Lost: a spider-man sock, or a reason to exist?

When you become a parent, you realize very quickly that have been given a human blank slate with zero instruction.  It's tremendous pressure to be sure- another persons life is solely and completely in your hands.  If you don't realize what a big deal that is, you haven't been paying attention.

Possibly because you've been too busy cutting your own hair

It's also pretty exciting though, when you realize that you have also been handed a miniature 'you'.  This is your chance to relive childhood, to buy all those GI Joes that your parents would never buy you, to watch TV shows based on comic book heroes and all this can be yours- if you can make it through the first couple of years, when they're watching crap like Dora, and Max and Ruby.   Note: It ain't easy.  It's kind of like watching someone gouge out your eyes and then use them to scrape the chalkboard in twenty minute segments.

The problem is that one day, your kids will grow up and start to (gulp) develop their own identities.  And ideas about what is actually cool.  There's a chance (however small) that all those early attempts at socialization and personality shaping will backfire, and suddenly your household of Red Wings fans has yielded some Blackhawks bastard spawn and you're watching game 6 of the Western Conference finals wondering what the hell just happened.  That's why, as a parent, I have to make sure that doesn't happen.  That's why I bought Shane this pair of Spider-man socks.

Aside from being the coolest socks ever (I know, right?),  these socks are a symbol of the struggle that I have waged to make my children in my image.  Just like Spider-man battled with the alien symbiote (and also his baser nature) and reemerged as a more awesome Spider-man, Shane and Delaney have wrestled with the entertainment advances of their father and come out on the other side as little daddylytes.  Brings a tear to my eye just thinking about all of the awesomeness that I have been propagating.

Something happened a few weeks ago though that completely rocked my world, shook me to the core, and threatened my very existence.  We lost the socks.  Well, we lost one of the socks, but that's basically like losing both socks.  Socks are like swans- they mate for life, and if one of the mates is lost, then you throw the other one away because it's a worthless piece of junk.   

I held on to hope for the last three weeks, believing that the missing mate would turn up in the laundry or in one of the kids toy boxes...waiting for a ransom note or a call from the dastardly villain that stole that precious piece of my soul...but as we boxed up our belongings and moved to a different home, and gradually unpacked all of the kids things, I slowly began to come to grips with the fact that the sock was gone...forever.  Must have got teleported to Battleworld for some sort of Secret Sock Wars or something super important.  Obviously. (sniff)

I know it's stupid to get attached to anything material- especially something belonging to your children and ESPECIALLY socks and ESPECIALLY socks purchased from the dollar section at Target.  It's just...it was such a cool looking sock, cooler than either pair of Batman socks or the Ferb socks and almost as cool as the Perry the Platypus socks.  Besides the physical sock itself, there's a chance that as Shane grows up, he'll forget all about Spider-man and super heroes and grow up liking shows like Teen Wolf and reading books about knitting and just generally being as anti-me as a man can be.

Which means he'll probably grow up to be a, you know, man

I'm sure I could wax poetic about how throwing away this sock is symbolic of my children and how they're growing older, or materialism, or tie it into life and relationships, or even making the best out of a bad situation (like being bitten by a radioactive spider, for instance).  Maybe one day I will.  But right now, the grief is still too near.

Goodbye, Spider-man socks.  I'll miss you, old friends.

PIC- Brittney Spears- http://static.poponthepop.com/images/gallery/britney-spears-bald-head-shaving-head-photo.jpg
Stephen Jackson- http://cdn.bleacherreport.net/images_root/slides/photos/001/388/288/stephen_jackson_display_image.jpg?1317846729