So, do you embarass your kids?

I do. I often do. No holds barred. I can see him cringing in the corner when I get up to shake my butt at parties. I can see it when he gasps in horror when I emerge down in the garden wearing clothes that have seen the worst of the dryer and have been twisted so terribly out of shape they are best suited for donation to the lesser privileged.

Read what this lady has to say.

Yes, yes, what about when them kids make us cringe with embarassment. Like the times in fancy restaurant, when despite all assurances to be angelic cherub, with harps strumming in the background while he downs his meal in peace and calm, and gently requesting for seconds, but morphs into a hellion escaped from the dungeons the minute he sets foot into the place, and does the minute mile around the periphery of the buffet one million times to 'check out' what is on offer, seriously putting waiters at risk for impaling fellow diners with the hot barbeque skewers they are carrying around.

Or when they sit flat down in the middle of the aisle in the toy section holding onto some ridiculous gargantuan toy the size of a small principality, and refusing to move unless said small principality, which is actually a beyblade stadium priced at approximately one dental filling and is primarily composed of plastic of the disposable plate variety, is purchased for them, and you try everything from calm explaining and rationalizing to getting down to eye level and talking sternly like you really mean it, and actually stopping short of dragging them through the store kicking and screaming or leaving them behind, pretending you dont know this child.

Of course, the child will get his revenge when he becomes an adolescent and insists on sitting at a separate table in a restaurant to pretend that he is not, in any way, related to me, given that I will inevitably morph into a loud mouth, loudly dressed middle aged matron. I see signs of that already. Of course, this has already begun.

"Mamma," he gasps, when I start dancing in public, "Don dance. Sit down." And will haul me back to a chair and keep watch to ensure I don't escape and make a public spectacle of myself.

"Dress properly," he will instruct me before he goes off to school on parent teacher day, holding forth as a shining example of how mammas should dress, a classmate whose mother, no offence to salwar kameez wearers, wears them salwar kameezes in synthetic prints every single day.

"Don come down wid me, come in the nex lift." This when we go down in the evenings, him to play, me for my walk. This when I'm wearing ratty exercise tracks and tees which have seen better days.

And of course, I think back to how I would cringe when my mother would pick up a spat in the local train and quietly skunk off to a different corner of the compartment. Or how I would do the merry dance of avoidance when the paternal grandmother would come to meet me outside the school gates. Gah, chickens are coming home to roost now, and all that is coming right back to bite me on my rather sizeable butt.

I embarass my son. Yes, I do. And he embarasses me too. I think we're fair and square so far in the game. Let's see how the scale tilts as he grows and I get older and not so wiser.