Sock It To Me

I’m 58.

At this point, there are some things I’ve accepted I will never master – like socks.

I’m okay at buying them. My favorite are the fifteen dollar magic fabric running socks. I know cotton is rotten and all that. I have owned socks, and when I was a runner (and I use that term loosely given my 15-minute mile time) socks mattered.

With three kids, socks were a bit of an issue. Some battles are better off abandoning. You can say “don’t walk around outside in your socks” or “don’t throw your socks on the ground” til you’re blue in the face but chances are you’ll still find one sock on the bathroom floor and it’s mate downstairs on top of the T.V. Or in the dog’s mouth. Or if you are really having a bad day, in the dog’s stomach. That’s a three grand problem by the way.

Parents have sock strategies – sock tricks if you will. Sometimes we try and buy every kid a different color sock to ease the sorting and matching. Sometimes we buy socks in bulk because with a thousand socks, there’s bound to be a match, and other times we buy “nice socks” mistakenly thinking our kids will become responsible sock stewards and cherish them enough to keep them matched and free of holes.

I passive-aggressively gave my children socks every year for Christmas. Maybe if socks are presents you’ll look after them. (In my defense Christmas socks were always cool, and not some kind of coal in your stocking thing).

My youngest kid hated and still hates as far as I can tell to cut his toenails. You know what that means. No, it doesn’t mean he’s growing them out for the Guinness Book of longest toenails world record. When he was young every six months I would either tackle him to the ground or stand in his doorway with clippers and say – now! He’s a great kid so his toenail thing wasn’t that big of a deal – except that he’d wear holes in the toes of all his socks…..and continue to wear them. Last time he visited he had this one sock where his entire forefoot was exposed. As a mother I felt guilt, responsibility, and shame. He thought it was funny.

When my kids were all at home we had a sock box. A sock box is the ultimate defeat. It means you have given up on sorting and matching socks entirely and rather than pair them nicely, you take all the socks from the dryer and dump them in a basket.

In the mornings before school there was always some kid running around saying, “I can’t find any socks.” Forget a balanced breakfast, I just tried to get clothes on their backs and lunches made and I was usually under my own bit of morning pressure so I quickly figured out that finding socks was a last straw sort of an ask.

Not wanting to blow a gasket every morning I invented the sock box and after that my kids socks might not have matched, but I could yell from the kitchen, “check the sock basket.”

Score!

I have a photo I’ll try and dig up of the day I decided to try and match all the socks in the sock basket. There were socks all over my bedroom and I posted it on Facebook and a fifty comment sock discussion ensued. You see, the aliens who run this show love to mess with us in little ways that aren’t the end of the world but that slowly drive us insane.

The missing sock is definitely an alien abduction type of a situation. Anyone with singles in their drawer they can no longer find the match to know what I’m sayin’. And I have to assume by the discussions I’ve had that this is every human being except this one family I take care of who always wears perfect matching socks. They have some kind of sock secret most of us have not been gifted.

My kids are gone, I’m old and now I have the power to say a big eff you to socks, and I have.

I wear one pair of shoes every day and they aren’t really shoes, they are flip flops. I buy them from a company called Island Slippers and they are just wonderful. I know doctors aren’t supposed to wear open-toed shoes but I have never stabbed myself in the toe with a needle (yet) so everyone can calm down. Kaiser would fire me for the way I dress, but I’m my own damn boss and I say comfort makes me a better doctor so the slippers stay.

There is only one problem. When the weather gets just too freezing cold, I have to cave and wear actual shoes. I have some boots and a ten pound pair of Doc Martens for that. The only thing is, for those, I need …….socks!

It just started raining yesterday and it’s getting a little cold but I wore my slippers anyway because it usually takes me a week or two to transition to winter shoes. That’s a fancy way of saying I don’t have any socks. Right now I have some of those fuzzy things they give you when you have surgery, running socks I keep stuffed into my hiking boots in the car, and a never worn pair of thigh-high stockings that have the print on them of chicken legs (which is funny because I’m a thick girl – no chicken legs, believe you me, but they were a gift)

So today, I am going to have to buy my yearly four pairs of socks so that I can avoid pernio (look it up) and frostbite and get some shoes on my feet. I only buy four pairs a year because that is about all I can handle at this point.

There are some problems we never master, but a good learner of life will always find a work-around.

Ha, ha socks, you’ll never bring me down.

Warm toesies to you, and Monkey love, Dr. Maria