My Most Embarassing Moment

I used to assign students to write a paper with this title. How ridiculous, now that I think about it. Most high school aged students are pretty self-conscious, and I don't know what I was thinking when I gave the assignment. Why did I think they would share their most embarrassing moment with me? Why did I want to make them relive it?

And the problem for me, too, was that I never really had a moment of my own that was all that embarrassing. But I'd try to come up with a story so that the students would feel like I was sharing, too. Sometimes I'd tell the story of how when I was in elementary school there was this girl in church that I thought was cute, and that I was running through the church parking lot after mass one Sunday and ran by her. I looked in her direction and slipped in some mud and sort of did a Pete Rose slide right through the mud.

And that was embarrassing, sure, but I was also in fifth grade. The embarrassment didn't last very long. By the time my mom and dad made it to the car where I was waiting for them in a winter coat covered in mud, I was much less concerned about the embarrassment and much more concerned about what kind of trouble I was going to get in from my parents. Truth be told, I don't remember whether I got in trouble or not.

At other times I told a story about getting caught singing a song aloud when I thought I was alone. It was about as lame as the falling in the mud story.

But a few years ago, thanks to my younger daughter, I had an embarrassing moment that quickly rose to the top and became--whithout a doubt--THE most embarrassing moment of my life.

It happened at the food court in the Florence Mall in Florence, Kentucky. I don't remember where my wife was, but I was alone with my two kids. I had taken my two children, who were four and not quite two yet, to the mall to see the Christmas decorations. After we'd wandered around the mall for a while, seen Santa Claus and played in the play land, I took them to get a cookie from the San Francisco Cookie Company or whatever overpriced cookie stand was at the mall at the time. We each got a $2 cookie and then sat down in the middle of the food court.

I looked at my two children. They really were precious at that age, so full of life, so full of innocence. As I sat in the food court and watched the two of them eating their cookies, which were so large in their tiny hands, and the remnants of which were on their smiling faces, I was overcome with emotion, filled with love for them. I reached over and gave Natalie, the two year old, a kiss on the cheek, and I wiped a strand of her hair back off of her forehead.

Before I go on with this story, you have to remember--Natalie was only two (Nay, not so much. Not quite two). She had always been and continues to this day to be precocious in her usage of language. Most kids under two years of age are not speaking in complex sentences yet. They can put together a two word sentence, or maybe a three word sentence, but that's about it. Natalie was stringing together complex and compound sentences at 20 months, and she was putting whole paragraphs together by Christmas of that year. Still, as I said above, she was only two. Her grasp of English was tenuous, and she often did not have a mature understanding of the meaning of words. A "doggie," for instance, was pretty much any four legged mammal. The moon and the sun were the same thing to her. And the word "hurt" implied pretty much any sensation she didn't like.

So when I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, apparently it was not something that she enjoyed at that particular moment. Or maybe it was the brushing of the hair back from her head. Maybe I pulled one of the hairs a little. I don't know exactly what it was about it that she didn't like, but I know that she didn't like it. Because she dropped her cookie on the table in front of her and let out the loudest scream she possibly could. And then, at the top of her lungs, she shouted out, "Daddy! Stop it! You're always kissing me and touching me! It HURTS!"

All conversation in the Food Court stopped instantly. I froze, my mouth open wide, my own cookie halfway to my mouth. I didn't dare turn my head, but I could see out of the corner of my eyes that everyone in the area was staring at us. After a moment or two people turned and started whispering to one another, and I could see them all pointing and motioning in our direction. My face felt like it was on fire, and I could tell it was a beet red color. I looked at Natalie and I said, "Honey, I'm sorry I kissed you when you didn't want to be kissed." Then I looked at both girls and said, "Girls, it's time to go!" I started to stand.

"But Dad," Meredith said, "we haven't finished our cookies!"

"You can eat them in the car," I told her.

"But Dad," she said again, "Mom doesn't want us to have food in the car!"

"You can eat them in the car," I said again, this time much more slowly, biting off the end of each word. "We're leaving." (More people were starting to motion towards us, and I don't think my tone of voice was helping matters any.)

"But Dad," Meredith said once more, "you said you'd take us to the Disney Store!"

"We can go to the Disney Store another day!" I said fairly loudly as I pulled both kids out of their seats. "Let's go...now!"

Both girls were crying by now, and it felt like we had become the topic of conversation for everyone in the mall. I got the girls' coats on and got out of the food court as quickly as possible. We made a beeline for the nearest exit, went quickly to the car and drove straight home. I was so grateful to be out of that place. I honestly was worried that a mall cop was going to stop me and ask me to come with him for some questioning while the real police were called.

So the next year when we were doing personal essay starter ideas and I saw the topic of "My Most Embarrassing Moment," I had a doozie to tell. But by then I'd decided that the whole topic wasn't a very good one (not because it was inappropriate but because it seldom yielded anything good), so I never got to tell the story to my students.

And that's why I'm telling it to you.