DU Troper Tales: Share your experiences of... AMAZINGLY EMBARRASSING PARENTS!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AmazinglyEmbarrassingParents

Mine:

Mom liked to buy fabric and sew clothes for me, instead of buying clothes. You can see where this is going to. Yeah, you guessed it -- I looked like a bad caricature of a Brazilian hillbilly. When I tried to point out the fashion dissonance to Mom, her reply would always be, "Nonsense! Everybody uses clothes like this!"

Your turn. Come on, I know you have tales of dorkiness from Mom and Dad. Of the kind that makes you reach for the Aspirin.

My step-mother used to make us wear trash bags - yes, trash bags - for raincoats. She would cut a hole in the bottom for the head and holes in the sides for arms.

She also made me wear pant-suits to high school - everyone else, of course, wore jeans (I went to high school in the late 1970's). And like your Mom, she insisted that "everyone wears pant suits". Add my cat-eye glasses and a patch for my lazy eye, and you can just imagine how popular I was!

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Jeans in your locker for a quickchange?
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First grade. Newly-prescribed glasses and I and every other bespectacled kid were subjected to the most
humiliating taunts of "FOUR-EYES!!!!" that you can imagine.
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I have desperately wished hundreds of times that I could remember how she accomplished this, but our
teacher CREATED a "Four-Eyes Club" and made it so cool that everyone wanted to become a member. We
"graciously" allowed everyone else to become honorary members.
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What a remarkable woman.
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Four-or-five years old and needed an eyepatch for a lazy eye. MiddleFingerMomMom (who COULD be hopelessly
clueless at times) was so empathetic that she went right out and bought me a BLACK eyepatch and I was
immediately transformed into the "only authentic 20th Century pirate in Connecticut".
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I have led a pretty charmed life.
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was a Children's Evangelist who dressed like a clown and put on Vacation Bible School programs. She also believed young earth creationism and was convinced those footprints at the river in Texas proved dinosaurs walked with man.

Still, I miss her.

:fistbump:

Welcome to DU! :hi:

Nice to be here!

edit~ Also, still getting the hang of how conversation threading works here - on my first post I obviously hadn't gotten it yet lol..

They never gave me that You'd put your eye out! crap cuz they knew I probably wouldn't: they just sorta impressed on me that if I shot anybody, I'd be in a real shitload of trouble

:shrug:

My mom made us drink dried milk which did not go with cereal, at ALL. (Well, it was rehydrated, so there is that.) It was disgusting!! I knew it would instantly win me the dorkiest kid award if that got around.

And then in grade school, she decided that my ankles turned in and I needed corrective shoes - saddle shoes. If you remember those, they were hideous clonkers that NO ONE would ever wear. I'd hide regular shoes in a bag and change on the school bus but it didn't always work.

Same thing happened to me. The other most awkward thing was that she always stuck hairpins in my hair. I have pictures to proof it, but I will not post them.

as they were walking out the door on a rainy night, "Don't forget your rubbers!"

:rofl:

take a photo of him. I think she did it to all of us but only the series of photos of him, mysteriously sitting alone behind a few ferns and a pine tree, survive. We call it the "nature boy series". LOL!

Ugly and ill-fitting hand-me-down everything. Dingy nylon ankle socks that wouldn't stay on my heels. Oh, the list I could compile.

(because I have the pointy nose).

Someday I'll find the photos. :hi:

and she never sent them back.

:hi:

She talks to God, He talks back to her.

As kids, my siblings and I always dreaded going to a new church because we knew it would end badly.

Catholic Priests and Bishops, Jehovah's Witness elders and overseers, didn't matter, anybody who got between God and my mom got burned.

Too short (mid forehead) and she'd always string a piece of scotch tape from one side of my head to the other. She'd cut along the TOP of the tape so the hair would stick to the tape and not make a mess. Usually the tape was slightly higher on one end or the other.

Bless her heart, we didn't really have the money to go and have my hair cut by a pro, and I'd just sit and cry because my hair looked so bad. Makes me feel like an asshole now.




Laura

my dad polished all my friends' shoes. At our house everyone removed their shoes just inside the front door (I think it was a habit we picked up when we lived in Japan) and when my dad got home from work at midnight, he polished the shoes.

At my sister's memorial service this past May, one of her long ago friends described how much fun she had being my sister's friend when they were kids. She mentioned how our dad always polished her shoes when she spent the night at our house. Till she mentioned it, I'd forgotten about his shoe shining. He was retired Army, and maybe that was why he did it.

