Poll: how much profanity did your parent(s) expose you to* when you were a young child?

  When I was growing up and my mother's anger was a result of and/or directed at me and my siblings, the cursing was part and parcel of it.  My mother had two distinct personas: the sweet and outgoing one she used outwardly when talking on the phone, when greeting houseguests, when mingling with the congregation at church, when she was in a good mood, etc., and the  the hardened, mean, visceral, lashing out one that she used behind closed doors at home.  It seemed to me that other people outside of the family were more important to her than we were, because she presented her best self to them and her worst to us.  When the latter personage in her emerged, there was a particular word that she used when cursing at us, her own children, that to this day the mere remembrance of her using it causes a deep and negative reaction in me.  Of course, it also feeds into what I think of my mother.  I used to ask myself, "How can she love me and at the same time call me that, talk to me that way?"  It was extremely confusing for me as a young child, and because it continued throughout my entire childhood, as I became a pre-teen and a teen, that confusion became rampant apathy.  I lost the bound that a child feels for and to his mother.

  I remember when I was about six years old, I thought that my mother was to only mother who talked like that when she got angry.  Of course, I realize that many people have different faces depending on their situations, myself included, but at age six, I didn't know that.  Interacting with other families and other adults only showed me their positive sides, and especially in media images of people such as parents, mothers, cursing never showed up.  One day at school, we were taking turns reading a story aloud, an activity that I always loved because I had been an avid reader from an even younger age.  The story we were reading was about people who worked in a building and the nicknames that personified them, and the passage that I was supposed to read stopped me cold.  I saw the words, I knew the words, I knew how to say the words, but I froze.  I was so afraid that if I read that one word out loud, it would immediately broadcast to the whole world that my mother used profanity.  My six-year-old rationale took over, and I couldn't go on.  The teacher was stunned.   I had always read beautifully, and my vocabulary was far beyond my grade level.  There was no reason I should not have known the word or words, so she couldn't understand why I balked.  She read the passage herself, and even though I don't remember it verbatim, the words that stopped me are etched in my brain decades later.  The man in the building was an angry sort, so his nickname was Mr. Yell-And-Cuss.

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