The Write Mommy For The Job

by Jennifer Brown

SOCK IT TO ME, SCHOOL'S IN SESSION!

Shhh...if you listen carefully, you can hear it. The joyous singing of mothers everywhere. School's started! School's started! Hallelujah, school's started! If I turn off All My Children , stop chewing on Cheetos, and listen really hard, I can hear it.

I know moms whose entire year is just a prelude to the end of August. Moms whose first-day-of-school happy dances have landed them spots on Dancing With The Stars. Moms who speak of nothing else from about mid-June on. Are you ready for school? they compulsively ask every kid that wanders near. Are you ready for school? Even their husbands, who've spent an entire summer carrying lunch to work in a plastic Incredible Hulk lunchboxes, with notes pinned to the collars of their shirts and Biggee crayons lovingly tucked into their briefcases, get in on the act. Please, God, let school start soon, their eyes implore, so I can drink from a big boy cup again.

Me? I'm moping around the house, wondering what I'm going to do with myself.

The start of school means the decline of my already-tentative good looks. My waistline expands as I lunch every day without interruption. Dark circles return to their winter home – under my eyes – as I try to balance my midnight writing habits with 6:00am breakfast duty. My fingernails are chewed to the quick as I worry, Will Tad and Dixie get back together? What will be the next tragedy to befall the perpetually unlucky residents of PineValley? And then there's the scowl – the bound-by-a-schedule-and-hating-every-minute-of-it scowl.

For me, the end of summer means the end of hurling myself down death-defying water slides. It means the end of saying things like, "That was awesome!" and high-fiving children I don't even know when I reach the bottom of said water slide. It means a nine-month hiatus from roller coasters, fireflies, miniature golf, bike riding, sleeping until lunchtime, and the ice cream man. In other words, it means it's time to act like a grown-up again. B-o-o-o-ring!

But mostly I hate the beginning of school for the socks.

Despite my mother's (whose bare feet I've never actually seen) best attempts to frighten me into never leaving my bedside without footwear (her favorite scare tactic being the old "you'll step on a bee" routine), I'm a dedicated barefooter. Asking me to wear socks around the house is like asking me to wear barbed wire undies. Ack! The restriction of it all!

So it's no big surprise that I've raised three dedicated barefooters, and with the beginning of school comes the beginning of nine months of fighting to get them appropriately socked. This is no easy task, something I realized when Teen Goddess began Kindergarten. Every day she would scurry off to school, socks firmly in place. But somehow during the day the socks would just...disappear. Poof! Into thin air. Her best explanation of where they went: "I dunno."

I quit fighting her years ago. Instead of socks, I now buy flip flops. She wears them year round, even in snowstorms. She says they're much "comfier." At least she thinks they are – she hasn't actually felt anything below her ankles since fourth grade.

My boys, too, are dedicated sock-avoiders, which is a bad thing. I've learned the hard way that an afternoon of sweaty feet in Spiderman sneakers can conjure a smell worse than a sulfur factory...situated in a cow pasture...on the Jersey shore and can send a carload of people into hallucinations.

But because the boys are too young to give up on (yet), I feel the reluctant need to force those darned (pun intended) things on their feet. Keeping them foot happy, however, is almost impossible. They're picky. I had no idea that socks could have properties such as "too squishy," "full of bumps," or "fat." Yet I somehow have to be sensitive to these needs. Put the wrong sock on Speed Demon and he'll write on the floor like you'd just dipped his foot in acid. Once I bought a pair of socks that were "too bouncy" and he wouldn't let me near his feet for a full year.

Socks or not, it's off to school they go – which, I'm told, is good for them. And, okay, maybe for me, too. And it's time for me to get back to work – baking things, planning parties, checking my watch every few minutes, and writing about the "awesome" life I've lived all summer long. And sorting socks. Perhaps all that sorting will keep my mind off of the water slides.

Ch-yeah, right!

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