{"id":2619,"date":"2026-05-10T08:34:30","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T15:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/?p=2619"},"modified":"2026-05-10T10:13:32","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T17:13:32","slug":"getting-my-mouth-washed-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/2026\/05\/10\/getting-my-mouth-washed-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting My Mouth Washed Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/b>This Mothers\u2019 Day, as I prefer to spell it, I\u2019ve been haunted by memory of the time when Mother washed my mouth out with soap for using a bad word. No, it wasn\u2019t the f-word.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That was almost 70 years ago, in Houston, not quite the Deep South, but close enough.\u00a0 <\/span>A few years before–I was likely around nine–she\u2019d already called out that particular F- vocable. When <\/span>I had asked where babies came from, she’d replied in her typical back-handed way,\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNow, George, I know you know. Don\u2019t you boys snicker about it? It\u2019s a four-letter word beginning with F.\u201d<\/p>\n

(For months I held them in, afraid I\u2019d inadvertently inseminate a classmate with a fart.)<\/p>\n

No, the word I used a couple of years later was, in her mind, much worse. It began with an N.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In her own way \u00a0she was honoring the origins of not Mother’s, but Mothers’ Day.<\/p>\n

Lest we forget: the origins of Mother’s Day lie in the \u00a01870 Mothers\u2019 [sic] Day Proclamation<\/a>, a<\/span> “pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. The appeal was tied to Howe’s feminist<\/a> conviction that women had a responsibility to shape their societies at the political level.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mother, who was a proud Unitarian, would have preferred the 1993 version, updated into a hymn by the Unitarian-Universalist Association<\/a>, this meant to be much more inclusive in both gender references, multicultural sources.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Last night as we were streaming Riot Women<\/a>, with fabulous music and lyrics by ARXX<\/a> (pronounced “arks”). I had a brief moment of positivity about the future.<\/p>\n

Politics is shaped by cycles. Maybe things will swing back. Am I allowed to hope that he-who-must-not-be-named is the beginning \u00a0of dying breath of mindless patriotism, even better of patriarchy?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0This Mothers\u2019 Day, as I prefer to spell it, I\u2019ve been haunted by memory of the time when Mother washed my mouth out with soap for using a bad word. No, it wasn\u2019t the f-word.\u00a0 That was almost 70 years ago, in Houston, not quite the Deep South, but close enough.\u00a0 A few years before–I … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Getting My Mouth Washed Out”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2619"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2627,"href":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions\/2627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}