Boxers AND Briefs

Luke is obsessed with clothes. If left to his own devices, he will change outfits ten times a day. For months and months he has not let us dress him or have any say in what he wears. It was not easy for me to learn to bite my tongue and let him wear his underpants AND pants backwards to school (for a while he liked them that way) or to let him wear the same shirt to school two days in a row. I have made a promise to myself, though, that I will not fight with him about clothes. I won't tell him he's cold or hot, won't worry about what other parents will think about my parenting, won't turn him into a mannequin on which to display my own fashion sense. This is not an easy promise to keep, but I'm mostly accomplishing it.

Yesterday, I came out of the shower just as he was finishing pulling on a pair of Spiderman briefs. He looked a little more endowed than usual. He gave a sly grin and said, "I have Spiderman on top, and Batman underneath!" He was wearing black boxer briefs underneath the Spiderman briefs. He told me that the Batman ones were his home underwear, and the Spiderman ones were his school underwear. "Carry on," I told him.

Then this morning after my shower I stopped into his room to help him reach the underwear, which are in his top drawer and hard to get at. He picked out a pair, and then told me, "Don't see my Batman underwear." This was his way of telling me that he was going to continue to wear the black boxer briefs he's already worn for an entire day and night, and he wanted me to look the other way. I complied as he pulled on a new pair of underwear over them. At least no one can say my kid wasn't wearing clean underwear. The top pair was VERY clean. He has also taken to asking Tina or I to leave the room for a few minutes while he gets dressed. Usually this is so he can fish something to wear out of his laundry basket without an argument.

Meanwhile, there's no lack of stylish, comfortable clean clothing in the kid's drawer. Today he wasn't happy because all of the pants he'll actually wear were in the laundry (WAY in the laundry, like down in the laundry room). There were still two pairs of pants in his drawer, and I reminded him that a couple of weeks ago I had gone through his bureau with him and given him the power to say "yes" or "no" to every article of clothing in there so that I could clear his drawers of all the things he refuses to wear (this was especially difficult for me, mind you). I told him that the two pairs of pants in the drawer were ones he SAID he liked. He said, "Oh yeah," and ran off into his room with a purpose. I was impressed at how effective my reasoning had been. A little while later I checked in only to find him going through his drawers and making a stack of clothes (including the two offending pairs of pants) on the floor next to his bureau. He told me, "These are for somebody else to wear." Later on I went back in and put the stack of clothes back into his bureau. Wrong of me? Perhaps, but I am still holding out hope that some day he will consent to putting on one, just one pair of jeans, or to wearing the Saint Mary's University t-shirt (my dad's alma mater). Pray for me.