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A Father's Dismay

 

In the movie A Christmas Story, a little boy named Ralphie was helping his father fixing a car tire when he dropped the nuts he was holding. In a panic, he blurted out: “Oh, sh*t!”, much to his already-grumpy father’s dismay.

Unlike Ralphie’s father who used swearwords often, I rarely applied foul language in my daily speech. Nonetheless, I feared of one day when my son, Spidey, would muster something like Ralphie did. I wouldn’t know what to do.

Then something happened. I was at my desk working at home and Spidey was playing with his Transformers toys on the floor nearby. Spidey liked to talk to himself while playing, pretending that his robots were interacting verbally. Suddenly, I noticed that Spidey was shouting “Dammit! Dammit!”

“Oh great”, I thought to myself, “so the day has come.” Did he learn that from me? Did he learn that from his friends at school? At church? From TV? More importantly, what am I supposed to explain to him now? Parenting is hard. I had a quick prayer to God that I would say the right thing.

“Spidey,” I turned to him and asked, “What did you just say?”

My son looked at me quite innocently and said: “Dimetrodon. This guy is transforming. He’s turning into a dimetrodon. DIMEtrodon!”

He was shouting dimetrodon.

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