Well. That's Embarrassing by Dean Gloster

 

            We learn early, as modern humans, the terrible fact that our parents are embarrassing. When my daughter Alex was four, I drove her to Step One preschool, and as I started to walk her up the stairs, she announced, “Dad, there’s a rule at my school.”

            “Oh? What rule?”

            “There’s no singing within a mile of my school.”

            “Then I’ll make sure,” I assured her, “I’ll never sing within a mile of your school.”

            Dear reader, I was not singing. And bursting into song was not a thing I did, then or now. Bad jokes? Overwhelmingly likely. Show tunes? Exactly zero risk. But somehow it occurred to my daughter that the most embarrassing thing that could happen was me singing near her school, so she’d better make up a rule to prevent the possibility.

            I sympathized, because I had a profoundly embarrassing parent.

             I’ve always been acutely vulnerable to feeling embarrassment or seeing people get embarrassed. When I was young, there was a T.V. program in reruns, “I Love Lucy” where the cringe comedy plots almost always hinged on some huge embarrassment the audience saw coming, while the show stretched out the buildup to increase the suspense. 

Even though others in my family watched the show regularly, I literally have never seen an entire episode: I had to get up and leave the room because the looming second-hand embarrassment was so excruciating.

            So, of course, I was gifted with a remarkably embarrassing mother, even by Adolescence-Is-a-Cringe-a-Thon standards. My younger brother and I once tried to jump out of the car while it was still moving to avoid the embarrassment of having classmates see us get dropped off our mom. It was complicated: My mother was a late-stage alcoholic, just wrapping up her final fatal addiction phase when I was a teen. I wrote about that here.

 

            I’ve done improv, so trust me when I say I’ve been in my share of bad scenes, but none of them since have been anywhere near as bad as some in my youth featuring my mother. For example, there was the time she took out the fire hydrant two blocks from my high school. Even she fled that particular scene, despite the resulting flat tire from crushing the right front of her car.

            A sheared-off fire hydrant is not a subtle scene. Water pressure creates a three-story geyser to mark the location of the hit-and-run.

 

            And, master criminal Mom, she also left at the scene what the police, two hours later, referred to as “her calling card”: Her front license plate on the sidewalk at the point of impact.

            My older brother and I still got home from school before the police arrived, to find our mom basically catatonic on the couch. She told us “fix my flat tire,” but there was no doing that: The fender was crushed into the space a fully inflated tire would need. There was also red all over the green paint of the car, and in the dim garage light we couldn’t at first tell whether it was paint from a fire hydrant or human blood.

            My mother (in what may be the most white person sentence ever) did not get in trouble for that drunk driving, crashing, and fleeing the scene of the accident. She was ultimately cited only for an “illegal right turn” and paid for the fire hydrant.

            My older brother had called our dad at work, and he met the police at our house. He explained (truthfully) that Mom was taking Antabuse to help her avoid drinking, and that having even a tiny amount of alcohol on top of that led to dizziness, fainting, convulsions, and a buildup of toxins that basically left her not responsible for her actions. (It didn’t hurt that both cops had previously worked security for my dad over their summers when in college. Back then Reno, Nevada was more of a small town, and my dad was a casino manager.)

            The next day at school, a kid told me, “I heard your mom took out the fire hydrant in front of the Greenbrae shopping center.”

            “Nope,” I said. Then feigned confusion. “What are you talking about?”

 

            There is a lot of research now about embarrassment. Some people argue that it’s a powerful emotional response that helps us change for the better, saying internally I don’t want to make that mistake again. But that assumes what created the embarrassment is something we have control over. When you’re young, you don’t have the power to change your parents.

            Although I suppose you could ask them not to sing—or hit any fire hydrants—within a mile of your school. 

            Or just work your way through it, knowing that we're all imperfect, we all make mistakes, and choose to live out loud anyway. You know--become a writer. 

            Dean Gloster is a former stand-up comedian and a former law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. He has an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His YA novel DESSERT FIRST is out from Merit Press/Simon Pulse. His YA short stories “Death’s Adopted Daughter” and "Proof of the Existence of Dog" are in the anthologies Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop and Spoon Knife 7: Transitions from Autonomous Press. He is at work on two more YA novels, and the one he's wrapping up now deals with opposing evil. (Which we should all do.) He is co-editing the next anthology from Autonomous Press on the subject "Bounce", with a submission deadline of July 1, 2026. You really should submit, which you can read about here. He also makes periodic anti-authoritarian posts on Bluesky, where he is @deangloster.bsky.social