’s eyes and that is how we should treat people too. Anyway, after see this family at our house, our neighbor cornered me and was asking about my father working for a black boss. Those weren’t the words he used, of course. The entire exchange was filled with racial slurs and swearing on his part. So Mr. M was my primary exposure to how swear words were incorporated in every day conversation.

When I went off to college, swearing was a lot more common and it wasn’t in anger and wasn’t done in connection with demeaning a race or ethnicity. Kids swore casually. It was part of conversation. They didn’t even appear to notice that they were swearing and no one listening seemed to think anything of it. It was jarring to me though. I could never ‘not hear’ the oaths.

As the years progressed, I grew farther away from my Christian roots. It wasn’t a life or belief system I embraced. I matured into understanding that I could be a good, loving, decent person without reading the Bible every day or going to church on Sundays. My senior year, I made a conscious decision to start swearing more. Seriously. I actively thought about it and decided I needed to incorporate swear words into my speech if I wanted to truly fit in with everyone else.

I think I did this for a couple months (sporadically since I would sometimes forget), until one time I was talking with my roommate and a friend when, in the middle of what I was saying, Jenn gets a big grin, exchanges a look with Barbara, and they both burst out laughing. It was the kind of laughter that could not be contained. I was all… “What? What’s so funny?”

Jenn collects herself enough to look at Barbara and say “C is so funny when she swears, isn’t she?”

Barb just nodded, still laughing. Jenn looked at me and said, “You can’t swear. It doesn’t sound right coming from you. You just can’t make it work.”

I thought about being offended, but their laughter was contagious. I played back what I was saying in my head and I agreed. From me, swear words sound ridiculous. It’s like an American trying to use the word “bloody” as a curse. It just doesn’t work. After we all got a good laugh, the profanity dropped away from my vocabulary again. It simply wasn’t me.

It wasn’t until I was going through my transition from female to male that I again gave some active thought to the extent to which I used swear words. Going through the process in my late 20s was sort of like going through puberty again. It’s true on a physical level, and it’s true on a social level as well. Although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, I did look to model male behavior much like a teen-age boy tries to model behavior of adult men. One of the things I noticed as soon as I started being perceived as unambiguously male is that men swear a lot more when there aren’t women around. Yes, guys swear around girls all the time and girls swear both amongst themselves and in mixed company. We are well into the 21^st century, but in my experience men curse much more liberally when only men are present. I guess it’s a cultural habit that continues to hang on. Noticing this, I thought briefly about how much I would stand out if I never swore. Is that something I needed to learn to do – a specific male habit I needed to adopt? Fitting in is important and I was already behind the curve since I’d been raised female instead of male.

I only entertained the notion briefly. I didn’t think I would be any more successful in pulling off the swear words in my late 20s than I had been in my early 20s. I get that slight hitch, a hesitation, just before I try to drop them in. I tense up, the same way I get tense – on alert – when in the presence of someone who’s angry. There’s lingering guilt there, too, that’s not only associated with my religious upbringing but with the guilt of not telling Mr. M that he needs to shut the fuck up when it comes to his opinion of people who are black. All that is inside me, mixed up, informing my reflexes whether I want it to or not.

When I was first dating Reed, I had to ask him not to swear so much. I still respond to casual cursing as if someone is about to become very, very angry. I could tell Reed wasn’t angry, but I was still reacting as if he were. I was on alert without wanting to be, without needing to be. Reed works in law enforcement and swearing constantly seems to be part of the culture. I notice it when I’m in the company of his colleagues. Men, women, everyone. The conversation is laced with creative cursing. There’s an irony to that too. I asked Reed once if his father swore much when he was growing up. Reed said his father didn’t swear at all. He hates it. His father spent his life as a longshoreman and hated the amount of cursing on the job. To him, it was indicative of a lack of education, something poor people did. He didn’t bring it into the house and he didn’t want his kids swearing. He wanted them to get an education and work in better jobs where people didn’t curse as a matter of course.

Reed still swears more than I’d like, but I only have to be around his work colleagues to realize how much he actually is cutting back on it at home. On the other hand, I am more immune to it than I used to be. So much so, that I can even drop a word or two into conversation without thinking about it first. Based on Reed’s reaction last night though, there’s still a comical element to it, even if now it’s me laughing over his reaction to my use of a single swear word.