socks

I think I'm ready to talk about socks now. I just matched 103 pair of socks. Does that sound like a lot? How many pairs of socks do you have? 103 pairs is about 9 per person at my house. The crazy thing is that I still have an overflowing basket of unmatched socks looking at me, staring at me, daring me to match one more pair. But I'm not gonna. In this area, at least, I have some measure of self control. I can stop matching socks anytime I want to.

I am convinced that a psycho-analyst could learn a whole lot about someone by watching them match socks. It used to be pretty important to me to get sock matching just right. I remember getting very irritated at my mother-in-law once, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, for matching socks less precisely than I wanted them done, which is, of course, nothing like I do them now.

These days, if it is about the same color and about the same style and about the same size, it's a match! Once you put your shoes on, no one knows if the letters in the word Hanes are the same color. (By the way, my favorite socks to match, not to wear, but to match are the ones Hanes makes. I'm not getting paid to say that either. The whole colored lettering/stripe thing makes it so easy to match things correctly, or to get it close anyway.)

Why do we have so many socks? Other than the obvious reason that we have a lot of feet, and the other obvious reason that I have a tendency to get behind on laundry, it is also because we are pretty hard on socks. I have 4 to throw away from this batch alone. I remember a sweet older lady telling me in a marvelously patronizing voice about how she taught her daughters AND her sons to darn their socks. I wanted to say, but didn't, we don't just get holes in our socks, we annihilate them. You can read through a sock before we throw it out. There's nothing there to sew up!

So, when someone gives me a bag of socks (it is beyond me that anyone would have socks to give that are matched and don't have holes in them) I take them. We will wear them until we A) lose them, B) wear them paper thin, or C) leave them at a friend's house.

We don't buy socks that often, usually. We buy them at Christmas, when we are in Indiana and run out of socks before it's time to come home, and just before KOV (church day-camp) when finding socks to wear is the last thing this amazing super mama wants to think about, when I'm packing lunches for 10 or 12 or 14, washing everyone's shirt for the next day, and trying to get all those people in the van before 8:30, 5 mornings in a row.

No one really has their own socks in our house. My husband sort of does, but I bum from him when I run out. I almost do, but the big kids bum from me, also. The rest of the socks are downstairs in two drawers for anyone's taking. They do a pretty good job, mostly, of being able to tell if a pair of socks is too small for them. They are not as good at knowing if the socks will be too big. And a couple of them are downright lousy at putting a pair of socks back, folded together, if they don't fit. Alas.

And then, sometimes, just to keep me near the edge of the cliffs of insanity, some bright eyed adorable children get the idea that it would be great fun to put socks on our hands AND feet, maybe multiple pairs (if 1 is good, 4 is better, don't you think?) and pretend to be dogs or skate around the slippery floor. Socks are also wonderful (who knew?) for carrying small treasures, money, rocks, legos, marbles, polly pockets, small sleepy beanie babies, and those little decorative glass pebbles we call dragon tears.

Summer is (or should be) the answer to all these problems. I beg my children to wear crocs (fake ones), flip flops, sandals, aqua socks, anything that doesn't require socks. I offer them tax incentives, increases in allowances, extra minutes on the computer, easier math homework next year, if they will just show mom a little love and stay away from the socks.

My eldest has some hillbilly blood in her, and would be happy to go bare foot all the time. But society (a.k.a. the department of health) insists that she wear shoes when we go places. So she respectfully wears them to wherever we are going and promptly takes them off as soon as she gets in the van. Does she sometimes forget to bring them into the house???

My sons tend to wear their socks until a few seconds before they fall asleep. B3 recently got assigned the job of tidying up the boys room each day. What that means is that it is his responsibility to harvest all the dead socks from the sock graveyard every morning.

The shoe closet is also a prime location for going on a sock hunt. Stuffed in the shoes, on the floor, scattered from the closet door up the stairs, it seems the best place to leave dirty socks is anywhere but where they ought to be.

And why is it that the butt-ugliest socks in the house never, ever get lost?

So, like much of my life and yours, the battle wages on. It has no end. Well, Heaven. I am as sure as I am of anything that I will not have to match socks in Heaven. Oh that will be glory for me, glory for me, glory for me. When by His grace I will look on His face (and not have to match socks anymore) that will be glory, be glory for me.