Several years ago, for my birthday, my mother wanted to buy me some nice yoga pants. We went to the Lululemon factory outlet store (don’t google, it no longer exist) and I tried on a lot of different pants and observed that their pants give everyone The Toe (you know the kind I mean. The camel kind). I chose a pair of non-stretchy, more-like-harem pants in the biggest size they had, which was 12, and we moved on with our lives. That was FOUR YEARS AGO! also an Olympic year.

Oh how I grew to love those pants. They were comfortable, non-binding, airy and light. I did not wear them to exercise, but around the house. I called them My House Pants and when I came home from anywhere, even the park, I put on my House Pants and I was home. Even when — especially when? — stay at home parenting is your full time job, it’s important to divide the day into work and not work. Or some other fuzzy line that everyone can place for him or herself.

In the Fall of 2013, I washed my house pants and the elastic waistband didn’t dry properly or in enough time or something and it took on a funk. The smell of mildew, or clothes-that-sit-around-too-long-in-the-washer. I washed them several times, used vinegar, pine-sol, stain remover, magic voodoo sauce, to no avail. The waistband of my favourite pants smelled bad. And no, the waistband is not near my face, but it is the only part of the house pants that touched my body, so my body’s heat would sometimes activate the smell and then I would get a whiff that was bad and you know, house pants are for RELAXING, not making you feel bad about your smell.

I kept them in the drawer for a while and then, recently, I gave them away, rationalizing that maybe some other genius person in the world would be able to get the smell out, or maybe a person who has no sense of smell could buy them and enjoy them, since they were otherwise in fantastic shape, having only really been worn around the, you know, HOUSE for four years.

This left me with a lack of house pants and this was sad, especially as it is winter, the season when we most need house pants.

I purchased some tights on a whim and they have worked out great as running tights but they are not so comfortable for lounging around the house.

I purchased some cheap flowy-style yoga-ish pants but they are shiny fabric’d and remind me of Elvis and have no pockets.

I have been wearing flannel polka-dot pyjama pants but the waist is held by a ribbon and it’s always coming undone and also they have no pockets.

WOE IS ME.

Yesterday my mother called me.

“I was given some yoga pants,” she said. “They are too long for me. Would you like them?”

Leaving aside the question of who gives another person yoga pants (except I know you’re curious, so the answer is: the friend of my mother’s who is a relative of someone who works in or near a yoga pant factory) I had the feeling these pants would work for me. She described them as harem-style, with an elastic waist, and pockets, and drawstring around the ankles. It was too much to hope that they would be the same style as my dearly beloved and recently so stinky house pants but hope I did because what is a life without hope.

Today, my mother met me at the mall and we had coffee and shopped for things and she gave me the house pants and THEY ARE NEARLY* EXACTLY THE SAME.

*they are pleated and I think they might be a size 10 (there is no label) and the inseam is shorter than the old house pants but other than that, they are the same. Same! Same! Pants!

It was an average, ordinary day, and then my new house pants came home.

Here is a picture of my trying to show you my pants. In the House kind of yoga this pose is called “teenage flamingo.”