To Love, Honor, Cherish, and Sort Socks
When my husband asked my father for my hand in marriage, my father asked him a few serious questions and then said, "You do understand that this means you are now responsible for moving all her heavy furniture and dealing with her sock drawer, right?"
JavaDad had already been well-vetted by the family, seeing as we had all known him since he and I were in elementary school, so I imagine my father was doing a happy dance on the other end of the phone conversation, knowing he would no longer have to rent U-Haul trucks to move me cross-country whenever the whim struck me (funny, we ended up moving cross-country again not long after our engagement...)
As to the sock drawer... well, that stems from a few visits when Dad would sit with me as I did laundry and he'd help me sort socks.
"My God, how many socks can you possibly own?"
"Well, girls aren't like guys, you have to have different colored socks for different outfits!"
"But they aren't even all the same style -- how can you possibly match all of them up?"
Then, when he was visiting me before a cross-country move and I was finishing up laundry so I could pack up clothes:
"My God, you still own more socks than anyone I know!"
"Yeah, but at least I don't have as many colored ones now."
"That's the problem, you have all these white socks, but they aren't all the same! Why don't you buy the same brand so they are easier to match up? You should throw these out and buy all new socks that are the same."
"Well, they were bought at different times and the same brand isn't always available. And it would be wasteful to throw these out and start all over."
Then my husband entered the picture and we co-mingled lives and socks.
"Oh my goodness JavaDad, these socks have HOLES in them! You have to throw these out!"
"J.J., how many different kinds of socks can one woman own?"
"JavaDad, you matched these socks up all wrong -- see how this one has skinny ribs and that one has thick ribs? And this has a three-quarter cuff length and that one has a half cuff length."
Of course the problem grew exponentially once we had children. We made a lot of mistakes along the way, but finally saw the light and only bought Old Navy socks with the size imprinted right on the bottom of the socks for the children. The problem is remembering to pull the smaller sized socks out of the laundry rotation once a child has outgrown them. And of course I was in complete shock the day I went into Old Navy and found out my son, a mere Kindergartner, had outgrown the socks with the sizes printed on the bottoms. How could they do this to me? My entire sock sorting system deteriorated before my very eyes! He's only 5 for goodness sake, way too early to enter pure sock chaos of the grown-up world!
I had to laugh when I opened a Christmas gift bag to find SOCKS from my dear husband. But I laughed even harder when I realized that the two sets of six pairs were different from each other. "Honey, did you know..."
And then he explained his frustration -- he had looked all over for a replacement set of socks -- and nowhere could he find enough of the same kind of socks. Upon closer examination, I see that the second set of six pairs of socks have a colored stripe on the heel and sole -- a DIFFERENT color of stripe per pair -- the sock equivalent of the underwear that says "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday" and so on. Poor man, even in his attempt to make things uniform, he made things less so.
Fortunately for us, JavaBoy really enjoys sorting socks....
Original post to DC Metro Moms. You can find J.J. Newby aka JavaMom, often in mismatched socks, blogging at Caffeine And A Prayer.
