Where are my pants?

No &%$# Said the Little Old Lady Who Lives in The Shoe

The news that having more than two kids is bad for brain health is not news to her

Thanks scientists for telling the world what some of us already know — that having three or more kids “has a negative effect on late-life cognition.” In other news, the earth is round and what comes up must come down (sorry Humpty).

These jokers say that three kids is the tipping scale. Try twenty-four, all living in a 750-square-foot shoe. I can’t remember my name anymore. That’s why everyone calls me the Little Old Lady. I’m lucky if I remember to put on pants in the morning.

If it wasn’t for that fine-looking minstrel I would have gotten to keep my business to myself. You know the one. He wrote that damn ditty — after gifting me with kid #12.

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. She gave them some broth without any bread; Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

Of course I don’t know what to do. Would you? Oh, but you want to get all judgy about it.

Why did you do this to yourself Little Old Lady? Didn’t you know anything about birth control?

The answer to your question, is yes, of course I do. Now. But for kids 1 through 5, I listened to the Little Old Man in the Shoe (long gone now) who told me that if we came together under a full moon wearing only one red sock apiece, we could not conceive. He also told me that his purple testicles were a medical condition that only I could cure.

Then I bought a sheep bladder diaphragm from Mary. Turns out those little lambs are good for something. Or so I thought. Hello kids 6, 7 and 8. I tried to return it and get my money back but Mary said ewwwwwwww Little Old Lady, why do you have to be so nasty?

You should talk, Mary. She’s been freaking with the Muffin Man for years. No kids. She even had time to get a degree in animal husbandry. I’m pretty sure she’s holding out on me. Still bitter I took the 4-H ribbon in husbandry back in the day.

Eight kids might have been OK. Sure, there was more stress and less sleep and I never had time to decorate my shoe the way I wanted. I wanted a rose garden. Some new curtains. A living room that didn’t smell like feet.

But I was hanging on. Getting the kids off to school. Feeding them. Trying not to lose my ever-loving mind listening to all those mouth breathers in my bed.

When Little Ole Man went up the hill to take up with Jill, I do admit I fell off the rails a bit. Enter Little Boy Blue — misleading profile pic, he’s been legal for years now — and blessings 9, 10 and 11.

Boy Blue wasn’t one to stick around and to speak truth, I didn’t want him anyway. He was forever blowing that damn horn and taking naps in the haystack.

I did, however, want my kids to pull their weight — but a lazier group of children you never did see. Even once they were old enough to go out and apprentice, they just sat around the shoe no matter how hard I whipped them.

Maybe it was too much book learning. Or too little. Half of them can’t read and the other half read too much.

“It’s determinism Little Old Lady, “ said kid #4. “Just like the Stoics said. All human decisions and actions are causally inevitable. This is happening because it can’t happen any other way.”

“We’re in a nursery rhyme, you freeloader.”

“Exactly.”

When Old King Cole took the throne, I thought things would get better. He invited us to court and had plans to make us an attraction of sorts.

“My diviner said that in the future, big families will be entertainment. They will sit in a little box and perform and people will watch them journey often to a place called Costco.” — Old King Cole

I started dreaming big. I took up with one of the fiddlers three. I had a dozen more kids and waited for glory. There was no cheering audience. There was no Costco. The king eventually tired of us and gave our rooms to the blind mice troupe. The fiddler moved on. Musicians, am I right?

It was back to the shoe which hadn’t gotten any bigger. We tried an addition on the toe but these children can’t even put 2 and 2 together. Of course, neither can I at this point.

In my waning years I’ve tried to take care of myself, get my steps in. They say it helps keep the brain up. And I’ve gone off the whipping. The kids are too big and I’m going to need at least one of them to take care of me and the shoe someday.

Mary is still footloose and fancy-free, but I see the way she looks at me sometimes. It may be my imagination but I think there might be just the tiniest bit of envy mixed in with the avalanche of gratitude that she doesn’t look like a barefoot sack of rags.

Her sheep don’t have opposable thumbs. I’ve got almost 50 of them.

Maybe that’s my in. I’ll send her some of the younger ones and tell her that they can help her around the farm. By the time she figures things out they’ll have become part of the scenery, like here.

Or maybe I’ll do like the Stoics said and just suck it up.

Like the realtor told me when she first showed me this dump.

If the shoe fits.

Betsy Denson, 2022