The Sinking Pleasure of a Bath
And how I’m finally learning how to rest.
Sometimes, I’m Ophelia drifting through the lilies, my seaweed tresses snaking the surface of the water. Other times, I’m a tired manatee, lumpy and scarred and sunk to the bottom of the tub. The sunlight glares through the large window in my bathroom, pushing insistently against my closed eyelids. Around me are bath salts gifted by friends and family slightly bemused by my bath obsession; a water-resistant (not waterproof, I learned) Kindle; a Waterloo soda; a ramekin of potato chips; a mermaid-shaped washcloth for drying my hands; a phone with the Notes app open to the beginnings of a very bad short story idea.
I’ll spend half an hour in the bath, sometimes more. I’ve taken calls in the bath, hoping the other person doesn’t hear the faint splash as I shift my body through the water. Certainly, I text in the bath. I’ve written some of my weirdest scenes for my novels in the bath. (I drafted a good part of this newsletter while soaking in a cherry-blossom-scented bath.) I’ve also briefly fallen asleep in the tub, my neck crooked at an odd angle while my feet dangle off the ledge.
My daughter or husband often pop in, sitting next to the ledge as they chat about their days. My daughter likes to reach her hand into the water, just to test her own endurance. “Scorching hot!” she proclaims. They usually get bored of hanging out, calling over their shoulders, “Don’t stay in too long.”
What’s too long, really?
The bathtub has become many things to me: an office, a bar, a parlor, a church. There, I consume and create; I think and I relax and I connect. Once, I saw a photo of a writer in the tub and I thought: How precious! And kind of pretentious? But now, I think: How inevitable! It makes sense that the most freeing space in my home should also become a site for contemplation. Oprah’s bathtub, carved to the exact specifications of her body, has always fascinated me. Instead of browsing million-dollar real estate listings, I’ve taken to goggling over sumptuous bath tubs, speculating on the soakability of each. When my neighbor tells me about her bathroom renovation, I nod attentively, but in my mind, I’m wondering, “But how large is the tub?” The bath has morphed from a dubious necessity to a luxury I regularly daydream about.
I did not grow up taking baths, or even showers. We preferred the old-school Viet way: stooped next to a bucket and a small plastic cup positioned under the faucet. It was quick and serviceable and water-conservative. In colder weather, bathing could be hellish, shivering without the cloak of warm water. In summers, I’d fill the bucket a dozen times, for just another wash of brisk water on my skin.
I had a younger cousin who took baths every night. She had strawberry-scented bubbles, those foam alphabet letters meant to stick to the walls of the tub, and a lavish robe that hit her knees. She thought it was strange that I never took baths. I told her she was wasting time that could be spent watching Nickelodeon shows.
And later, after my mom and I moved out of my grandparents’ house into a house with one bathroom, efficiency was key. Someone was always waiting for the bathroom, so you had to be quick about it. In college, within the depressing cement shower of the dorms, I squeezed my eyes against the dingy, prison-like gray. One time, a boyfriend suggested taking a bath together, in an imitation of a sexy romcom scene. I told him that taking a bath was like floating around in your own smelly dirt-water.
I’ve also always resisted the self-care messaging that baths are a viable solution to things like structural inequity and undue pressures on women and mothers. “Light a candle, spend a ton of money at Lush, and your problems will be solved!” I still don’t believe that, though I’ve begun to separate the commerce-related messaging around bathing rituals from the actual, private practice of them.
A few years ago, my husband and I bought a house with a ridiculously large jetted tub surrounded by sealskin-gray tiles. The whole set-up was lavish, yet outdated. As habitual showerers, we always intended to replace the tub eventually—what would we do with a jetted tub?—but then, slowly and surely, the bath wormed its way into my rituals.
When my daughter was a baby and toddler, we’d take baths together. I reasoned that it was, again, an efficient use of time. Two for one. It took all of three minutes to finish bathing her, running a washcloth around her neck, in the delicious folds of her arms. I could finish scrubbing myself in a minute flat. But we stayed submerged for much longer, as if we had absolutely nowhere to be.
She’d use her little plastic scoopers to transfer water back and forth with the methodical regularity of a line worker, eyes glassy yet focused. Her swim school gave out plastic goldfish bath toys every month, each newly designed for the season. Cupid Goldfish. Leprechaun Goldfish. Goldfish with a Floatie, even though goldfish presumably wouldn't need floaties. We began to enact complicated bathtime dramas for our goldfish. We added an octopus to the cast, a monkey in a submarine, a foam taxi cab from the car dealership. Bubbles were a revelation for her. Color drops, too.
