Harder than I thought it was going to be

This "no saying the F-word" thing is turning out to be much harder than I ever suspected it would be!  So far I have made it into day #4 before I blew it.  Some days I start over more than a half a dozen times.  I am currently on day #2.  Again.  It's looking like getting that "No saying the F-word for 7 days" off my list is NOT going to be the easy one!

So why is this so difficult for me?  I was certainly taught better than this.  Saying "Gosh" or "Gee" would have gotten me a scolding growing up, and if I had ever let loose with an f-bomb in my Dad's hearing, I might not have survived it!

And even after my Dad metamorphosized into Mr. Live-and-let-live, he still frowned on vulgarity and coarseness. 

Profanity was NOT something I grew up doing.

In my early 20s I was reading a lot of Stephen King books, and good old Steve liberally salts his books with the F-word.  And I found myself thinking it a lot.  The cure was simple:  stop reading Stephen King. 

Of course it was my 9-1-1 days that really got me going.  You hear a lot of "F#@%" when taking calls from panicked and angry folks.  And my co-workers weren't much better.  Gradually I picked it up.  There were two memorable moments of my use of that word while at work.  Once was during a call.  I don't remember what the call was about, but the guy was literally using the F-word every other word or more.  It got so bad that I couldn't understand him and I needed to do so.  Finally I said "Sir, if you don't stop saying "f#@%" I won't be able to help you since I can't understand a word you are saying."  Silence on the other end, and then he calmly proceeded to answer my questions with no more profanity.

Lucky for me he took it well.  Profanity is expressly NOT allowed, and every word we said was recorded, so if he had complained to my supervisor, I would have been toast.

The second time was even more spectacular.  I was dispatching on one of the police nets and we had a little flurry of cop #1 decides to go to cop #2's call, while cop #1 goes off the call, meanwhile cop #3 calls in a traffic stop with a license plate and then cop #1 decides to go help out #3.  This makes for a lot of typing really fast, with mostly numbers, so that we have a record of who is going where and when they decided to go another place.  I was frantically typing things in and realized that I messed up one location.  Frustrated, I muttered "f@$&" under my breath.  Seconds later a message flashed across my screen from the sgt - "I heard that"  I nearly died!  My foot was still on the send pedal when I spoke, so every cop in Gresham hear me, as well as anyone with a police scanner tuned to that frequency.  Several other cops sent joshing messages, but I waited in fear for the sgt's call to my supervisor.  If he had complained, I was toast.  Lucky for me, he was forgiving.  But that scared me straight for a long time.

These days I find that I can censor my mouth around family and friends.  It is when I am stressed and/or frustrated that I slip up.  But not stressed over big things.  Silly little things will bring out the F in me.  Yesterday morning as I was driving to meet a friend my ear muffs rolled off the seat and onto the floor.  No biggie.  But I realized that I had just said "f$@#!"  And my response to the realization that I had just blown four days??  You guessed it - I said "F@%#" again.

sigh

You might ask why this is such a big deal to me.  You hear it all the time from all sorts of people these days.  But it still strikes me as coarse and unladylike.  I know.  A silly sounding reason.  But it's the reason that I want to knock it off.  I don't want to sound like someone making an appearance on Cops.  I don't want to sound white-trashy and common.  I want to sound like a mature, grown-up woman with control over her mouth. 

So I am back to finishing up day one and getting started on day two.  Just six more days to go....