My kids love to hear me tell them stories of my supreme embarrassment. I suppose all kids love it when their parents are shown to be just kids like them inside. I told them this one last weekend and realized I hadn't posted it.

When I was sixteen, my dad decided it would be a good idea to send me on a long drive (about 10 hours) to Colorado where my sister and brother-in-law were staying. I drove with a very responsible friend (and cousin, whose parents I can only assume think like my father that this kind of a trip is OK--remember, I flew to Germany alone when I was fourteen, the first time on an airplane). I was supposed to be helping my brother-in-law pass his basic math class for college, which was the last class he needed to graduate and hopefully get a better job.

I don't remember doing much tutoring. (I think I'm actually better at tutoring math than I am at math myself because I don't find it all that easy). I do remember the night that we sat around talking in their living room. I was on a couch my sister had recovered in mauve and gray, which were apparently the hot decorating colors of the season. My brother-in-law was really, hysterically funny. He got me laughing so hard I peed myself. Yes, at sixteen.

Then I sat there, sure that I was unwilling to confess, getting colder and colder as the conversation went on. He was still funny, but I was ready for it to end. When it finally did, and he and my sister were safely out of the room, I hurried to the bathroom to change. Then I came back and saw the couch cushion. Quick thinker that I am, I turned it over. There. No one would notice now. Until my sister wondered why the couch cushion was upside down and turned it over.

But by then I would be gone.

My kids wanted to know if she ever noticed. I told them I had no idea. I had never spoken to her about the incident. If she did notice, well, the better part of valor kept her silent, for which I am eternally grateful. If she didn't, well, why would I bring it up now, twenty years later?

When I was a junior in high school, one of the girls I knew was a passionate debater who campaigned daily in our high school on the subject of apartheid. Midway through the year, she announced to one and all that she was doing her "part" for the cause by refusing to shave her legs until apartheid was abolished. This was a great sacrifice for her, I think, and she would sometimes self-consciously pull her jeans back down over her fuzzy blonde hairs. Everyone admired her for her devotion to her cause, even if there were a few comments about hos gross her legs were (sympathetic ones).

A couple months passed and it was getting close to the time for Junior Prom. I was never much into shaving my legs, despite the fact that I was on the swim team, and I, for some reason I still do not understand, one day announced to one of my classes that I, too, was not shaving my legs for a cause. Only my cause was getting a date to the prom. If someone wanted me to shave my ugly, hairy legs, they would have to ask me out. I don't think I actually thought this would work (although maybe I hoped it would--I think I believed someone would ask me out of pity and that would turn out so well!). It didn't.

Needless to say, I stayed home the night of Prom, looking forlornly at my green velvet dress which my sister had hand-made for me as my Christmas present that year. All my friends went. Yes, all of them. Even my friend who had skipped a grade and wasn't yet sixteen (the age to which most Mormons are supposed to wait to date). It was a miserable night. I spent it shaving my legs.

When I was a freshman and on a swim team for the first time, we were coached by an attractive unmarried guy who used to regale us with tales of him beating Olympic swimmers in matches from his college days. I had a bit of a crush on him, I admit it! So when it came time to order our suits, and he asked us to write down our sizes, I had no idea what to do. I could see what the choices were: 30, 32, 34, 36. But for some reason, I could not figure out what my size would be and I was too embarrassed to ask any of the other, more experienced girls for help. So I glanced over at one of the senior girls to see what she wrote down, which was 38, and I just wrote down the same thing. I figured it couldn't be too far off, right?

The next day, Mark, the coach of the crush, tapped me on the shoulder after practice and handed me my form back. He said he'd looked at the size I wrote down and was pretty sure I wasn't that big, so he'd written in what he thought I would wear. He wanted to know if I thought that was right. What did I know? Blushing furiously, I handed it back to him. When the suits came, though, he had gotten me the right size. I was, indeed, only a 32.

