Toby, Christine, and their 11 year old daughter, Lila, are socially inseparable; any invitation to the couple automatically extends to the child. Lila is home schooled and her parents seemingly don’t want her to miss any experience that might include a teachable moment, so Lila comes with to parties and to dinner invitations. I don’t know how Lila herself feels about this unusual arrangement. Her mother is clearly eager for Lila’s inclusion in the conversation, and gets far more anxious than her daughter if the talk strays too far from family topics. Lila participates in the conversation when she can, and though she eventually gets bored with the adult company, she is never sullen or disrupting. She is admirably a good sport about her mother’s need for togetherness.
My husband and I get together with the close knit family on a very irregular basis, maybe once every two years. We’ve known Toby and Christine a long time, have friends in common and enjoy the reminiscences and the status updates. We recently joined them for dinner at a charming but noisy Mexican restaurant. The family was drinking tea. Steve and I immediately ordered a margarita and ramped up our energy level to conduct our conversation loud enough to be heard above the lively din in the restaurant. Maybe I got a little carried away. When we’d exhausted all of our family appropriate topics and somehow entered into politics, I forgot about Lila, the 11 year old child sitting demurely at my side.
Channeling George Carlin, I inadvertently used two of the seven words no one is supposed to say. In Carlin’s routine, he used to say that you couldn’t say these seven words on television, but that’s probably passé. Christine was shocked and somewhat upset; Lila, of course, had no problem with the language at all. She said she’d heard those words no one is supposed to say in the locker room where she goes for swimming lessons. In my defense, again channeling George Carlin; they’re just words. Toby thought the incident was amusing, Christine was still a little shaken, and Lila began paying attention to the adult conversation again. Still, I'm not really comfortable in the role of corrupter of youth. I'm definitely going to clean up my act. 
