Summertime and The Livin's Easy

It's July 9, and today's temperature is only 83 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course) with 36 percent humidity in Kansas City. This is unheard of for this time of the year, when normally the heat and humidity has reached peaks that cause your face and body to melt into a mess of sweat and fluids. 

My brain is telling me that I should be moving, doing some summer-esque activity - find a lake to canoe on, lounge by a pool, go for a bike ride - but all I want to do is sit on my back patio, under the looming Bradford pear tree that is giving me shade. I'm trying to concentrate to read, but I find myself tilting my head back to lean it against my chair, staring up at the tree's leaves, the fat squirrel sprawled across the branch getting a fur-tan, and watching the bluejays and cardinals flit across the yard. I am. Happy. Content. Present. 

Tomorrow, the temperatures will creep back up into the melt-your-face-off territory and I'll be back at work, fighting the usual case of Monday blahs. But right now, this moment is easy.

Bubbly Bubbly

 I still don't like bubble baths. 

But here's the deal: the stress of work has me taking bubble baths. Mr. Bubble is not involved; I've advanced to using less aggressive bubble bath, such as Bath & Body Works shower gel to get some sudsy bubbles. Or maybe my skin and vagina are tougher after all these years, less sensitive due to time and age. 

I find myself taking a bubble bath almost every night before I go to bed. I don't last very long in it - maybe 10 to 15 minutes. Our bathtub isn't very big, so I can't submerge my full body simultaneously: either my legs and lower body are submerged and my upper body hangs out, or I can soak myself up to the neck with my feet propped against the bathtub/shower wall, my legs hanging out until my thighs. The downside of being six-feet tall in a tub built for a child or petite person.

When I took that first bath six weeks ago, I'm pretty sure that it was the first bath I had taken since 2014. From 2015 to 2019, I lived in a downtown apartment that had only a shower, which I was completely happy with as I still carried the trauma of Mr. Bubble and the grossness of sitting in my own dirty bathwater. I occasionally took a bath in the house that I owned from 2008 to 2014, but it was usually when I had pulled a muscle playing sand volleyball or a pickup game of basketball, and I would always take a shower before taking a bath, then rinse off after taking the bath. I essentially used more water than a family of four did in an entire month just for one bath.

But after more than nine years of having my last solo bath, I decided to give it a whirl. I was sore from playing an especially aggressive match of pickleball the day before, my nerves were frayed from several stressful months of work, and it was so cold outside that my bones hurt. And I thought, what if? What if a bath can soothe me like it does for so many other people? 

So I lit the candles we have in the bathroom, cranked the tap water to as hot as it would go, dumped some Frosted Snowball Coconut shower gel in the water, and tentatively climbed into the tub - completely terrified that I'd slip, break my neck, and my husband would find my naked, bloated body when he returned home. 

I didn't slip and somehow managed make it into the water unscathed and unscalded, the water hot but not melt-my-skin-off hot. And I soaked in a tub for the first time in years. I lasted for about eight minutes, which I took as a personal triumphant. When I carefully crawled out - still concerned about slipping and falling on my way out of the tub - I realized that it was something that I could do again. I didn't take a pre-bath shower or a post-bath shower, I had no allergic reactions to the suds, and I felt a little calmer (and prunier, with my fingertips puckered and overemphasizing my fingerprints). My brain felt refreshingly empty. 

Six weeks later, I'm now experimenting with different bath enhancements. Do I like bath bombs? (No) Do I like bath salt? (Nope) How about a little music while I relax? (Sometimes) I avoid taking my phone or a book into the bath with me. To a certain extent, it's my variation of meditation, focusing on emptying my thoughts and stress so that I'm empty when I gingerly crawl out of the tub. My next bath experiment is likely to install some sort of handrail so that I can appease my anxiety of slipping and sliding to my wet, naked death in a bathtub...

Mr. Bubble Broke My Other Heart

I don't like baths. I never have. And not a dislike when little kids fight their parents on having to take a bath to get clean after a long day of, well, being a kid. A fundamental core belief that baths are a form of torture forced upon children.

Even as a youth I didn't fully understand the concept of a bath. You want me to immerse myself in a tub full of water that's slowly turning opaque because of...my filth? And then I'm clean at the end, even though I've been sitting in that filthy water with just a little soap scrubbed on me...? Or am I clean because after I stand up you're dumping more water on me to wash off the water that I was just in...? That adult logic just did not make sense to me. 

So I struggled with the actual cleanliness level of a bath. But baths also represent to me one other thing: an itchy vagina. I could tolerate baths as a kid if my mom threw in a little bubbly into the tub. (The soapy kind of bubbly, although I probably would have been more mellow child had my mom plied me with champagne or moscato.) Growing up in a small Iowa town, our store-purchased bubble bath options were limited to a pink bottle of soapy suds named Mr. Bubble. Being cursed with freckles and pale, sensitive skin, it meant a trial and error of what my skin could and could not tolerate. Baby powder? Nope. Direct sun? Absolutely not. Snuggle Bear and her fabric softener? Hell no. And apparently, one of those elements in life that my skin rejected was Mr. Bubble: the first mister in my life to make my skin itch and crawl, but definitely not the last. I'm not sure what exactly about Mr. Bubbles' formula that caused my thighs, vagina, and lower leg parts to feel like a million little ants were crawling across them, but it was painful and uncomfortable. Eventually, after a trip to the doctor's
office, my mother came to realize that it was Mr. Bubble causing me the discomfort. Without the solace of bubbles in my water, I protested baths and soon became a five-year-old who refused baths and only showered.

I heard about the company that owned Mr. Bubble filing for bankruptcy way back in 2005, and remembered being relieved that I wouldn't have to worry about stumbling across Mr. Bubble's stupid pink face again. But they continued to market Mr. Bubble and, 62 years later, you can still purchase Mr. Bubble and his itchy vagina suds on Amazon. If Mr. Bubble was on a dating app, I could not swipe left fast enough on him, and I absolutely would report him.