Recently, Washington Post's advice columnist Carolyn Hax responded to a suburban mother's "concern" for her daughter, who skipped from going to college in order to grow her bartending business. How outrageous! Now (cue shock and horror) her daughter also decided to start a family of her own, but wait: she is doing it all wrong, the parents express, she was suppose to go to college and become something "nice and stable" (my words, not theirs) such as becoming an accountant or teacher, before deciding to get married or having children. Here is the mother expressing her distain: "Our issue is with her use of foul language. We’re not prissy, but both of us work in professional settings where the casual use of such language is not acceptable, and neither of us grew up in households where it was used. She has recently gotten married and hopes to have children." Her daughter is obviously a mutant. Bartenders do not raise good households, especially bartender-mothers with a sailoress's mouth.
How are her children suppose to grow to be healthy in a household like this?
The parents then ask Ms. Hax for advice, what should they do? Carolyn Hax replies in due form: "Yes! Yes, there’s something you can do. You can see in your letter that you are in the early stages of estrangement from your daughter over language she might or might not use around children she doesn’t even have yet. Then you can try to persuade me that her cussing is more harmful to family health than your judging. You praise her management skills and faint-praise her self-sufficiency (“finally” . . .), and your expressed purpose is concern for your someday grandchildren, but if there’s such thing as writing through clenched teeth, you’re doing it here. It’s achingly clear that you can barely abide your daughter, and that’s the thrust of your note. To wit: A question about her language didn’t require mention of her dropping out or bartending, did it? Conveniently, the answer to both questions, text and subtext, is the same: The best thing you can do for your grandkids-to-be is make real peace with your daughter, not just peace from one end of a 10-foot pole. You have deep self-interest here. The more you dwell on her deviation from your expectations, the more she’s likely to deviate.
Why? It’s tempting to blame her immaturity, and there’s probably some of that at work here. But the bigger issue is that what you “imagined for her” still governs your opinion of her, and probably always has. That comes with a powerful message for a kid, one you probably don’t even realize you’ve been sending: “We don’t care who you really are, we just want you to look like us.”" Thank the Southern Baptist Suburban White-Jesus for Carolyn Hax. I am in this predicament at this moment. My parent actually says to me: "Why do you abuse me with your language?" and I looked at him like "Is he havin a rare moment of egocentricism?" and have to point out that I use this language with everybody, even my therapist, who cusses right back at me, and is one of the top psychiatrist-and-psychologist in the metroplex.
My parent then replies back "Well, she is not even the same religion as I am!" and I reply "And neither am I!" to the gasp of my parent (I am thinking: How did we get on the subject of religion? And she isn't something "nutty" to the people in his upper-class suburban area, like Islam is, my therapist is Jewish. And I am something even more alien, a Unitarian-Universalist, to which, if you tell anyone in my suburban microcosm that you are by abbreviating it to "U.U.", you pretty much just told them, to their brains, that you are a part of a cult) "Well I am not going to be around you if you talk like that!" he fires at me. To which I reply "Then why don't you drop me back off at my apartment?" "Because I enjoy being around you!" Huh? I am an artist, which, if you ever tell anyone that that is your occupation, you just as well said "I am a homeless person" but *surprise, surprise* I actually do make money with it. This reflects how the parents also view their bartending daughter, who, if they tell any other of their suburban neighbors of their daughter's occupation, they just as well said to them "She is a blossoming horrible-mother due to being surrounded by alcohol and foul language", to be mild. To be extreme, you could have just told your neighbors that your daughter is Casey Anthony.
I have never found any, ANY, men faced with these expressed predicaments, and, after hearing about how Cosmo magazine asked selected bachelors in their magazine "Is it skanky or sexy for a woman to cuss" and some men say that it is "skanky", it made me ask myself "What is going on?!" as I push my eyes back into my sockets. Am I on an alien planet? I cuss every third sentence and can get a date with most types of men, surburban to urban to a man from Sudan. I am one of those people who cuss naturally, and am a "I love everybody" persona (AKA, for all you psychology majors, a MBTI "ESTp"). most people my age understand my tough tongue and find it endearing and/or comedic; I strike others as a punkish avant-garde figure. But whenever my "normal" friend (I know she considers herself that way because she calls me her "crazy" friend) cusses (a rare feat for my friend) in front of her mother in their home, the mother gives her a look that would silence a bulldog, and my normal-friend says "sorry" to her mother's look.
I witnessed this all, and while I shoved my boggling eyes back into my eye sockets I quietly shrugged my shoulders to myself. It is not my place to tell them how to be, what their familail dynamics should be, or what my normal friend should or should-not apologize about. And if her and my family did Wife Swap, a television show where families trade mothers for two weeks, the families would love each other, and I would be not a "crazy" friend, but regarded by both her and my family as a "crazy person" in a "normal" family.
*Sigh*! So now I ask: Has anybody ever felt discriminated upon due to not posturing in the "be nice and sweet" noncussable archtype that suburban-raised women are pointed to abide in our society?
Washington Post Carolyn Hax Article Citation http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/carolyn-hax-a-mother-who-needs-to-back-off-on-expectations-of-a-grown-daughter/2012/01/01/gIQAh5MrBQ_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines