Sock wars

I caught Danger Mouse this morning standing with her hands over her face, twitching and stamping her feet and murmuring savagely to herself, “One, two, three, four, five…”

“Are you mad?” I asked her, trying very hard not to laugh at this miniature version of myself. When I’m getting to the point of wanting to explode, I’ll frequently close my eyes and count to ten. Ten times, if I must. I have what is fallaciously referred to as ‘anger management issues’ – better known as, Classic Quick Temper. Just a powder keg waiting for a match, that’s me. I’ve been counting to ten since I was a kid, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop any time soon.

“I am very mad,” she said quietly in a choked up voice, still twitching in place. “I am so mad I want to cry. And Boo Bug is a very, very bad girl. She tooked my Minnie and then she said it was her Minnie and now I’m so mad I’m going to cry. And also, well, two things. I want to cry, and also I want to…well, I sort of want to hit her.” {pause} “Very, very hard.” {pause} “With…with…with a sock.”

Oh Lord. We contemplated this situation for a long moment.

Well, actually, I wasn’t thinking about the poor hostage Minnie at all. I was harking back to when my brother and I were kids, and the many happy hours we spent whacking the hell out of each other with knee-hi socks: you’d ball up one of the socks, stuff it down into the toe of the other sock, and then – HAVE AT YOU! Well, heck, since mom was too cheap to buy us an Atari like everybody ELSE had, we had to come up with something to do on those long, lazy days of summer…

Hee. Sock wars! Use the farce, Luke! Heh heh heh. My white-with-blue-bands knee-hi can whump butt over your stupid gray-with-red-bands any day, buster! En garde! Hup! Ho! Ha! Parry! Thrust! Swing!!

Gee, that was fun. Oh yeah. Heh. Good old days. Have a sock fight, eat some of those astonishingly hideous wax Coke bottles (remember those things? Suck out that brown syrup that was supposed to taste like Coke but didn’t, then chew on the wax as though it were gum for a while?), and wait (endlessly) for the ice cream man to come around…

Oh yeah. Those were the days, my friends, those were the days. Maybe I ought to turn the kids on to…

{shakes self} Good God! Was I actually thinking that?! Bad enough that I taught them how to blow the paper wrappers at each other whenever they get straws, now I’m going to show them how to utterly destroy their socks?!

What kind of mother am I, anyway…?

In the meantime, Danger Mouse calmed down enough to stop twitching. We retrieved Minnie and peace was restored to the household.

For the moment. I’m still pondering the great Sock Wars of ‘76-77, and considering making that the way we settle domestic disturbances around here. “OK, you both want the same toy? Right. Go and get your socks, first one to get five blows in wins…”