As I have mentioned before, the Munchkin is playing T-ball this year.  Nothing excites him more than being able to put on his uniform, which is a blue jersey with his name on the back and his sparkling white pants.

Wait, did I just say sparkling white pants?

Listen, obviously the T-ball league is run by a bunch of men, because no woman in their right mind would ever sentence another woman to the laundry hell that is a five year old in white pants.  Who plays on grass.  Which is sometimes muddy.  Which results in pants that wind up being not so sparkling white at the end of a game.

A fellow mom was sitting next to me as we watched practice last week, and she asked me what I used to get the Munchkin’s pants clean.  She told me that she didn’t want to use bleach, but had heard that Oxi-Clean worked well.

I had to fess up that I do use a bit of bleach, else the pants would already be gray-green from the knee down.

She told me that nothing she had used got the pants clean, so she just went ahead and bought a few other pairs.

It was at that point that I wanted to leap off my folding chair and cry, “We must stop the insanity! Who gives a crap if our sons’ pants are not pure white?  Does it make us bad mothers if they are not?”

The answer is, of course not.

But if only we lived in a world where dirty pants were worn with pride.  They would be the mark of a dedicated player and a mother who is too proud to get rid of her child’s badge of honor for sacrificing their body for that ground ball.

Maybe someday.

But until then, I’m sticking with the bleach.

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