How I Embarassed My Child

While our family was living in Torino Italy for three years, my children attended an International elementary school that was located clear across the city from our home. Naturally there were no school buses to bring them back and forth to school, so this was yet another adjustment to living in a foreign country. My husband would drive our children to school and I would use public transportation such as buses and trams to pick them up after school.

The buses are very crowded around the time school lets out in Torino because the Italian school children (especially middle and high school age) typically use this mode of transportation in the city.

One day the buses were particularly crowded, and my boys and I were standing next to the doors on a tram because the next stop was ours. As usual once the doors opened, people pushed past us in a mad jumble of stomping feet and jostling elbows, to be the first ones off the tram.

I was in the middle of transferring my eldest son Gabriel's heavy backpack that was full of schoolbooks from my right hand to my left and as it was swinging past my right ankle, my eleven year old son was pushed from behind and ended up tripping over the backpack.

He literally went flying through the air in the only non-occupied space on the bus, and landed with his face planted in an elderly man's rear end. I heard his yell: "Noooo!" then a muffled "Ufffff" as he went sliding to the floor. The old man turned his head and looked down bewilderedly at my son, and proceeded to curse him in Italian. Gabriel picked himself up off the floor, and with a face beet-red began apologizing profusely in Italian to the old man, all the while backing himself up and out the doors of the bus. When I saw that nobody was injured, I lost it. I couldn't contain the laughter bubbling up inside me, at the sight of his mishap!

My son gave me the oddest look, which made me laugh even harder, and then accused me "Someone pushed me, and I tripped over the backpack that you were holding, I go flying, my face lands in someone's behind, and you just laugh? Mom, you're so embarrassing!" I apologized to him, telling him it wasn't my fault, and that I was sorry, all the while trying to choke back little snickers. That is the true story of how I embarrassed my child.