Parental Embarrassment
 

Some parents seem to positively delight in embarrassing their kids, and my mom was the greatest at it! What was the most embarrassing thing your parents did when you were a kid?

(I have too many to name, but one that I especially recall is that whenever I was grounded, if friends came around asking for me, I had to come down from my room, in my pajamas and bare feet, and explain to them myself why I couldn't come out. That included what misbehavior had prompted me to get grounded.)

Hmm... I would have to say one of the highlights was when I was in junior high (you know, the age when EVERYTHING your parents do is embarrasing).
So my mom was supposed to be picking me up from school, which was embarrasing enough because she drove a giant ugly 70's model Pontiac Grand Prix that made funny noises. Normally I could hear her coming, and I would run up closer to the road so she wouldn't pull into the parking lot and nobody would see me.... Anyway, so there is a "school zone" on the main road where you can't go over 20 miles per hour, and evidently she was going faster than that. As luck would have it, there happened to be a cop monitoring the zone.
Of course the only place she could pull over in that area was right into my school parking lot.... and naturally she would have to pull up right in front of the door where EVERYBODY was standing.
Oh yeah. Loud ugly car, police vehicle with flashing lights, my little sister who was a baby at the time screaming bloody murder in the back seat, angry mom behind the wheel. You get the idea.
I tried to hide in the laughing/ pointing crowd, but my mom spotted me. She rolled down her window and yelled out not only my first name, but my middle name too, and told me to get in the car.
I had to sit in the car while the officer took his time calling in the info, wrote the ticket..etc. All in plain view of the other students.

I still get embarrased just thinking about it.

One of the most unusual parental talents is that in the midst of mortally embarrassing you, any comment you make in response is seen as an affront to them, personally, and you are later treated to an hour long lecture on "why must you repeatedly embarrass me in front of my friends."

Well, just the fact that my mom taught at the same elementary school I went to was a guarantee for a lifetime's worth of embarassment.

See you and raise you.

My mother worked as a secretary in the Guidance Office of my high school. Confidentiality? What's that?

You poor thing. Did you ever feed something to a guidance counselor just to see how long it took your mom to get hold of it?

I never talked to my guidance counsellor about anything more complex than scheduling. I have a lot of unresolved issues.

But whatever parents do, they're going to embarass their kids because it's just not cool/hip/phat/whateeeveeeerrrr to be old. and nobody wants to be like their parents.

If your parents are ageing hippies/goths. you'll be a straight-A preppie (We're trying this approach with our kids ;))

If your parents are super-straight you'll do drugs and drop out

If your parents are republicans you'll be gay and join PETA/Greenpeace

If your parents are divorced you'll be a born again Christian/member of virginity-until-marriage-youth-group

If your parents are rich you'll shop at Walmart and the Salvation Army (and order $30 pizza when you're done); if your parents are poor, only designer will do....(McDonalds is designer, right?)

If your parents are pop stars, you might as well give up now, Delusionella Grumpypuss Hyundai.

My mum tried so hard to be cool, I ran out of levels of embarassment and decided to play the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" school of thought. The height of the embarrassment came when, in the 80s, she grew a long curl of hair on one cheek and dyed it bright pink, then brought my forgotten lunch into my classromm, wearing one red and one blue stiletto shoe. Now I have children, I dye my hair bright purple, blue and red ALL OVER, and wear grotty black t-shirt, jeans and trainers all the time :D

I don't think I ever really got embarrassed about anything my Mum did. She used to drive a very unsightly car which is difficult to explain and probably best described as 'a toolshed on wheels'. My father had converted a long wheel based landcruiser into a sort of campervan. This was the car of my childhood. It actually was quite legendary at both the primary and high schools that I went to along with my brother.

The embarrassing story I have is actually my brothers, but i think it deserves telling here.

My mum (who was a two pot screamer) had been at her squash club christmas party when she recieved a call saying that my brother had broken his leg and could she please come down to the school. I didn't actually see the next bit, but this is how my brother tells it.

He was lying on the oval with a mask on his face feeling ok - thanks to the drugs - even though he'd broken both bones just above his ankle when they all heard another vehicle heading towards them! As they turned, they saw to their surprise, shock and amazement that my mother had driven the toolshed through the school and down onto the oval and parked it right next to the ambulance. I'm sure she violated several rules of the road, not the least of which was being under the influence of alcohol while driving.

My brother was loaded into the ambulance shortly after everyone regained their composure after this momentous event and Mum was asked to follow to the hospital in her car - slowly! On the way to the hospital she had to stop off and pick me and my b/f up from home and then continue on to the hospital. After a breakneck ride, we arrived at the hospital and there was no sign of the ambulance. Mum assumed that they'd already dropped my brother off and left. This was not the case. She actually beat the ambulance there!

A brief description of my mother. She was 5 foot nothing and quite slight in build. She was fairly observant of her catholic faith and rarely had a drink except at special occasions (like the xmas party). She was quiet and softly spoken.

On the day of my brothers accident, I thought she had been possessed!

So the ambulance arrived and my brother was all smiles when he got out - till the gas wore off. Mum continued to panick for the next 8 weeks or so till his leg was healed, but the story goes down in history, and was in fact a part of the eulogy my brother gave at her funeral just over 2 years ago.

CLASSIC !!!!!! ;)

I just caught a few minutes of "Mad Max" while at MIL's. I'm thinking post wrap prop sale.

¿"a two pot screamer"?

Great story!

Ok Aliantha - you've got to do some translating for us. I've been to Australia once already, and I'm going back in April, so I need a refresher course in 'Stralia Speak.