When I was a new parent, I was very into "natural consequences" for children. One of my daughters was about eighteen months old. She was a (delightfully) stubborn and opinionated child. She started telling me what clothes she wanted to wear when she was about nine months old, about the same time she gave up breastfeeding cold turkey. At about five months old, when I tried to start feeding her oatmeal, I discovered her mouth only opened if she put her own fingers in. She could not use a spoon, of course, so for about six months, I lived with her feeding herself oatmeal with her fingers, and just spraying off her and the area around her.

So, another problem I had with this daughter was that she sometimes did not like to wear clothes. She would put something on, then take it off again ten minutes later, run through the house naked, laughing, and then put on something else. By the end of every day, there were piles of clothes on the floor and she still only spent half the day clothed.

One day, we had to take her over to the grandparents for a family event and I asked her several times to get dressed. She giggled and hid. What I should have done was grabbed her, held her down, and forced clothes on her, then strapped her into the car before she could take them off. What I did do was decide that since it was winter out, this would be a good opportunity for her to learn the natural consequences of not doing as your mother asked.

We let her walk out to the car stark naked. We buckled her in, drove to the grandparents, and stayed for some two hours while she ran around enjoying a lot of attention. Grandpa took a picture of her which the next year ended up as an 8x10 on the family calendar. I was mortified, not that she was naked so much as the evidence that he had of my obviously bad parenting skills. Of course, now I have that photo, I can use it to embarrass her. He, he, he.

Still so many to choose from.

I normally think of myself as a good kid. But when I was about ten, I had this paper route that I hated. We delivered a free newspaper, so we didn't have to collect, which was good, and we only delivered two afternoons a week, which was also good. And I liked getting the money for it, so I almost always just went ahead and delivered the papers. I spent maybe twenty minutes in the afternoon rolling the papers and putting a rubber band around them, then tucking them into that big paperboy contraption that you put over your head and has pockets in front and back. It took another hour to deliver them before dinner.

There were a couple of houses that I had to remember not to deliver to, and that always made me nervous, because what if I forgot and accidentally delivered to them and they saw me and chewed me out? More nerve-wracking were the houses with dogs that would chase after me and terrify me. Some houses I knew had dogs that might be out. Other times, dogs would just start running at me, barking, and I had no warning and no idea where they belonged, if they were strays or nice or whatever. I think twice I abandoned my route and just ran home, sobbing. I kept thinking that my parents would have pity on me and just tell me I didn't have to deliver the papers anymore. But they never did. They would take me back out in the car, and I still had to get out of the car and take the newspaper up to the doorknob and hang it on.

So then came the day that it was cold outside and I just didn't want to deliver the papers. And because they were free, I knew that no one would call the newspaper and complain about not getting them. And frankly, I thought probably no one really cared and would prefer it if they didn't get the paper that day. (This was partly true and partly justification. You decide how much of each). So, as I was walking down the street, I thought of what happened to the newspapers that no one wanted. They threw them away, right? And newspapers actually decomposed rather quickly. And then they were just dirt. So, it was all the same if I just threw them away in the first place.

That day, I was influenced in my choice by the presence of all the garbage cans out for the next morning's garbage truck rounds. And I found a can that was half empty and just dumped the newspapers in. I still feel guilty about this. But as it always does, it gets worse! Can you believe what a terrible child I was?

A few months later, after I had gotten over the guilty feeling (mostly), I had told myself I would never do that again. But there was this gully nearby, and I thought--there is a bunch of garbage in there. No one will notice if I dump all my newspapers there. So I did. My parents, by the way, never noticed that I happened to return rather early from these trips to deliver newspapers. They trusted me, of course.

The third time, I still hadn't been caught, so I was yet more daring. I honestly do not know what I was thinking at this point. I must have been pretty stupid. But I guess I figured those newspapers in the gully must have disintegrated really fast since I didn't see them again any of the times I walked by, and this one day I was feeling pretty crappy, probably a little sick, but if I'd told my parents, I didn't think they would excuse me from delivering the papers. And plus, I wanted my money and if I had someone else deliver for me, I would have had to pay them. So I just went over to the neighbor's house and dumped all the papers in their backyard circle of scrub oak.

A few days later, the papers were gone. Decomposed? No. I realized eventually that I'd just made someone else pick all the papers out and throw them away and they probably hadn't told on me because they were nice. But I started begging my mom not to make me deliver papers anymore. Eventually, she listened to me.

Since then, I have always told my kids they will never have a paper route. My husband has his own horrible stories of delivering papers at 4 a.m. in blizzards and then being too shy to actually go around and collect money. I think one month he actually got a negative pay check, from people who complained he didn't deliver on time combined with the lack of actual, you know, income, and the cost of the newspapers themselves.

I want my kids to live without guilt. Ha!

The terrible thing about these is that I realize most of them are from when I should have known better what I was doing, and apparently, didn't.

In college, there was this guy who I thought was pretty hot, in an Honors English class with me. This was my freshman year, so I suppose there's some excuse, and he was maybe three years older than me. Also happened to be well known around campus because of his family. Very well known, actually. My good friend who was in the class with me decided we should go to the formal dance close to the end of the term and we were both going to invite a couple of guys from the class. (Unfortunately, as I recall, she figured out the guy she was going to invite was actually married already, so she invited someone else.)

The guy in question said yes to me. I was so excited. I got my older sister who was also at the university help me pick out a cool dress design. I made it myself, with white velvet on top and a cutout triangle in the back, plus black velvet on the bottom. I wore these funny, lacey black tights underneath and high heels. I put on makeup (something that happened more in those days, but not all the time). I did my hair to the nth degree. And we went to pick up our dates.

We had planned a sort of strange treasure hunt of a dinner, where we went from different locations to eat different parts of the meal. I guess I thought this was a cool, different idea. One of the places we went was my married sister's tiny house. My date seemed not very talkative. (In retrospect, I see that this was probably because he had nothing to say to me, and had come on the date out of pure politeness--maybe??) I said some incredibly stupid things and kept laughing--a lot. I wanted to show him I could be the life of the party and wasn't just smart. But I kept letting things slip out about how smart I was. I think I was still under the delusion that this made me more attractive, rather than less, to all men on the planet.

We had pictures taken, went to the dance, and then drove the guys home. I can't remember him saying anything to me when he got out of the car except for, Uh-bye. But I kept thinking about him and I'd see him in class all the time. I have no idea what he was thinking, but at the end of the semester, he invited me over to his house to study for the final (me and my friend, along with the married guy she had been interested in). The whole study session involved me and my friend answering all their questions. It was very odd. I won't say that his only reason for inviting me over was to get a better grade because he wasn't an idiot. But I honestly do not have a better explanation for it.

That would all have been plenty for an embarrassing moment. But it gets worse. Oh, yes, it does! I tried calling him a couple of times the next semester to see if he wanted to go out, but he was never home and I kept talking to his mom. I remember once asking her if she knew when he was home and she sighed rather heavily, and said, no, she didn't make up his schedule these days. He was a big boy now and came and went as he pleased. I left messages, but he never called me back. (Big surprise! Did I understand what this meant? No. Or I didn't want to. Or something. Have I ever mentioned my theory of bright children--that for every area in which they are bright, they have another area in which they are equally stupid. I am a textbook case for this. Very, very stupid socially.)

So I began to send him postcards. Snarky cards where I used my writing skills to make fun of various aspects of his character. As though this would somehow make him want to go out with me again. And I kept doing it. For weeks. Every Wednesday I would send one, until I think one of my sisters mentioned that this might be termed "harrassment" and that he could possibly sue me or call the police to stop it. I think I stopped then, anyway. Or eventually, I did.

The funny thing about this embarrassing story is that I couldn't get away from it. When I went to Princeton, it turned out my best friends there had been good friends of his. And he came to visit several times, and I think we both had to pretend that we didn't know each other. He was polite enough to do so, anyway. Of course, I did not want to mention it. And then later on, he was good friends with my husband's brother, who went to the same university he did, Duke.

The end of the story is that he ended up marrying a girl from my high school. And he now teaches at the university where we met. So one day, when I was doing one of my idiotic superwoman attempts to get my children to preschool at the university, I bundled them into the back of my bike carrier and biked them over because my car was broken. It was a ten mile bike ride to the university and by the time I got there, I was exhausted, to say the least. And there she was, the wife of this guy, taking her kid to the same preschool. And I was desperate enough to ask her for a ride home. She agreed, helped me collapse my bike carrier and get my remaining kids in the car. I always wondered if she told him about this, and he told her about my postcards. I hope not. I really, really do.

On the other hand, now I've exposed myself to the world. So what does it matter anymore?

My last name when I was a kid was "Ivie." This led, of course, to the great nickname "Poison Ivy" which all my brothers and sisters and I endured through Elementary School. It really did not seem to indicate a lot of creativity or intelligence on the part of those attempting to torment us, since we all knew it was coming from reports from older brothers and sisters.

I puzzled over this a lot when I was a kid, why people who made fun of you were so stupid. Another rather mind-boggling stupidity was when someone asked me if I was my brother's identical twin. This was before the bad haircut and I was wearing Holly Hobbie at the time. I think the questioner knew I was a girl. He just had no idea what "identical twin" meant. Or something.

Other stupid torments: people asking if I rode in a horse and buggy or was allowed to wear buttons and use a telephone, when I told them I was a Mormon. It took me a while to figure out that this was confusion over Mormons and Amish. Because the two groups are so much alike! I had one teacher in Germany who insisted I should see the movie "Witness" because I would really understand the Amish culture. Uh, no.

I had hated P.E. all through elementary school and junior high. But when I hit high school I realized I finally had the chance to choose what I wanted to take as P.E. Instead of the regular, boring classes, I could be on the swim team. We'd had a swimming pool until I was about 7, and I could swim around in it without drowning, but I knew I should probably be able to do "real" swimming before I found myself on the team, so I signed up for a red cross swim class where they try to teach you to dive and do a few of the strokes.

Only problem: trying to save money, instead of getting a good suit, I'd found an aerobics suit made of some kind of cotton/polyester blend. It was stretchy and for the first couple of days it worked OK. But then it started to grow. (Lycra suits do this, too, if you wear them for more than a month or so. I don't buy Lycra anymore, either. I get the 100% polyester suits that last for years.)

I figured I was fine because when it was dry, it wasn't too bad. But about a week into the class, we were supposed to jump into the water feet first to prove one of our skills. I did it just fine. Unfortunately, my "suit" did not. It fell down to about my knees. Or that was what it felt like. I tried to grab it as I came up out of the water, but I don't know how well I did. The swim instructor was male, so I was pretty embarrassed. I made sure I didn't do any more jumping that day, and tried to tie the straps up a bit. Then that afternoon, I went and bought a new swim suit. One that was made to actually last through chlorine dunks. I never had that problem again!

But I will say that I think the class was almost useless. It turns out that you learn how to swim on a swim team best by actually joining one. I was probably the least experienced swimmer there, but I caught on and they did actually teach me how to do flip turns, dives, and all the strokes the first couple of months. I always did envy the kids who got started on a team earlier. I could just see how their strokes were so much more efficient than mine and it seemed like the only way to get that was to just swim a lot, over a long period of time.

My brother loved to tell his friends stories of my cooking fame, just when I was starting to care about what they thought. If there was ever food on the table, he would ask, "Hey, did Mette cook this?" And his friends would wonder why, and he would tell them.

So now I tell the stories myself, my way.

The first is the story of the butter pizza. My mother had all the kids assigned to make dinner one night a week, from about the time I was 10 years old. One night, she wasn't home, so I was trying to make pizza solo. I couldn't find the cheese. So I called my mom on the phone and she said the cheese was in the deli drawer, wrapped in plastic wrap, to keep it from getting all smelly. So I looked in the drawer, found what looked like cheese, and grated it up. I put it on the pizza, but when Mom came home, it was just in time to look in the oven and see the "cheese" had melted all over the place. She was mad at me because I had wasted her butter, and ruined dinner at the same time. But she was the one who said the cheese was in the deli drawer.

The second story is about plastic pizza. This is a birthday story (which could link to a whole series of other embarrassing moments). I wanted to make dinner on my birthday night because then I could make what I wanted, shrimp pizza. However, I couldn't find the tomato sauce downstairs. All I could find was some canned tomatoes. I got those and threw them in the blender, thinking I'd make my own sauce. Yeah, the blender made a funny sound, and then I couldn't find the blender lid, but I figured it would all turn out well. It was my birthday, after all. It wasn't until I started eating the pizza that I noticed the little chunks of plastic in it, and realized where the blender lid was.

The third story is my salt cookies. As a joke, I made cookies with salt instead of sugar and gave them to the bus driver as an April Fool's Day gift. When I asked the next day if he thought anything was "strange" about them, he said he'd given them to his kids. And they'd eaten them right up. When they can't tell the difference between you cooking bad on purpose and on accident, that's a problem.

I'm a better cook now. A little.

OK, this one was in college. Technically, I was 18 and therefore an "adult." Ha! My best friend and roommate and I dressed up for Halloween and went "trick or treating" to our professors' houses. I was dressed as a spider, in my prom dress, with that weird silver lace on top. My face was painted with black lines like a web. We went over to my favorite professor's house, who had lots of young kids. He invited us in, gave us some candy, and talked to us for a while. I remember in the midst of it him calling his oldest daughter, who was maybe 14 at the time, in and pointing at us, telling her, "Never, ever do anything like this to any of your professors." My BFF and I laughed and laughed. It was only years later that I realized he was probably entirely serious.

Sometimes people ask for a "most embarrassing moment," but to me it always feels like asking me to choose between children. There are so many, and they are so very embarrassing!

In fourth grade, I still remember my mom cutting my hair so short that I looked like a boy. Really, and truly. I'll have to find some pictures. My mom couldn't afford, with 11 children, to send us to a salon, so we all got her hair cuts, and she was always cutting our hair shorter and shorter in an attempt to get it straight (which almost never helped, actually). So, in second and third grade, I have these school pictures with my bangs cut up to my scalp, and still crooked. My teeth also too big and bucked.

But after the boy hair cut, I went out to get some new clothes for my birthday, which was right around the start of school. I bought this striped brown shirt and brown corduroy pants. Very comfortable and I thought decent looking. Yes, I bought them in the boy's section of the store. I didn't care. But when I went to school and the teachers, who could not figure out how to say my name, let alone whether it was a boy's name or a girl's, were baffled. One of them was explaining pronouns in grammar and used me as an example of "he."

To make things worse, a friend of mine invited me to her birthday party at the roller skating rink. When it was "all girl's" skate, I started to step out onto the rink when someone held me back and told me it was "for girls only." I tried to explain that I was a girl, but the person didn't believe me, even when I held out the "Lip Smacker" lip gloss in my pocket. Dares to go to the bathroom followed. I simply stayed off the rink instead. And grew out my hair that year.

Later in life, the "m" of my name got cut off on the school rolls and I was simply "Ette." No wonder that in junior high, I tried to go with my middle name, Marie. It was a nice, normal name that everyone could pronounce and spell. But it turned out in high school that I decided I liked having a weird name. And in college, I wrote my dissertation on gender switching in the Bildungsroman and argued it was an important part of developing into an adult. Well, it was for me.