Remember when The Bachelor was on and Melanie and I thought a sure-fire way for the bachelorettes to know if they were reallllly ready for motherhood would be for them to take care of Jason’s little boy when he had a stomach virus?
Well. Today I thought of a new test.
I think it might be better than the first one.
Want to know if you’re ready for motherhood? REALLLLLLY ready?
Take a little boy who’s in kindergarten to buy shoes.
And you can’t go to one of those fancy stores where they let you sit in chairs while they bring you different styles and sizes. Oh, no ma’am. You have to go to a Gigantor Sporting Goods Warehouse where there are all sorts of helmets and balls and scooters and treadmills vying for your child’s attention attention while you try to find and fetch the shoes your own dadgum self.
SWEET. MERCY.
Because I’m here to tell you: after going to Gigantor Sporting Goods Warehouse to buy the little man a very basic pair of New Balance exactly like the ones he’s worn for the last seven months but now outgrown, and after 45 minutes of trying to find the right size and the right width and the right style to accommodate a super-high arch, and after getting the young’un who needed the shoes sufficiently settled down so he could try on the shoes and subsequently “go for a quick run, Mama” to see if he will be “really SUPER fast” when he wears them, I grabbed his hand, led him to the aisle with kids’ shoes and said, “Pick out the ones you want.”
I figured that if he loved the shoes enough then he would convince himself that the fit was perfectly adequate. This is a shoe-buying strategy that I’ve employed countless times in my own life, and since I was burning up hot and in dire need of a trip to the restroom, I knew that something had to give. Desperate times, desperate measures, etc. and so on and so forth.
And that is why the boy and I walked out of Gigantor Sporting Goods Warehouse earlier today with some newly-purchased sneakers that cost less than $20 and have big plastic pictures of Iron Man on the sides. They even light up when you walk. They’re ugly as all get out, and my child loves them and cannot quit admiring his feet.
Also: my child has never seen Iron Man.
Go figure.
By the way, on about four different occasions during the shoe shopping I found myself wondering WHAT IN THE SAM HILL I would have done if I’d had more than one child with me. What would I have done if I’d been trying to manage, say, an infant and a two-year old in addition to the boy who needed the shoes?
I’m not sure, but I think it would’ve involved a lot of crying.
And my hypothetical extended brood probably wouldn’t have been very happy, either.
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