Children aren’t all bad. In some instances, they can actually be quite useful. But that’s another story. This one’s about the day my seven-year-old dropped the N-bomb within five minutes of meeting my girlfriend’s parents for the first time.

It was the second time he had said it that day. We’d just spent the afternoon at a kind of mega pet store on the outskirts of town called That Fish Place. Along with a huge selection of available pets (cats, dogs, reptiles and amphibians and insects and lots and lots of fish), the store features a touch pool inhabited by stingrays. We were there for the stingrays. 

It’s pretty cool; the stingrays swim around and you can pet their surprisingly hard, rough bodies as they glide past you through the water. That day we lucked out and ended up being there for feeding time and got to watch the underwater birds swim up along the side of the pool and flap their wings eagerly as an attendant dropped bits of chopped fish into their weird little mouths on the undersides of their weird flat bodies. It was quite the sight.

After feeding time the stingrays settled down and I let the boys run off through the aisles of fish. While they were exploring I found myself captivated by the variety of clown fishes with their black-lit oranges and blazing whites and void-like blacks. After ten minutes or so, me and my youngest son and girlfriend all bumped back into one another. Shortly after that, the excited seven-year-old run up and said, very loudly, “I just saw a really ugly fish!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! A nigger fish!”

Now, this was one of those precarious moments you sometimes face as a parent. As far as I know, there’s no manual for what to do when your child inadvertently yells a racial slur in a crowded public space. In the moment, it felt like drawing attention to the word in question was a bad call, especially with the four-year-old there who’d light up with Christmas-level glee each time he learned a new potty mouth (my kids are Jewish, but hey, who’s counting). In fact, just as we were leaving the house that day, the oldest boy ran up the stairs and said “I need to go pee first!” In response, his younger brother bolted into the front room shouting “I need to get my fucking shoes first!” so I played it cool and corrected my son’s pronounciation of Niger Trigger Fish and got the hell out of there.

---