Mom on the Run: Has anyone seen my sweatshirt?

Lianne Wilkens/Columnist
Published: June 1, 2008

Let me be perfectly frank: yes, I am using this column for purely selfish reasons today. I want to find my son's sweatshirt. It's out there somewhere, in some kid's closet or under his bed, and I want it back.

It was about two weeks ago that I gave up and cleaned my 13-year-old's closet. It was a wreck, shirts half-on and half-off hangers, sweatpants wadded in the corners, a whole pile of single shoes. I couldn't stand it. So I started at one end and worked my way across, straightening shirts and folding jeans. I even unearthed a brand-new pair of dress pants.

And after I organized the whole thing, I discovered that the sweatshirt section was suspiciously thin. So I combed the house, searched all vehicles and sent him to empty his locker. In the end we located the crewneck from summer camp; two zip-ups; and three of the four hoodies pur-chased on sale this past winter. Missing are the black hoodie from the winter sale and—I can't believe it—his custom-embroidered middle school football sweatshirt.

When my son made the football team in the fall, our school didn't offer team sweatshirts. So my friend Patty and I got creative, we worked with Sloper's Stitch House in Manassas and designed our own navy blue fleece pull-overs with our middle school name, "Football 2007" and a football logo on the left chest. Sloper's stitched our boys' jersey numbers onto the football and even their last name and number on the hood.

They were a masterpiece, and Patty and I were so excited! We whispered between ourselves, but kept the secret until Christmas morning.

And our boys loved them, too! They oohed and aahed as they unwrapped them, grinned as they pulled them on. They had made the middle school football team, in seventh grade! Sure, they hardly played—that honor goes to the bigger, more experienced eighth graders—but they sur-vived the cuts and the practices, they sweated and learned. They earned those sweatshirts. And they wore them, a lot.

But now the weather's warmer, and my son's special football sweatshirt is … where? He took it someplace, didn't need it, and left it … not, apparently, in his locker at school, where two others turned up. Not in any of our cars, or closets, or, so far, any corner of our house. Not in the school's lost and found, not at our friends' or relatives' houses.

And I could buy a replacement, I guess, but I don't want to. I'm feeling broke, it wasn't a cheap custom sweatshirt; it's not sweatshirt weather; and, mostly, it was one-of-a-kind. A second one just wouldn't be the same.

So if anybody's got a spare navy blue hoodie in your closet, with a strange last name em-broidered on the hood, send it my way, would you? I'll hide it for a while, make sure my kid has good and learned the lesson of taking care of his things, that carelessness has a price. Or a plain black hoodie, newish, size adult large. I sure would appreciate it.

Lianne Wilkens lives with her family in Manassas. She can be reached at .