Moms Know: there IS a sock god.

Years ago, when the kids were little I discovered that we had an idol living in the laundry room.
I named him. . .
SOCK GOD.
His big, white body and cavernous mouth hungrily accepted the sacrifices of clothing that I threw his way. He gurgled and swished them about in his mouth, then sucked the nutrients: dirt, lint, formula and mashed food particles down his rubbery esophagus that traveled somewhere into the guts of the house.
But on a weekly basis the little white idol got hungry for more than his soapy pablum and, without telling me, required as proof of my worship one of my children's socks.
It took me a couple of weeks to catch on that the socks weren't simply disappearing under the chilrdren's beds or hiding under piles of leggos.
There are hundreds of reasons why a child is only wearing one sock:
Ian used one as a drawer separater between two categories of transformers,
Garrett turned a sock into a puppet,
Kiri used a sock to wipe the chalk off the sidewalk,
etc.
But those socks were accounted for.
After careful household sleuthing, it came down to the laundry room.
That was the last place we'd seen the white sock with the blue strip at the top of the ankle that came in the package of three pairs from WalMart.
The sock god never swallowed old socks. No, they had to be pristeen, white, unstretched-out, young, perfect, without defect. A little lamb to the slaughter.
I'd say to myself, "those socks are gonna turn up when we move."
But they never did.
And when we moved to another house, the weekly sacrifices continued.
For at least fifteen years I fought the sock god.
Then mysteriously, he either decided to quit cold turkey with his sock-eating habit, or perhaps he decided that we'd sacrificed enough childrens' sock to prove our devotion.
I've shared my hard-luck story with other moms. Some of them told me that their sock god resided in the dryer.
And their socks never turned up either when they moved to another house.

To all you left-brained, super-logical types, don't try to explain away this supernatural occurance.
There IS a sock god.
I know.

.