How have you embarrassed your kids?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I did so recently, though my intentions were good. I was tempted to post this in the “bone-chilling scary story” thread, but it doesn’t really qualify, so it’s here.

Earlier this week, my 13-year old daughter had a couple of her friends over for the night. It was a weeknight, so while it’s summer vacation for them, my wife and I had to get to bed early while the girls got to stay up late.

My bedroom is on the second floor at one end of a hallway. My 13-year old’s bedroom and her sister’s room are on the opposite side of the hallway and, at the other end, there’s a flight of stairs going down to the first floor.

I went to bed first around 10:00 pm and fell into a deep sleep. I woke up abruptly in the middle of the night, hearing some loud and rapid thumping on the stairs. My subconscious mind quickly informed me that one of the girls must have fallen down the stairs (despite the fact that my conscious mind knew the girls were all sleeping in the basement bedroom). I awoke, jumped out of bed as quickly as I could (more quickly than I would have thought possible), and ran to the stairs …

… where I was greeted by my 13YO and her friends, who had in fact just run UP the stairs to get some things from my daughter’s bedroom. Nor was it the middle of the night as I had thought. It was about 10:30 pm, meaning that I had been asleep for only about half an hour. As surprised as I was, the girls were even more surprised to see me running into the hallway in my boxers with a look of panic on my face.

They all got a good laugh out of it, but it took my another couple of hours to fall back asleep. Stupid kids.

2

So far, I haven’t. My son is 5, and believes (contrary to abundant evidence) that I’m the smartest and coolest man on Earth.

I’ll have to reminisce about these days, when he’s 13, rolls his eyes at everything I say, and doesn’t want to be seen with me.

3

Nope. My kids have always been a shake-their-heads-and-smile and say “That’s my mom, for ya” kinda guys. But I will be following this and hoping for some funny stories.

4

There is no serious dispute - this post pretty much serves as definitive. And it has some serious competition.

Regards,
Shodan

5

That was exactly the first thing I thought of. Thanks for searching.

I haven’t had an occasion where he needed embarassing yet, but I can tell my son is hoping the floor will open up and swallow him when I sing along with the grocery store muzak, or dance anywhere remotely public.

6

So I write fan fiction. I write explicit fan fiction. And I have since my early teens. So anyway, I used to keep all the paper drafts in a box in my bedroom. My mom is a born snoop, and she was down in my room one day, but I never thought she’d actually read the stuff I had lying around.

So my mom, being my mom, doesn’t bug me about it in private. Oh no, she brings it up at the mall while we’re with my older brother.

Yes, my mom teased me about writing sex stories while we were surrounded by people, including my big brother. I wanted to strangle her!

7

I exist. That seems to be enough for my kids.

8

When my daughter was 12 she had given me an awful time in a store one day, whining for me to buy her frivolous things I couldn’t afford. When we got outside, it was windy and I wanted to put a kerchief on so I said, “Here, hold this” and handed her my cigarette. I turned around because of the wind direction and put on the kerchief. Two old ladies had come along to wait for the bus and I noticed they were looking at my daughter and scowling. Immediately, I spun around and said to her, “How many times have I told you not to smoke?!” grabbing the cigarette and mashing it on the ground.

The look on her face was priceless. Boy I got her good that day.

9

It doesn’t matter what you do.

I’ve never had any kids, and they’re still mortified that I’m their dad.

10

When they’re in high school, and sometimes junior high, yeah, just existing can be enough. However, I used to sing along to my soundtrack of Rocky Horror. I hugged and kissed her IN PUBLIC, in addition to existing. There are times, I’m sure, when she would have preferred to have a limb chewed off rather than admit that I’m her mother.

As she’s become an adult, she’s grown more tolerant of me, though she still doesn’t want me to sing in public.

11

Many years ago when my step daughter was at that age when she was just starting to think it uncool to walk down the street holding my hand despite the fact she still wanted to. This meant that it was okay if we never bumped into her school friends.

It all stopped permanenetly when we would be walking along the street holding hands and typical tweenager she would be oblivious to her surroundings so I would slowly crouch down chimpanzee style and drag my knuckles along the ground. When she would eventually notice the strange looks we were getting and look at me with immediate horror. I would just keep hold of her hand and say ook ook!

Am bad stepdad :slight_smile:

12

My 12 year old skipped / was unexplainably late for school last monday. He got to be the kid whose mom still holds his hand at the bus stop for the rest of the week. Hopefully I embarrassed him badly, and he’ll not do it again.

And Manila, that’s GREAT. I’m telling my husband about that one. He’ll likely emulate it.

13

One was in middle school and one was in high school when I got pregnant.

This, apparently, is really embarrassing, especially when you waddle in on Parent Night.

