Bathing: On Memory, Childhood, and Time
A Personal Essay
“The Bath,” Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris), Charcoal and pastel on heavy wove paper
My toddler had a bath in the big tub tonight. He calls our bathtub the “big” tub. It is in fact larger than his and his brother’s, so it isn’t solely adorable; it is also highly logical.
He has just discovered the blind joy that is a bubble bath in your parents’ larger-than-life tub. I’m a grown woman, and I still love to shower in my parents' jumbo waterfall shower, fat alien drops falling on my skin. Doing routine things in different places can be satisfying.
In the mind of a child and the child mind of an adult, it’s more than the subversion of the mundane. If your childhood was, when all is said and done, loving, then there is safety in your parents’ personal spaces. Proximity, maybe. The ability to be fully in their world and in a space you may not regularly spend time.
When I moved out for college, this feeling intensified. I can vividly remember bathing in my parents' bathtub after being released from a holding cell in my parish prison for possessing benzos that were not prescribed to me. I’d spent the night in what locals call “the Easter egg.” The women’s holding cell in our parish jail is painted Pepto-Bismol pink. I was also really hungover by that point, so the bath was downright medicinal.
Some other night, I was bathing my toddler, and I had a transportive vision of my younger self in the visitor’s bathroom on the second floor of my Paw Paw Sid’s house, floating on my back in the bathtub, staring at a yellowed ceiling bathed in yellowy light. The water smelled different in Maryland, and I could conjure it then and there with my son, could put language to it now, chlorine.
There are things from childhood that you can never get back, apart from memory, like picking blackberries in the neighborhood pasture every summer and coming home stained by juice and stuck by thorns. When Old Lady Ford died and they announced plans for a housing development on the pasture, I drove to the spot where we played as kids and tried to sketch the small ditch that ran through it, dividing the silos and pens from the open field. We used to sit in the same spot by the ditch, on thick tree roots and old stones. I was just a teenager then, learning about loss.
Something you can reclaim from childhood, maybe, is a bubble bath, wherever you feel safe.
Did you grow up in a house where your parents’ bedroom door was always open? If so, was bathing in their tub as intimate? Would it be now? If not, how do you find comfort?
What do you think remains from childhood?