Family Daze
Daughter's missing clothes proved not so mysterious
By Debbie Farmer
This may sound strange, but lately I've noticed that my 8-year-old daughter comes home from school in less clothing than when she left. I don't understand why, especially since games such as strip poker aren't allowed in third grade. Frankly, I'm hoping she'll outgrow it before her entire wardrobe is gone.
"What happened to your denim jacket?" I asked her one day after school.
She looked at me as if I had asked her to recite Newton's second theory of physics.
"What jacket?"
"The $45 one you had on your body this morning."
"Oh, that one."
"Did you lose it?" I asked, trying to sound calm.
"Of course not. What kind of a question is that?" She rolled her eyes. "It's either in the cafeteria, or still on the playground. In fact, I tripped over one just like it that was lying on the ground when the bell rang."
Now, I could've asked her the obvious question, "Then why didn't you pick it up?" But I had a feeling it's one of those things I wouldn't really understand.
Such as how in the world one of her mittens got "sucked right off her hand and out the car window" during the carpool on the way to school. Or why she came home from a friend's birthday party wearing someone else's socks.
But I digress.
I knew something had to be done before I went broke repurchasing her entire wardrobe, so I searched the lost-and-found bin at her school. Instead of retrieving my daughter's clothes I found a worn pair of wing-tipped shoes, a silk disco jacket and an Andy Gibb concert T-shirt. I stopped since I was scared to dig any deeper.
Next, I considered stapling my daughter's jacket directly to her shirt, but I figured it would just make a big hole when she ripped it off her body to fling on the ground when she got hot during recess.
I finally thought that the best I could do was to send her to school dressed in old clothes, stuff a note in her pocket telling her to trade up, and hope that she came home with better clothes than she started out with.
Eventually my daughter explained to me that she wasn't losing her clothes, after all; she was really just "sharing them" with all of the other children in the school. Needless to say, I should quit wasting my time lurking around the lost-and-found bin since all I needed to do to get them back was to work out a schedule with the other parents. But somehow this didn't make me feel better.
So, I called my friend Julie, but she only urged me to relax and let it go. She said it's only a phase and there are more important issues to deal with, such as raising her to be a politically conscious, productive, beneficial member of society and all that.
And she's probably right.
But, in the meantime, I'm going to try to cut my losses. From now on, I'm only buying clothes on sale or in bulk. And the next time I see a stray shoe sitting along the side of the road, you can bet I'm going to pull over and check the size--just in case it belongs to my daughter.
Debbie Farmer can be contacted at ParadigmTSA@familydaze.com. Copies of her new ebook, The Best of Family Daze, can be purchased at her website, www.familydaze.com.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