They were jazzed about getting a little brother, but the gritty details? Nope. Apparently it would have been better if we’d adopted a little girl from China.

Also, while in this condition, I really embarrassed the high school student by causing a scene in a bank. It was one of those cascades of ineptitude: First, I screwed up the access code and lost the card, so I had to go through the drive-through.

When I rolled the window down at the drive-through the glass fell down–this happened a lot. I said a bad word. The person on the other end of the speaker said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.” (Okay, that even kind of embarrassed me.)

Then it turned out they couldn’t give me the amount of cash I wanted at the drive-through so I had to come inside, only they hadn’t sent back my driver’s license (they said they had). So my son and I went inside, and then when they asked for ID, I didn’t have any–since they hadn’t sent it back. I got argumentative. At one point I said something like, “What, do I have to come in with a gun and a note to get MY MONEY?” At that point my son decided to go outside and see if the driver’s license had dropped onto the asphalt, and he did not come back inside. He probably figured I was going to get arrested. Which would be so much worse than me simply losing my temper, and that was bad enough.

(I did get the money, and even continued arguing for awhile about what they’d done with my driver’s license. I said they must have it somewhere as they hadn’t sent it back, they said that was impossible. About six weeks later, after I’d gotten a replacement, they mailed it to me.)

I didn’t realize how embarrassed he was until I went out to where he was examining the parking lot, inch by inch, and told him to get in the car. He said either he’d drive, or he’d walk, since I didn’t have a driver’s license. He was pretty sure I was going to be arrested, one way or another.

Poor kid. Stuck with a mother who was inept, foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, and pregnant. Fortunately one of those was only temporary.

14

I made myself embarrassment proof when my kids were little by going out of my way to do goofy stuff with them and their friends. My kids could always fob off my behaviour with a mere shrug.

Examples:

I used to take the kids out on garbage bin night if we had extra bags of rubbish that had to be put in neigbour’s bins. We would dress in dark clothes, camoflague our faces and creep from bush to bush like commandos.

I would make outlandish claims which under pressure from the kids would be proven to be lies. I would, for instance, claim to be an opera singer. When they finally taunted me into singing (after lots of ridiculous excuses why I couldn’t) I would burst in to the WORST singing you have ever heard - just tone deaf, wrong phrasing, wrong emphasis. They would be begging me to stop, covering their ears, screaming but I would drive on singing, say, “The Impossible Dream.”

But basically my childishness knows no bounds and there would be dozens of these stories, in fact I’m not much different at work.

15

Although the instance I described above was completely unintentional, I am getting to the point where I actually do enjoy embarrassing my kids intentionally from time to time, so I may have to borrow this. :slight_smile:

16

When my daughter was a teenager, a boy came over to pick her up and take her to the movies. I resisted the impulse to be sitting on a rocker on the front porch cleaning guns when he arrived (although I did threaten to do so). Instead, I greeted him pleasantly, chatted for a moment, and then said, “So, did my daughter tell you about when she learned to castrate sheep in 4-H?” I accompanied it with raised eyebrows and a smirk.

Daughter was not amused, although she thinks it’s pretty funny in retrospect (ten years later).

17

One word: cosplay.

18

Not me, but my mother, and her sister when teenagers. They would hate to be seen walking down the street with grandma. So to get back at them she would talk to random objects.

“Hi, tree how are you?”
“Good job street light. The street is well lit tonight”
etc

After telling us this story, my mom made the biggest mistake of her life. She told us what they did to fight back. While at the grocery store if they went down the beer/wine isle the two of them would start in on the “MOM!! You prommised you would stop drinking.” “MOM!! Please don’t drink you get mad when you drink” “Please don’t drink” “Can we buy food instead of beer?”

So two or three weeks later we are at the store, and my mom happens to be buying a six pack of beer. My brother and I start in. Happened to be 4 or 5 other people standing there at the time. My mom put the beer back, and went directly to the check out.

-Otanx

19

I collect Asian Ball Jointed Dolls and frequently take the with me to stores. So while we were in Vancouver Washington last month, my 13 yr old and I decided to dash down to Powell;s and blow some moola. Much to his embarassment I took my smal fox doll. He is about 6 inches tall and rided in my cargo pocket quite easily… or in the basket on top of the books!

20

I got both our kids really good the other day. I am the “designated morning person” in our family. None of us like mornings, but I happen to tolerate them better than the rest of the clan. How do I deal with mornings? I sing.

Well, one day as we were dropping the kids off at school, I opened my window and started singing a line from The Sound of Music. You know, “So long, farewell…” My kids were mortally embarrassed. The crossing guard was laughing hysterically. I chuckled all the way to work.

Since then, even if I open the window to remind them of something, I hear, “MOM! No SINGING!” :smiley: