Time certainly heals most hurts. One day you will look back at your painful or embarrassing moments with laughter and understand the important lessons it taught you. Probably my all time funniest experience, as I recall it now, was the performance where I lost my skirt on stage. I was dancing as a teenager with an inexperienced partner in the “Wizard of Oz.” In one part of the routine, I was sitting on the floor waiting for my partner to pull me up between his spread legs to a standing position. The only problem was he accidentally stood on my skirt when he took my hands to pull me up from the floor.
As I came up, my skirt unhooked and came off. I found myself standing beside my partner displaying my black tights and starched crinole petticoat. Of course, the orchestra saw what happened and stopped playing to laugh, as did the audience, and then the other dancers. What did I do? Picked up my skirt and ran off stage as quickly as I could thoroughly embarrassed. But the show had to go on and luckily this event was in the finale moments of our number. I recovered off stage and put myself back together to continue dancing, because the show must go on. That relates to life also.
I believe you can recall some moment in your life that didn’t turn out as expected, perhaps your first kiss or a blind date or giving a presentation in school or at work. Life is full of little mistakes or events that makes the journey interesting, times when your great expectations aren’t met. With maturity, you can laugh at those experiences, while at the time you felt you’d die of embarrassment. In the dictionary embarrassment is defined as a feeling of painful self-consciousness, un-comfortableness, shame or humiliation. Isn’t that a good definition of most of your teenage years? (Photo above of my first husband and me folk dancing at BYU.)
The teens in your family need to hear your stories either vocally or in a written form so they understand that everyone has challenging times in life. There are entirely too many youth suicides in our society that could be prevented if we as grandparents and mature family members took time to listen to the concerns of family members and reassure them. Isn’t that why we are here on earth, to learn and progress and help our family members also?