There’s a boy from my past who I hear stories of occasionally but with whom I had an embarrassing moment so fierce as an impressionable teen, that in its wake he and I were never able to speak to each other again.
To think on it now is to laugh, he simply walked in on me in the loo(bathroom) on the occasion of one of those World Vision 40 hour famine sleepovers that were very popular with us in our younger days. There were probably 30 of us at the house so I probably wasn’t even the only one it happened to!
The embarrassment was compounded by the fact that he was the most popular (read gorgeous) boy in yoof groop and all of us girls thought he was next to God. I truly thought I.could.have.died.
To his credit, it remained our little secret, and as a less impressionable adult I just know that should I meet up with him again now we’d laugh it off and catch up on the intervening years. (And he’d be old and balding and thickening around the middle and I’d wonder what on earth we’d seen in him back then…).
I remember too, the first time I ever saw a ‘feminine hygine’ ad (feeling the full impact of what THEY were about having only just begun to require them) with my older cooler male cousin and wishing the floor would open up and swallow me too.
I blame the embarrassment on my puritanical upbringing. I think my sister was the only one to ever come face to face with the fact that our parents actually DID it by finding Mum naked in bed waiting… Dad certainly never gave us any indication of affection in front of us so the whole subject was a no go. Any whiff of it on the telly was quickly snuffed out and the prospect of going to the movies where there may be the barest prospect of the mention of sex, let alone the act, was strictly verboten.
And then I left home and went overseas, far from the confines of the family ethic (but still bound by the confines of my conscience) and there my eyes were opened to rather a spectacular degree.
So while there has been mention made in this blog about how my life choices have meant that there are some lines I am yet to cross in this regard, there hasn’t really been any discussion of just how far the boundaries have been tested… (Most of any relevant incidents were hazed by an alcoholic fog so even if you asked me to recount them, the details would be too fuzzy to make a good story – except the Greek sailing one *sigh… blush*).
In any case, had my alcoholic shenanigans not wiped out some of my embarrassment factors in my very early twenties the epic trip round Europe obliterated them. 21 people living on a bus for 45 days going from camp ground to camp ground, (sleeping, eating, drinking – EVERYTHING).
Nothing was sacred after that.
So it amused me to note that , having found myself at the movies watching a movie that not only discusses issues of sex, relationships and childbirth, but portrays them rather graphically (if not gratuitously), watching it not with my girlfriends, but with a couple of single guys, I do still consider sex to be a sacred thing… I can watch it without TOO much in the way of squeamish toe curling…
…and it’s bloody funny.
I was raised the same way…
Most embarassing moment was in High School. I had just changed from my gym clothes and was walking my dirty clothes to my locker. I saw the guy (ultra cool senior–I was a lowly freshman) who I had a major (silent) crush on…up a head leaning against one of the sidewalk pillars. I walked past him chanting to myself to “be cool–don’t be a geek”…when I heard him clear his throat and say, ” Eh, em…you dropped something”
I turned around…and there lay my dirty underwear!!!!
I scooped them up and scurried to my locker. I hated him, passionately from that moment on. I just wanted to DIE from mortification.