Thursday, May 3, 2012

Complicated Lives 31....A complicated bath

Few things are as sacred as bath time for me now.  I love a good hot soak, a nice tub of warm softly scented swirling water, soaking up to my aching neck, reading in the tub, sometimes texting (oops don't read this son!) hair piled up, or even washing my hair in the tub since showers now send me into some weird world.

As a small southern child of an aged parent...bath time was.....different......

I was always clean, but as a regular matter of course those were sink, or spit baths, as my Mama called them.  That meant washing the "stinky spots" and the dirty spots.

We didn't have nightly baths we had Sairdee night baths!  That was the time to pull out all the stops!!  Soap, bubbles, shampoo, combs, brushes, washcloths, towels, perfume, powder, pig tails!!!  Sometimes we even washed with cousins of the opposite sex.  We got our ears scrubbed and cleaned with sweet oil, we got our nails trimmed, errant filth balls in our navels cleaned out, toe jam washed away....we were pink by the end of the scouring!  Then we got to play in the tub for about 30 minutes! :)

We had toy boats, submarines, old bottles, barbie and ken dolls, sharks, alligators, wash cloths to make jellyfish with, aluminum foil, meat trays, etc, etc

There was this one time...I was next door having Sairdee night bath with my 2 cousins (oh what names did I give them???  Well for this one they can be leroy and jethro)  I was washing up with Leroy and Jethro...a totally UNsatisfactory in Mama's eyes bath because we had to **gasp** wash ourselves!! the baby sitter my Aunt had hired was not doing it for us.  A 6 year old (me) a 5 year old (Leroy) and a 3 year old (Jethro) were all in the tub together....for the first time.  We learned a lot in that bath.  We learned that boys had dinkers, girls had trolley's...it hurt when you put soap up a trolley, it hurt when you rubbed soap on a dinker.  I also learned that in order to end an awkward bath all one has to do is tell Leroy to wash his hair with Nair because Nair is for hair and that means shampoo, then casually taking the bottle to the baby sitter and saying "I tried to get Leroy not to use this but he didn't listen" then running quickly and towel clutchingly wet, soapy and mostly naked back home to my happy, sweet bath.  My own green bathtub with the snoopy in the bathtub bubble bath, my Mama's wash cloth, powder while standing on the toilet after the bath, perfume and story time.  Some things are just sacred....or scary, or complicated

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

#1...what kind of soap were you using? I've never had any burn my dinker before.

I just can't shut up said...

@ anon #1....At home it was pink Dove soap...until i had " shunned girl sores" (a prior complicated lives). Next door at my cousin's it could have been something really cool, like Zest, or Coast! :)