One Day in December

I dressed in darkness yesterday morning, with the bedroom door closed against the chill of an ill-insulated front-of-house. Our broad, Northern wall collects the Arctic wind and welcomes it with love, funneling it into our living area like a Personal Pan Polar Vortex.

This year's hips were forced into last year's skinny jeans. (And they were not welcomed with love.) I pinched my belly in the process and cursed respectfully; no husband was waked in the forming of the words. And all of my longish shirts were dirty, so a too-short thermal under an even shorter woolen sweater topped me off with disappointment.

I huddled into a scarf and cardigan, just to ensure I would survive my first expedition to the frigid, tiled kitchen.

(As it turns out, I did.)

But the day got sketchier from there. 

Just enough chocolate milk was spilled to seep, irretrievably, into the seams of the coffee table.  Blocks were thrown into buckets and dumped out again x 12. A load of freshly washed towels was freshly re-washed because they sat for too long in their own mildewy stench. Dinnertime came and went without Daddy's arrival, and baths were skipped in order to better facilitate a rousing round of The Children's Witching Hour. And under and around and in-between all of that, there was the simple fact of a three-year-old. Three-year-olds trump all.

Oh, but the poop...I almost forgot about the poop.

Landon took himself unassisted to the WC and did a stinker at naptime while he was supposed to be sleeping. Then he went to play in his big sister's bedroom, pants-free. He dragged his backside all over her carpet like a paralytic horse with an itchy bum. (I know that's a horrible analogy, but...see above causes of brain-melt as poor excuse.)

So when the clock struck nine and I stumbled into my own bedroom to undo the effects of the day with a delicious novel, I first had to peel my skinny jeans away from my angry, squashed hips. The ankles caused a series of momentarily graceless disasters, but eventually I was liberated.

I slipped into some stretchy black pants of unknown size, and fell in love with life. I breathed and expanded and settled in the lightness of uninhibited softness. Nothing pinched. Nothing wedged. You know the feeling, right?  Pure bliss. Include the unhooking of one bra and the addition of one sweatshirt, and you've found nirvana.

And as I sang with the angels, it struck me that I hadn't left the house once that day, except to retrieve some delivered packages from the front porch. I had even worn mascara. I couldn't bend at the knees, and I was ready to kill the person who failed to add an extra three inches to each sweater in America, and my ankles were mildly abused, for nothing. Nobody saw me but my singing, snuggling, poop-smearing kids.

And my stretchy pants, they smirked up at me with reinforced seams and shook their spandex hips in  rebuke of my madness. I got the distinct impression that if only I'd worn them instead of the hateful jeans, that my day would have been filled with singing birds and obedient children and at least one less incident of carpet-as-butt-wipe.

It's an experiment I mean to follow up with during the entirety of Christmas break.