It Takes Two of Us to Put On One Sock
Here’s why that forty-second video is the single most-watched thing on that woman’s phone, and it isn’t the sock.
Eleven weeks earlier they had very nearly not been a family that did this at all.
It had not been dramatic. There was no affair, no shouting, nothing you could put in a sentence at a party. It had been the other thing, the ordinary one — two people who’d had a baby and got tired and stopped being nice to each other in about four hundred small ways, until by August they were essentially running a shift system in a shared house and handing a child between them in doorways.
She had said the word separate out loud in July, in the kitchen, at eleven at night.
He had said “okay” far too fast, which was the worst thing that happened that whole year.
They did the counselling. They did it badly for about a month and then slightly better. The thing the counsellor said that actually landed — after weeks of things that didn’t — was this:
“You’ve divided him up. One of you does mornings, one does bath. You’ve never seen each other be parents, because you’re never in the room at the same time.”
And they’d looked at each other across a small office and realised she was completely right. Ten months of a child and they’d been running it like a relay.
So they started doing things together that only needed one person.
Which is a stupid, inefficient way to run a household and was the only useful thing either of them did that autumn.
Both of them at bathtime, which takes twice as long.
Both of them at the nappy change, which is absurd.
Both of them in the entryway on a Tuesday morning at 9:15, late for something, fighting a one-year-old for the right to put a gray sock on his left foot.
And her laughing — that laugh, the loud one, the one he hadn’t heard since roughly the previous Christmas and had privately assumed was gone.
That’s why she filmed it. Her mother was standing in the hall with the phone, actually, having come to help with the lift, and she picked it up without a word because she had been watching her daughter all summer and she knew exactly what she was looking at.
They were eighteen minutes late to the appointment.
The receptionist said it was fine. It was a one-year check; the health visitor weighed him, measured him, said he was long for his age, and asked the standard question about how they were both doing.
They looked at each other.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re all right.”
And it wasn’t a lie, which it had been the previous three times somebody asked.
Arthur is four.
He puts his own socks on now, inside out, every time, and will not be told. He has a strong preference for one specific pair with dinosaurs on and has been known to retrieve them from the washing machine mid-cycle.
His parents are still together, which is not a triumph and not a guarantee, just a fact about how it went. They had another one two years ago. It is harder now, obviously, in the specific way two children are harder than one, and they are not glib about any of it.
But they still do the inefficient thing. Both of them at bedtime, most nights, for a job that needs one.
And when people ask — and people do ask, because their marriage apparently looks easy from the outside, which is the funniest thing in the world to them — she doesn’t say anything clever.
She just says: “It takes two of us to put a sock on.”
And everybody laughs, and nobody understands, and she doesn’t mind.