Two pot screamer?

Non drinker...two drinks and they're plastered........and screaming. :lol:

At Xmas time, I was coming out of the bathroom, and my Mom asked if I had sprayed air freshener, because she thought I had taken a number 2. She asked this in front of 10 or so relatives. My mom didn't think it was a big deal, but my my one aunt and I thought otherwise.

That's the sort of thing my mother loved to do, as well. "Did you stink it up?" was her usual query.

I have a good one.

When I was a sophomore in high school my dad was fixing up a car. It was a 1960 Austin Healey Sprite. Really little car, it felt like a tin can when you rode along in it. It would have been really cool, except he had just rebuilt it and it was pretty scruffy looking and bright orange.

Well one day he decided to drive me to school in the Austin Healey. He had just got it running that weekend and wanted to take it for a test drive. Bad idea. It was fine until we got up to the school. Then the front drivers side wheel came off. Completely. Rim, rubber tire and all. Right in front of the school. I could have died...

He managed to coast on 3 wheels into one of the parking spots on the street in front of the school. I grabbed my stuff and bolted to the door without further ado.

When I got home that evening, my dad told me that he had 3 teachers lift the car (it was that light and since he didn't have a car jack) and put the wheel back on to drive home. Apparently he hadn't tightened it enough when he put the wheels on in the days before. He laughed at the way I ran for the door as soon as the car had stopped. But can you blame me?

Here is what it looked like, but keep in mind, it was bright orange.

There was a girl I had a huge crush on in high school. I finally got the nerve to call her one day, and her dad answered. I asked if she was there, and he said "She can't come right now, she's having a bowel movement."

I never hooked up with her, and I never told her about that. I probably should have.

Dad was just separating the wheat from the chaff.

I can see that and raise you to the limit. My momster ran both the bookstore and the cafeteria at the college I attended.

Actually, the only reason I agreed to go to North Carolina Wesleyan College was that because she worked there I was able to get quite a discount as a "day student" while my family agreed to save money to send me to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which was where I really wanted to go but out-of-state tuition was obscenely high. That meant the momster still had full control over what I wore, my hair, music, friends, driving, even what time I got up and went to bed. It wasn't bad enough that I had to go to a home-town Methodist college which specialized in training ministers, I had to see her every day, all day, and of course all the other faculty and staff watched my every move and reported back to her as only Southerners can: "Well, I don't know if I should really tell you this, but did you know your daughter cut her Biology class today and was out on the Quad with that awful Jewish boy? It's such a shame..."

To top it off, the year she managed the Cafeteria (while they were recruiting a professional manager but had not yet been successful) the quality of food hit an all-time low and there were a lot of student complaints. I began carrying a paper bag of spices - garlic salt and Seasoning Salt were my favorites - to load up what they served to the point where you could no longer taste how tasteless it was. I'll admit that it wasn't so much the momster's "fault" that the food was bad as that she had no experience whatever at this but had been drafted to fill in because she was the President of the college's secretary, but it still got blamed on me by association. Plus I had to cringe in mortal embarassment everytime I went through the serving line, never knowing what had been reported to her about me that day on one hand and hearing the rather nasty gripes from the rest of the students on the other.

After nearly a year of spending every day and night of my life with the momster things were at the breaking point, but I found a way to turn the tables on her. I went to the Dean of Women Students and told him that if I couldn't get a work grant so that I could move into the dorm I was going to kill myself because my mother never let me have any privacy and was micromanaging every breath I took. I really poured it on, because I knew that he COULDN'T tell everybody about it. He agreed to talk to the momster, who also had to back down and let me go to the dorm, because SHE didn't dare let the word get around. So my life finally began when I was 18 and managed to "run away from home" at least a few miles from my family, at least for part of the day. I finally started growing up, I finally had my first date, and a lot of other firsts. And I finally got to the University of Colorado and never looked back again.

My dad never did anything that wasn't embarrassing. He used to hand out "grammar police" tickets to strangers who weren't even talking to him. He also used to fart and then evaluate the smell ie. "That wasn't bad, actually it was quite pleasant." In public. Once we were at the museum and I was about to say something I'd recently learned, he let out a really loud one right as I was saying "I heard that..." and he said "I didn't!" There were lots of people around too. He was morbidly obese long before it was an epidemic. He would go out wearing shorts, a way too-tight T-shirt, long black dress socks, and sandals. Once when I was of drinking age he showed up at the bar I was a regular at, wearing only one shoe. He said it was because he was swimming in the ocean during a storm and got dashed against some rocks, and lost part of his big toe. He managed to get the email of one of the other regulars and then continually spammed her and also told her a lot of personal info about me & my family. Then he disappeared for a month and when he turned up wouldn't tell anyone where he had been. Strange guy. I rarely talk to him anymore. Every one of my friends who has ever met him has some kind of bizarre story to tell.

I cant really come up with a story about myself but my mother told me one about my brother! He was still a baby when he got sick one day... The day before my dad was busy redecorating and painting the house! My brother had been watching very closely with full intrest! He s room had been done a coupple days before so it wasnt the smell of paint or something like that! But in that morning he didnt feel well.... So my mom had put him to bed and called the doctor...By noon he arrived...He noticed the redecorations immediatly and told my mom it looked great...She was proud and showed him the kitchen and hall...They went up to my bro and when she got in the room there was a terrible smell and some free-hand painting on the wall!
He had been grabbing in his own diaper because suddenly there was so much in it! As he was standing there, feeling much better and very proud....:o
Offcourse my mom was a bit embaressed....:rolleyes: