EDMONTON - Susan Sheehan decided to surprise her nine-year-old daughter by picking up her favourite cheese pizza and delivering it piping hot for her lunch at school.

Soooo embarrassing! remembers Kassie, now 11.

Her Grade 3 class had been showing their love of the environment by bringing lunches from home in reusable containers for two weeks. A local TV station had arrived to interview some of the students, including Kassie, and there she sat, the only kid with a pizza box on her desk.

“My mom had just randomly decided I could use a treat (forgetting about the eco-friendly lunch project),” Kassie explains. “She walked in and she was like, Ohhhh! She says, ‘that’s one of my most embarrassing moments too,’” Kassie says laughing.

It’s a good thing you love them so much, because moms sure can be embarrassing sometimes can’t they?

We asked readers how their moms had embarrassed them, and we got some great stories, like Kassie’s, and this one from Cathy Given of Beaverlodge. Given says she kills herself laughing every time she sees a photo or TV coverage of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip riding in a car.

“I can still see (Prince Philip) raising himself up in the back of that car and peering back down the street,” she says.

Why? Given’s story explains all. We’ve also included Kassie’s, and a couple of other embarrassing mom stories we really liked.

Enjoy, and Happy Mother’s Day.

czdeb@edmontonjournal.com

Hey Philip, over here!

July 1959. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are in Calgary. So is my family — Dad, Mom, myself at 10 years old, and two younger brothers — from a small village outside of Grande Prairie.

We are at a shopping centre, standing in the crowd waiting for almost two hours to see the royal couple as they drive through Calgary in a cavalcade. My youngest brother, David, is on my dad’s shoulders, as the car with the royals whips around the corner, (hurries past) and disappears.

We rush to the car and Dad listens to the radio and plots an intercept course. He parks in an alley and we pile out of the car and run down to the street to be the only five people standing in the sun and it was boiling hot! Everyone else is on the opposite side in the shade.

Dad points out the direction the car will be coming from and Mom readies her little square box Brownie camera. Again, the royal cavalcade whips around the corner and rushes past. Frustrated at not getting her picture, my mother, a staunch royalist, hollered at the top of her lungs, “Hey, Philip!” and snaps the photo!

In our family photo archives is a long shot of Prince Philip raising himself out of the seat, hand braced on the back of the car to spot this uncouth, brash westerner!

At the age of 10, I was so embarrassed! I wished for a manhole cover to open up in front of me.

— Cathy Given, Beaverlodge

(“I couldn’t believe my mother (Florence Given) had done that, but it was such a big deal for her to be as close as we could be to royalty like that,” Cathy, 62, tells us. She’s not surprised her mother’s call-out caught the Prince’s ear. “When my mother yelled, she could yell. She had a lot of practice calling us in for dinner from all over the farm,” Cathy says laughing. Ironically, the picture turned out to be one of those that you have to point out it was of Prince Phillip because it was taken from half a block away. “If you blew it up with today’s technology you might be able to see who it was,” Cathy says.)

Deep dippity do-do

My mother read somewhere that the best way to really deep-condition your hair was to cover it with mayonnaise and leave it on for 24 hours. The year was 1972 and I was in Grade 8. What a joy school was that day. The babushka (triangular headscarf) I wore was somewhat in style at the time, but not the grease that was soaking through it.

The next night when she went to help me wash the mayonnaise out of my hair it would not come out with normal shampoo. We had to use dish soap over and over and over again. So much for the deep conditioning.

— Jocelyne Larocque, St. Albert

(Jocelyne, 51, doesn’t know why her mother (Jacqueline Marcoux, now 80) didn’t try this deep conditioning experiment on a Friday or Saturday night so Jocelyne wouldn’t have been “absolutely mortified” at school. “That would have been logical,” she tells us laughing. “I guess she must have thought if it’s a good idea, run with it.” Jocelyne has never mayoed her daughters’ hair.)

