How Embarrassing!!!

Rather than choose just one embarrassing, cringe-worthy moment, I decided to write about a few instances that happened to not only me but to a few of my family members as well. Yes, they are embarrassing, but as time goes by they just turn into funny, cute memories that we often reminisce about.

The Birthday Party

The first embarrassing but really funny experience doesn’t really have anything to do with me but involves my sisters. It was the 1960’s so I don’t think my sister Jill will mind me telling this story. My two older sisters, Amy and Jill, were going to a neighbor’s birthday party. Amy was only about eight years old at the time and my middle sister Jill was about three. My mother was great and she always took good care of us. She always dressed us and styled our hair when we were little but for some reason on the day of this party, she told my oldest sister Amy to dress Jill. Well, she dressed her alright but she forget one important garment...her underwear! They went to the party and there was Jill having a blast dancing and spinning around in her “party dress” while flashing all the other partygoers. She was so little and couldn’t understand why she being dragged off the dance floor! I wasn’t born yet so I can’t say how this happened but our family has had some pretty good laughs over this story. Thank goodness my sister was so young because this certainly was something to be embarrassed about!

Dental Disasters

It seems like I have had a few embarrassing experiences at the dentist’s office. I have always been afraid of the dentist which I think led to these instances. I am happy to report that now that I am older I have not had any recent embarrassing adventures at the dentist’s office! The first one happened when I was about six years old. Unfortunately for me, one of my molars came in rotten so my parents took me to an oral surgeon to have it removed. This is embarrassing but I am sort of proud of myself for being so resourceful. I was in the dentist’s chair and they put the mask over my face to put me to sleep. The dentist and his assistants had their backs turned and just assumed I was sleeping but while the mask was over my face, I held my breath so when they turned around to start the procedure I was gone! I can still remember running down the hall searching frantically for my mother who was in the waiting room. I was naive enough to think my mother was going to take me home after my “great escape” without getting that tooth pulled. Of course, they dragged me back to that dentist’s chair and held that mask over my face without taking their eyes off of me to make sure I fell asleep. Actually, I think this story is more funny than it is embarrassing.

Now the next dentist sorry is a little more embarrassing and I try not to think about it. I was a little older but still on the young side but this embarrassing practice continued until I was at least twelve years old. It seems like I always had cavities no matter how hard I tried to take care of my teeth. So every time I went to the dentist's office and was waiting my turn I would listen to all those horrible drilling sounds and the more I listened the more scared I would become. Then when it was my turn to get my teeth filled, I actually made my mother stand beside the chair and hold my hand! Then the poor dentist had to work around my mother. I always was given what my mother called “magic air” which made me feel really out of it and I would say the stupidest things. Nitrous oxide is the technical term but to little kids “magic air” sounds so much better. One thing I can always remember doing was asking for friends to come to my house to play when we got home from the appointment and my mother always said yes. I think she would have probably said yes to just about anything just to get me through the procedure. I was not only embarrassing myself but my mother as well because she was definitely in the dentist’s way. The things our parents do for us!

Thumbing a Ride

The next funny and embarrassing story happened when I was about six years old. It seems I was experiencing many embarrassing moments at this age! I was at my friend’s house on a very hot summer day to go swimming. At some point, we decided we would walk to a local market for candy. The market was not that far away but we decided to walk in our bare feet. It was so hot the asphalt was burning our feet. We made it to the market but on the way home we had to walk back up the hill to her house and it was so hot and our feet were burning so badly we decided to thumb a ride with the mailman! Of course, he was smart enough not to pick us up and we ended up having to walk the whole back home on our own, burnt feet and all.

Who Spiked the Punch?

Another embarrassing story happened when I was a junior or senior in high school. I am so old I can’t remember anymore. If we would have done this today, my friend and I would have been in REALLY big trouble. We were in French Club and we were having a party. My friend and I were responsible for making the punch and we thought it would be funny to spike it. My Uncle Tony made wine so we had lots of it in the refrigerator. It was a very sweet and delicious wine but floating on top were dried grapes. Honestly, I never drank so I didn’t know if those grapes should have been floating on top or not. So we took a bottle or two of Uncle Tony’s homemade wine and dumped it into the punch we made with those dried grapes floating on top and then proceeded to take it to our French Club party. The other students were drinking it like crazy commenting about how wonderful it tasted. I can remember one girl acting really giddy like she had way too much to drink. It was funny at the time but now that I look back I’m so thankful nobody got sick. We didn’t get into much trouble because they may have suspected but nobody knew for certain that there was any alcohol in the punch. Uncle Tony made the best tasting wine...it tasted more like fruit juice than alcohol! I vaguely remember the teacher asking us about the punch but we didn’t get in trouble for what we did. So it started it out as a little joke but we ended up regretting what we did and just a little embarrassed.

Mud or Chocolate

My niece and nephew were only about six and seven years old when they were playing in the woods behind my parents house. They always played there and I’m not exactly sure what they did but I figured just the normal things children that age do like climbing trees and chasing each other. One day when they came home they both had something brown smeared all over their faces. Everyone sort of knew it was mud but when their parents asked what they were doing my nephew, who was the younger of the two, froze and said “Ask Hayley!”. They must have had their explanation planned out in advance and so Hayley responded “we were eating some chocolate”. Well, it definitely wasn’t chocolate, it was mud and they were eating it”! This explanation was caught on video and it is hilarious because they looked so guilty and ashamed.

The Dance Recital

This situation occurred to my oldest niece, who is now in her early 40's, at her very first dance recital at the very young age of two. The dance she was performing involved having a hat placed in front of each little dancer. My niece carefully picked a hat from my mother’s collection and she was so proud of her selection. When the dance was finished she was supposed to put the hat on her head. But when the dance teacher put the hats in line she didn’t put them in the correct order and my niece ended up with another dancer’s hat. This probably wouldn’t have been a big deal for older children but it was for for a two-year-old girl who wanted her grandmother’s hat. My niece was a spunky little girl too so when she realized that was not her hat sitting on the floor in front of her, she practically attacked the poor little girl next to her yanking the hat off her head! She was determined to get her hat back. The dance ended with poor Heidi crying and the dance teacher coming out on stage to explain all the commotion. This embarrassing moment was also caught on video and at first Heidi got mad when our family watched it while hysterically laughing but I think after 40 years she has moved past this cute but embarrassing moment in her life.

In conclusion, we all go through embarrassing experiences that we try to forget. As an adult I continue to run into embarrassing situations. That is just how life goes. In most circumstances it isn’t that hard to move on and stop obsessing over them. The ones I described above involve embarrassing moments experienced by young people and since so much time has passed I think they are pretty funny at this point in our lives. When you are young, embarrassing situations are much easier to get over and can create some pretty funny memories.