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Should I write an entire post about the sock issue? Theresa commented in hilarious detail that it was an extreme issue in her house as well.
It certainly took me by surprise. I’d read the entire section on social work at the University of Georgia library, back in the days when I only had one daughter. Also a reader and not having a television, we’d spend an inordinate amount of time with our respective noses in books.
Good thing too, as the years passed and our family grew, the free reading time evaporated quicker than the pee on our sheets from troubled children.
But the socks…oh honey, all I do is pick them up. The kids come home from school; shed their shirts and their shoes but never their socks. Running over our 50 acres, through the woods and the creeks, the mud and the gardens, they are always in their socks. I’ve never gone outside in my socks, but each sibling group that I adopted had this common sock characteristic. I’ve seen my sons in nothing but their Hulk underwear and socks outside.
I’ve climbed mountains, hiked for miles, traveled a good bit, and had a satisfying number of very fun experiences before I settled down to adopt, yet I’ve never had the apparently exhilarating experience of running outside in socks,
I’m a very barefoot girl; I hate shoes, kicking them off even in church. One son-in-law remarking he’d never seen tougher feet than in our family. I could run down our dirt road barefoot and it wouldn’t hurt me at all. But I’d feel weird, naked even, in socks. It seems bizarre to me. I’ve been dealing with feces smearing kids, window breaking juveniles, and sheetrock smashing angry sons, all to be expected in the world of the adoption of older children. That seems normal whereas the sock obsession sends me over the edge.
But no caseworker, and I’ve had the best, ever prepared me for children who can’t comprehend why I go nutso over the socks. They, the socks, don’t even cost that much but they are a separate line item in my budget spreadsheet. We don’t throw them away just because they have a hole or two, and they don’t go into the trashcan until they can no longer stay on a foot.
I’ve been present at the birth of almost all my grandchildren and I’ve halfway expected the next generation of children to be born equipped with a pair of socks as their parents were once so intently and weirdly involved with socks.