Nowhere to hide

When I was 12 and my chest began developing, my mom took me to the basement floor at Eaton’s to buy a bra. I was very self-conscious about my “budding breasts” and not too thrilled to be going out in public to shop for my first bra.

This was back in the mid-’70s in Hamilton, Ont., when Eaton’s was still around and you got all the bargains in the basement. Mom took me over to the women’s undergarments area where they had these open bins full of loose bras on sale. My mother was a very frugal shopper and never bought things for full price.

I was horrified that we were standing in public on a Saturday morning, when all the bargain shoppers were out, with my mother pulling out bra after bra, holding each one up to examine it for hidden flaws and stretching it this way and that to see if it could stand up to pressure (what pressure, I am not sure of).

I slunk behind her and tried to make myself invisible. After 10 minutes, Mom had a handful of bras that had passed the initial inspection and were ready for me to try on. I was just about to grab them from her and quickly take them to the nearest dressing room to try them on when my mother said, “No need to do that, Edith,” and before I could step away she had the first bra wrapped around my chest and over my top to see if it fit.

I died a thousand deaths that day. I was too stunned to move as Mom whipped one bra on after another, each over top of my clothing to see which ones were worth buying. Mom was not only frugal with money, she was also frugal with time, not wasting a minute when she had errands to do, and this was just another errand to her.

I secretly vowed I would never go shopping with my mother again. As I became a teenager and paid for my own clothing, I didn’t have to.

But when I reached adulthood and realized how expensive bras were and Mother offered to take me shopping to buy a few new ones when I went home for a visit one year, I readily accepted. As long as she was buying, she could fit the bras on me anyway she liked.

My shyness over my body had been replaced by the reality of how much it costs to be an adult, and I would happily endure any embarrassment if someone else was paying!

My mother now has Alzheimer’s and when I tell her that story we have a good laugh together. That’s what makes that event so precious now and I am glad that it happened. Sharing the “funny” stories doesn’t make Mom remember, but it does make her laugh and I know that a smile/laugh shared is the greatest gift we receive.

Thanks, Mom, for the laughs and for teaching me how to laugh at myself. I love you!

— Edith Mackenzie, Slave Lake

(Edith, 47, never embarrassed daughter Denise Potvin, 21, by buying her first bra the way Edith’s mom, Alda Mackenzie, now 79, bought hers. “But I’m just as embarrassing to her in other ways, especially when we go shopping and I say things like, ‘Oh look at that girl with the butt crack showing,’ or ‘And they’re going to charge you what for this!’” she tells us. “Moms just speak their minds. I think when you reach a certain age you realize the things that used to embarrass you aren’t a big deal anymore, but you forget what it was like when you’re a kid and you think the whole world is looking at you and everything you do and looking at what anybody with you does. It’s totally embarrassing and you don’t want that spotlight on you.”)

Environmentally unfriendly

My mom does things like hug me in front of all my friends, yell “I love you!” in public and try to walk me home from school, but most mothers do that.

When I was in Grade 3 (I’m in Grade 5 now), a TV news channel decided to do an interview with some kids in my class while we were eating our lunches. This was because my class had decided to go two weeks using only reusable container in our lunches. I was picked to do an interview.

Well, of course this would be fine on a regular day (and I was really excited), but my mom had decided to bring me lunch from Little Caesars Pizza. So I was being interviewed and filmed and I had a lunch that didn’t even really save the environment, thanks to my mom.

— Kassie Sheehan, Sherwood Park

(“I feel like my mom (Susan Sheehan) embarrasses me a lot, but after I think about it, what she does is not really that embarrassing,” Kassie told us. Besides, “sometimes I embarrass her, apparently, like when we’re driving in the car and I try to get the big trucks to honk at us by pumping my fist up and down. The drivers get the motion because they pull the cord (for the horn). Apparently, that’s pretty embarrassing for my mom.”)