Years ago, when I had fewer kids, I would go barefoot in the house come summertime. The first warm day there was a bit of dread as I came downstairs sockless in the morning, knowing I was about to find out how dirty my floors had gotten over the winter.

I’d feel the grit under my feet and pull out the broom, and the rest of the summer would be a tug between kids, crumbs, dirt, and my bare feet.

Several kids later, I’ve given up and wear socks year-round. I do clean my floors, often multiple times a day, but not frequently enough for bare feet.

Having clean socks in the summer has become more important. I’m churning through three to four loads of laundry a day just to stay afloat. The last week or so, despite doing a high volume of laundry, I wasn’t seeing any of my own socks or underwear coming back to me.

Last night, I was down on my hands and knees in one of the bedrooms. I don’t remember why I was down there, but I saw one of my socks under the bed. I looked closer and there were more further underneath, along with several pairs of my underwear.

One of my kids has been unloading laundry baskets into the space under the bed rather than deliver the clean clothes to the people they belong to.

I felt a rush of frustration and anger.

I’d been keeping an eye out for my own clean clothes while doing laundry all week, and here were several socks whose mates I already had, stuck under a bed to save someone from doing their chores.

Living with seven kids is like that. You spend a lot of time feeling like you’re going crazy because your stuff is missing, and either you find it in a completely bizaare place, you discover it destroyed or completely used up, or it never shows up again.

There’s a saying parents use, “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” I feel that way a lot. It feels completely futile to have anything of value, but at the same time, cheap things quickly get destroyed.

I’m at the point in my life where I want to have nice socks. Yet when I spend money to get a fancy pair of socks, they frequently lose their mates or disappear altogether because someone delivered them to the wrong room after they went through the wash, commandeered them (“They were in my room! I thought you gave them to me.”), or stuck them under a piece of furniture so someone could say they were finished unloading a laundry basket.

I sometimes wonder what life will be like when I can find things where I left them. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I got to the point where I didn’t mind so much if I discovered someone had used all my tape again, or that my favorite pair of socks was missing a mate.

I do care. I’m still looking for order in my life. Even if I don’t neurotically clean my floors any more, I still like things to be a certain way. When the kids complain, “Only YOU care about this being clean, Mom!” I just shrug and agree with them.

They have to live with me. That means things are going to be cleaner than they want them to be, and not as clean as I want them to be.

Living in a big family is about compromise. Gritty, sometimes sticky floors no matter how often they get cleaned. Dying to self. And sometimes, wearing really nice, mismatched socks.

More macro photography. This time, blue hydrangea.