It was long before my two girls Alicia and Andreya. It was long before I had a house, or a college degree or a paycheck from my first professional job. Long before all of these things there were only two real constants in my life: My wife Gloria... and my Old Navy sweatpants.
My Old Navy sweatpants are large enough to expand or shrink based on whatever size I've been over my past two children, three jobs and four homes. My Old Navy sweatpants are comfortable and blue, with a stripe of gray and gold right down the side. They say "Old Navy Athletic Department," even though I've never been, am never going and even though the letters have long since faded. At the bottom of the sweatpants, each leg now has extra ventilation with the small holes that have torn across the cuffs. At the top of the sweatpants, my waist now has extra ventilation with the many holes which have left the elastic waistband exposed to the public. God I love these sweatpants. I L-O-V-E them. I wore them just this weekend when I went out to Starbucks. So imagine my horror. Imagine my shock, my dismay, my stomach-contorting cramps of anguish and sadness when I walked into the bathroom today and the sweatpants had been tossed in the bathroom trash. It was not an appropriate ending for a pair of sweatpants that followed me across the county and shared many of the same moments in my life that my wife has. I know Gloria is the culprit.
I know she hates those sweatpants. Actually, hate isn't a strong enough word for the way she feels when I wear those sweatpants. It is a disgust, an anger and a why did I ever marry this mountain man with the sweatpants in the first place sort of thing. I get it. So when I saw those sweatpants in the trash I thought long and hard about what those ripped liners and hole-filled legs must have been doing to our marriage all these years. I thought long and hard. I thought long and hard some more. And then I did what any self-respecting man who is guaranteed to be sleeping on the couch alone tonight would have done... I pulled those sweatpants right out of the trash and promptly hid them. She'll never find them. Never. Never.
I promise to start my own brotherhood of the traveling sweatpants, a hidden society of all the comfortable ripped jeans, old concert shirts and busted outfit man clothes that wives would like to seek and destroy. We shall pass them around for safekeeping from man cave to man cave across the world and back.
And remember this, the next time you come to throw out the sacred sweatpants: They have holes all over them. That means they're holy.
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