Let me first set the stage.... My dad was a tall, big man with a booming voice. He was a complete teddy bear, but visually imposing.

Here was our usual conversation in the grocery store line:

Dad: You know what's a shame?
Me: (silence)
Dad: The state of our school system!
Me: (silence)
Dad: You know why?
Me: (silence)
Dad: Because the people in the express line can't even count to ten!!
Me: (die)

He also had no ability or inclination to recall the names of anyone I ever dated. He just called them all by random names.

His funeral was 6 years ago today. It's strange that those horrifying moments are the ones that are so endearing now.

my mom loved brown corderouy, I hated them, and she would buy that for me all the time.

My dad loves golf pants/plaid pants, he would buy me pants that I wouldn't be found dead in. Same with shoes...I dislike straight white shoes, I'd tell my parent this a lot, and lo and behold...I got a lot of white shoes. I'm starting to think they did it antagonize me.

I'd be like, those suck...

Well, there pants, wear them...

Well then, I got to weigh the option of going to school in my undies, or wear disgusting pants...so they won, most of the time. :D

If I had told my dad "those suck" I would have gotten a 20 minute lecture on the etymology of the word suck, with graphic explanations of why one should not use such a word.

I also hate corduroy. I refuse to wear it in any form to this day.

Edited because I had the wrong "ology".

I would never utter "this sucks" outloud...I'd get backhanded fast. It was my inner voice at the time. :D

Pure ammonia.
Moms just couldn't resist messing with our hair.
I was 19 when I found out I had thick wavy hair, and got a hair cut at a decent salon. I still have thick wavy hair.
Mom didn't need to mess with it.

When I got glasses, in the second grade, she made me get one of those stupid chain things that middle aged ladies wear around their necks to hold them.
I didn't need one, and I told her so. She didn't listen. I was nearsighted, so the glasses were either on my face or they were on the night stand within arm's length when I was asleep.

Handdown clothes. She spent money on piece goods and sewing stuff she never sewed up for me. I think she wanted me to look like a dork. I finally got a new, storebought dress, when I was a senior in high school, and had a hissy fit about it. Any thing that was a hand down with a Neiman-Marcus label was good according to her. Yet she spent money on beautiful straw hats she didn't need, leather and alligator purses, and would sneak things she bought into the house, just to sabotage Dad, when she got mad. I was supposed to be a goody goody that didn't play with the other kids. I would leave the house to go play with the kids down the street and that was a cardinal sin.

She would run down the sidewalk screeching my name, with a bamboo switch in her hand, looking like a complete nut. She was a jailer. My friends and I would hide by the side of a house and laugh our butts off. She didn't give me any alternatives as far as kids to play with. I was supposed to stay inside all the time. The trashy kids picked on my anyway. Dad would do the same thing, lumber down the sidewalk with a bamboo switch in his hand like a Papa Bear.

I never learned to swim because we never went to the city pools. Mom didn't want us to get other peoples' cooties.

In the 9th grade, Dad took me to a beauty operator that was a client of his (he was a lawyer). She gave me a Jane Fonda shag like Jane Fonda wore in the movie "Klute". Well, mom was horrified because I was trying to be fashionable. He also took me to a store where I got some striped jeans and some overalls. This was the late 60s/early 70s. Mom was shocked because I wasn't dressed up like a little doll in a dress and looking "feminine".
She was always worried about what I wore to parties, and whether or not I was dressed up. I tried to explain to her that in college, nobody wore dresses.

I wore jeans, t shirts and long hair and no makeup and I had plenty of dates with math and physics majors. This infuriated her that I did not dress up like she wanted me to. Every time I went to a party and she would ask me what I wore. I said, "A good pair of jeans and a silk shirt". That pissed her off. No dresses and heels.

I got some bell bottom hip=hugger pants. That was bad. I looked better in those than in the ones she bought me. And she was a fashion and costume design major, and should have known about proportions!! She bought me pants with three inch wide waistbands that came up under my bust, and made me look like a mushroom, because i am short waisted.

She wanted me to wear lipstick in high school. I got some and wore it and every one picked on me that day. I didn't have any dates anyway, so I decided that wearing makeup was a bunch of bullshit. Her idea of makeup was red lipstick. No mascara, no covering up the dark circles under the eyes. No eyebrow pencil. No boys would go out with me because I was smart, at least not in high school.

When I was little I was supposed to look like Shirley Temple, and when I was big I was supposed to look like Joan Crawford.

:puke:

And half my DNA came from this crazy person???? :shrug: