No white socks

While sleeping the other night, I scared the hell out of my husband when I woke him by saying very clearly  in my sleep  “no white socks!” He said he jumped out of his skin…I’m still laughing about it.

I actually like white socks, unless we’re talking about tube socks. Perhaps doing laundry again has me stressed out. (I’ve found myself relieved lately when the laundry soap container feels super light…)

When the kids were little it seemed like the “sock matching” would never end.  In my usual “horrible mother” status,  I resorted to keeping a laundry basket next to the dryer that held all unmatched socks. Within the year they were stored, miraculously many of their mates would somehow emerge at some point.  Every one of us hated the sock basket but none of us loathed it enough to take on the challenge of mating all the socks that were in there.

There were times in our life when we didn’t have enough socks to wear to get through more than a couple days – so a missing sock became a huge deal. The frustration of having absolutely no idea where the matching mate could be was beyond comprehension sometimes. How exactly did one sock end up in the laundry and the other did not? Seriously…did you come home without a sock on?? Which if you did, that could mean that you put a bare foot in your shoe…was it even possible to put a bare foot in a shoe and a socked foot in the other shoe…and not notice?

These questions haunted me! (It’s funny now that I look back on the idea that a missing sock could stress me out so bad.) I look at the empty basket in my laundry room now that the kids are all grown and I think back on those days. Part of me misses the basket being full of all those little unmatched socks.

The socks in the basket represented all things that were going on in our life. I could tell when my dear daughter had been sneaking off to play in the creek by the sand in her socks. My youngest had socks stained green from playing tackle football with his friends from our neighborhood in the field behind our house. My eldest son was my ‘one sock traveler’… he would emerge from his bedroom in the morning all sleepy and slowly coming to his full senses with one sock on and one pajama pant leg pulled up to his knee. I usually found his sock’s mate tucked in the sheets of his bed. My husband’s socks could seriously stand up by themselves when he’d been out doing field training exercises but his Army green socks were easily matched.

The sock challenge now seems like such a small thing and yet at the time with all the other stressors that life had thrown our way, the sock basket was more than any of us could deal with. So every morning we rummaged through the basket in hopes of finding a matching pair.

Now that it is just my dear husband and I, matching socks is not a huge challenge and the empty basket is a wonderful reminder of the full life we lived with our children. And I’m pretty relieved that I don’t have a basket full of different sized white socks to match…

Maybe all the sock memories are causing nightmares now. I don’t believe any of us would expect sock nightmares from the one we love. Can you imagine having to ask our lover “by the way, do you yell random shit about socks in your sleep??”

(In the spirit of full disclosure, I do always have one sock left over after all the laundry is done…)