Someday he’ll be his wife’s problem

Half of my family is from Missouri and My Honey’s is from Arkansas and Oklahoma. Plus, we live in AZ so there’s always access to guns running in the background. As you can guess, there is a serious redneck gene running through my kids’ blood–something my husband is quite proud of, actually. I do my best to make my children speak proper English and urge them to have an expansive desire to fulfill their curiosity, thus not falling into the stereotypical redneck trap.

But then there’s my boy.

We’ve always had trouble with him and clothes. He had a real aversion to underwear when he was little. As a toddler, the day care asked me to make sure he was wearing some when I dropped him off. It got so that I would have to do a butt check at the front door and send him back in for drawers.

These days he’s embraced the concept of underwear. So much so in fact, that now I’ve had to enforce a rule that pants must be worn to the dinner table. The minute he gets home from school, off go his pants.

Then he requested white “wife-beater” tank tops from Walmart that he wears with his underwear to sleep in. And walk around the house in. And eat dinner in if his father and I allowed it. The two of us find this disconcerting.

Now his sister on the other hand, LOVES clothes. She wears approximately seventy-five outfits a day, all of which then end up on the floor of her room requiring laundering. Am I the only parent who has a conniption when they find folded clothes, married sock pairs, and clothes still on hangers in the dirty-clothes basket? Invariably they will be moldering under a wet towel thus requiring that they be washed AGAIN.

I’m like Sisyphus with the laundry. I’m always doing it – washing, folding, putting away. The very second it’s done, the laundry baskets are full again and no one has “anything to wear.”

Not that the boy cares. He’d be just as happy as a pig in mud to wear dirty underwear and a dingy t-shirt for the rest of his life.