Making Statements With My Slacking

I have been doing laundry for other people for almost fifteen years. It can wear on a woman. For the last couple of years I have been a lazy sock woman, in that I have a large bin in my laundry room where all the clean socks go and I throw them in there. It's up to the kids to find socks each day.

Bob somehow manages to keep his dress socks intact and in the armoire upstairs (and this irritates me, his ability to selectively match only his socks) but everyone else is usually stuck wearing mismatched socks. It's just one of our weirdnesses.

My good friend, Just Seeking, has pointed this out to me before. It cracks her up that to a person (again, Bob is exempt) we're the family who looks great from the ankles up, but we're sad sacks if you judge us by our feet.

The only time this has bothered me was when I was watching Jacob play on the playground, and as he crawled along the play equipment, I noticed that he was wearing one white lacy ankle sock of his sister's and one large adult-sized tube sock. I went to Target that day and loaded up on fresh matching socks.

It doesn't last long, no matter how many trips to Target or Old Navy I take. Someone invariably takes a sock off, oh, say in Egypt, and one off in the car. They are never to be matched again.

For years, my oldest daughter, Maddie, has always struggled socially in school. She was the first grader who was in character as a T-Rex all day while her co-horts were playing jump-rope or planning sleepovers. For a long time, she lived in her imagination and could have cared less about the boring ways the popular girls conducted themselves at school.

In the past couple of years, this has all changed. Maddie is a superstar with her junior high peers. Unfortunately, I liken this to the poor trailer trash family who suddenly wins Powerball and can't manage their money, but that's another story.

I was talking with a mom of one of Maddie's classmates the other day and she told me a story. She said recently her daughter, a quiet girl who is well-liked but on the fringes of the class, has been coming to breakfast each day wearing mismatched socks.

"Meagan," she asked. "Go back upstairs and put on matching socks. Why do you keep doing this?"

"Mom! Don't you know anything? Maddie M. wears her socks like this and she's cool. This is how they do it now."

Who knew, my ineptitude as a laundress has been spun into social gold by my offspring.