Tag Archives: Family

Mama Never Told Me

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As a painfully shy teenager, my mother spent hours trying to teach me how to get a boy to ask me out. While Mom lived in fear that I would never go on a date, I lived in fear that I would.
The first thing she tried to teach me was how to bat my eyelashes. Evidently boys found this irresistible.
“When you’re talking to a boy,” she said as we stood in front of the bathroom mirror. “Tilt your chin down and look up through your lashes. Now, blink several times in a row.”
I looked like a bobble head with an eye infection.
The next thing she tried was to shorten all my skirts. She had a friend lug her sewing machine over to our house. I stood in on a chair in the middle of the dining room and Mom gauged how short my skirt should be. “Put your arms down by your sides,” she said. “I think we should mark it at the tips of your fingers.”
“Dad,” I shouted. “Help me out here, would you?”
His only comment as he walked out to the safety of the barn, was “You have to have the right bait if you want to catch a fish.”
Mom’s friend diligently stitched up the hems on all my dresses.
At school I walked from class to class hugging the walls, terrorized of exposing myself but Mom’s idea worked. A boy asked me out.
“And he’s a senior,” Mom bragged to her friends.
He took me to the homecoming dance where I refused every request to move toward the gyrating in the middle of the gym. I calculated that his height would require me to move my arms above shoulder level which would reveal my backside to the entire school.
To my relief (and probably his) we left early. When we were fifty yards from the driveway the engine went dead and the lights went out. We rolled to a stop in front of my house.
“Is there something wrong with your car?” I asked.
He leaned across the seat toward me, lips puckered. I backed up against the door. My mind raced through everything Mom had coached me to do, but the coaching sessions didn’t cover kissing.
“Just a minute. I have to ask my Mom what to do next.” I jumped out of the car and ran to the house. He was gone before I’d made it to the front door.

LIKE A VIRGIN

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I’m very happy being a wallflower, unlike my father who believed you should leave a lasting impression wherever you went.  And he did.  Sitting around a table sipping coffee with his buddies or standing in a crowded reception, he was the one people remembered.

“Don’t just sit there.  Say something,” he coached when I complained about an upcoming dinner party.  “Tell a funny story about yourself.  People love that.”

The night of the event, I put on my new dress, picked up my borrowed evening bag and teetered out the door on my uncomfortable high heels.  Within minutes of our arrival, my husband was whisked away to talk to some Very Important People.  I waited next to the bar.  With flawless logic, I knocked back a few vodka tonics to calm my nerves.

The dinner bell chimed and I weaved my way through the crowd.  I plopped down in the only empty seat at our table.  While I concentrated on chasing a cherry tomato around my plate trying to stab it without it shooting across the table, the woman at the head of the table shared her opinion that the current generation of teenagers was too sexually aware.

“Don’t you agree?” she said.

There was an awkward pause at the table.

My husband poked me in the side and said, “Answer the Chief Justice, Honey.”

“Well, Chief…uh…Judge…uh…I couldn’t agree more,” I said.  I cringed at the impression I was making, when my father’s advice to tell a funny story about myself, popped into my head.

I laid down my fork and cleared my throat.

“In fact, I didn’t know anything at all about sex when I was growing up,” I said, checking to make sure I had everyone’s attention.  “When I was in high school, a secret survey was passed around ‘Are you a virgin?  Yes ___ or No ___?’  I had no idea what a virgin was…” I paused for dramatic effect.  “But, it didn’t sound like anything I wanted to be, so I wrote NO!”

Hey, my father’s not the only one in our family who can make a lasting impression.