Sundays with Stretchy Pants

…not for bellies. Alas, my belly does look like seersucker because of this:

Darn twins.

I hate to generalize when it comes to Lena and Liberty, but their birthday is tomorrow and I think it’s interesting that Lena keeps saying, “Our birthday is in 1 more day,” or “when we’re 9, I think I’ll get a job.” Liberty, on the other hand, will say, “How many days until my birthday?” or “when I turn 9, I’m gonna ROCK N ROLL!” I just find it interesting, that’s all. And I’m sure it isn’t 100% of the time, but still. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Lena use a singular possessive pronoun when talking about her birthday. I know this is true because that has bothered me before. Haven’t we done a good enough job showing her that she is an individual? Does Lena only identify as a twin and not a singular person? OMG, OMG, OMG! What if she can’t adjust to living a separate life? And then when I hear Liberty repeatedly saying “mine,” I’m all, “Geez, selfish! Don’t you know you have a twin?” (not out loud of course). These kids just can’t win.

Anyway, as most mothers do around the time of their kids’ birthdays, I’m thinking about their birth and all that jazz. The first two songs on my playlist are songs that really bring back that time for me. So much so, that when I listen to them today, they make me cry. Like, literally. I’m not going into all the details right this minute, but I had to leave both babies in the hospital (Lena for 2 days, Liberty for 3 weeks as she recovered from surgery to repair an esophageal atresia with a tracheoesophageal fistula) and I used to sing You’ve Got a Friend to them every time I was with them in the hospital (which, I’m sure contributed to their pain). And I cried because it wasn’t true that if they called out my name, I would be there. No, I would be at home. Without them. And they would cry and I wouldn’t know. Just the beginning of a long list of ways I would let them down.

Beauty for Ashes came into my head at one point while I was sobbing hysterically in a bathroom stall at the hospital. It was probably a week and a half after they were born. We were visiting Liberty and we weren’t yet able to hold her because she was having a hard time recovering from surgery. It was an awful, scary time. Beauty for Ashes was a song that I had heard a lot while I worked at the Christian bookstore and I really felt indifferent toward it until that day in the bathroom stall. It just came into my head and it really did bring me a lot of comfort at that time. I’m not looking up the verses, but the song is about the part in the Bible that says the exact same thing the song says: “He gives beauty for ashes, strength for tears, gladness for mourning, peace for despair.” I had all the ashes, tears, mourning and despair I could handle thankyouverymuch. I was wanting some of that beauty, strength, gladness and peace that was promised to me. I clung to that song like I’d never clung to anything in my life. And then one of my church friends came up to the hospital to pray for us and proceeded to tell us that Liberty’s issues were all probably the fault of my grandfather’s time in WWII (he probably killed children and now we had to pay), and my grandmother’s abortion. And our pre-marital sex. And I thought, “Huh. Are these the people I hang out with?” and then I cried some more. For different reasons. Church people are sweet. Anyway, when I listen to it now, I still cry. But I don’t cry when I look at my seersucker belly, so I guess that’s progress.

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