2003-07-20 - 10:55 a.m.
BATH TIME
I just took a bath. I did not really want to take a bath. I wanted to take a shower. But showers in this house currently are out-of-the question. The shower in the girls� bathroom has disintegrating walls behind the tile that will require the help of a contractor, perhaps the one who is coming to give us a bid tomorrow. The shower in ours has a plugged drain that will require a plumber, whom I plan to have come tomorrow rather tan today when his mere arrival will cost approximately ninety dollars. So my choices were to take a bath, to hope the weather holds and go over to the city pool locker room and pay the $5 entrance fee just to take a cold shower, or to stay dirty. I chose the bath.
As I bathed, it occurred to me that I used to dream of baths. When the girls were preschoolers, I literally dreamed of baths. In those days, I used to have an overnight business trip once or twice a year and I would go off with a combination of dread and excitement. But mostly I would go off with a dream of baths. I would think about the bath. I would chose a book to take into the bath. I would bring bath salts. And off I would go.
But the bathtub was never as comfortable as I had imagined. Although I am petite, I never quite fit. The bathroom was never quite warm enough and I would begin to shiver before the end of the imagined long, luxurious soak. With all the bath salts, I never quite felt clean when I got out. And I never could quite read the book because my glasses would or the pages would get damp no matter what I did.
Eventually, I realized that the idea of the bath was infinitely more appealing than the bath itself and that what I really craved was just a little bit of uninterrupted quiet. I stopped bringing the bath salts. I stopped taking the baths. I just curled up in the bed or in a chair and read�and I was more relaxed and happier.
Sometimes being parent is something like the bath thing. You dream, you prepare, you figure, and you plan�and it turns out that what you really wanted or needed was not the whole dream but just a tiny part of it. Maybe you didn�t even need the dream to come true at all. Some of the most satisfying journeys go places you never even knew existed.
One of the challenges of having teenagers underfoot with their own thoughts and dreams and increasing power is sorting out the rest from the bath. It�s realizing that you do not need the hair styles and frills any more than you needed the bath salts. It�s realizing that the setting may not be as important as the doing�and more, that the doing may be even less important to happiness than originally anticipated.
But still, knowing all that, I�m still daring to dream. I�m just keeping the dreams small. I really don�t think it is asking too much to dream of having a fully working bathroom back. I just won�t dream that the girls will stop fighting over it.
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Copyright 2006 by Ellen |