We spent so much time in the bath that she’d lift her fingers and marvel at their pruned texture. Baths do offer a kind of temporary physical transformation. I emerge with softer-feeling skin, an insular and marrow-soaked warmth. I emerge feeling as if I’ve been quietly held. As fresh as a baby.
I’m not a swimmer, but I often think of how swimming becomes a metaphor for the propulsion of life. One stroke in front of the other, a steady tracking of time and distance. Water, really, is the ultimate metaphor for life. It gives and takes. It’s tempestuous at times, and deeply calming at others. So there’s something ancestral and comforting about a bath. Once, a luxury for the nobility, and now, mostly accessible for those with space and time.
Spending a few hours a week in the bath is certainly a privilege. I see friends with new babies, on the verge of sleepless collapse, and I think: I should draw you a bath. But in that phase of motherhood, I would have scoffed at a bath. Give me a nap! Give me childcare! Give me a lifetime’s supply of breakfast burritos in my freezer! My daughter is at an age where she doesn’t require my constant attention, and my husband will often shoo me into the tub, knowing that it offers me some kind of regulation. These are not small gifts.
Bathing as a category of self care does have that sheen of decadence to it. Power, even. Picture all the scenes of women (always women) lifting themselves seductively from a field of bubbles. Paintings of goddesses by a stream and the devout performing their ablutions. Period movies where a thousand middling servants scurry to and fro with pitchers full of scathing water. Silk robes falling sinuously onto the back of rattan chairs. When we bathe—and I mean, in the slow, deliberate way, not the utilitarian manner—we enter a historical practice that feels almost mystical. Romantic, certainly. (There are exceptions, as in the Neoclassical painting “The Death of Maras,” where bathing becomes a site for vulnerability and betrayal.)
Bathing, of course, is not always a solitary endeavor. Though I’ve never been inclined to share my bath—with the exception of my daughter—I know there’s a great tradition of communal bathhouses, places where one gathers to philosophize, conduct business, and reconnect. I imagine what it would be like to gather with other women, cementing our friendship in the quiet subterranean spaces between land and water.
Though formal bathing practices have been around for centuries around the world, bathing was a particular preoccupation in Medieval Europe, with the Church’s obsession with hygiene as a means to purification. But insofar as the bath cleanses the body (I admit that I sometimes forget to use soap altogether), for me, it’s much more about a cleansing of the mind.
For some, serenity comes in the reverberation of sneakers pounding along asphalt. For others, it’s the knead of strong hands on an oiled back, zen music playing softly in a darkened room. The bath has become another way of returning to myself. There, I’m (mostly) left to my own devices, no longer expected to react to the needs of those around me. I don’t feel guilt for neglecting the laundry or an email. I’m unreachable. Floating through life.
I shouldn’t need a bath to release me from guilt or to teach me how to relax. But, like many other rituals that demand physical remove, it’s helped carve out a moment of “can” in a day full of clamoring “musts.”
In a way, though, bathing is about more than finding one’s agency. It involves a sort of release of the self, too. A return to the womb, where everything is quiet and sacred and a little unknown. Maybe that’s where peace lies; not so much in a reclamation, but in a recapitulation. I have no answers, really. But I’ll contemplate all this tonight, in the bath.
Recent Notables
Reading
Books:
The Whalebone Theater by Joanna Quinn: This was the first book I read in 2023—and what a way to start the year! In this story, orphaned Cristabel finds a whale washed up near her home in pre-WWII coastal England. She and her motley band begin to put on Shakespearean plays in a makeshift theater made from the whale’s ribcage. This sets the scene for another kind of playacting as, years later, Cristabel and her brother become undercover spies in Nazi-occupied France. Quinn’s language is incandescent, full of texture and nuanced description that transports readers to a world as magical and dangerous as the belly of a whale.
We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman: a moving and intimate look at grief and friendship. Warm and funny and so very human.
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank: I missed this coming-of-age novel when it first came out, but I’m glad I picked it up now. It’s brisk and funny, with the immediacy that makes you feel like you have just been dropped into another person’s life. Bank deftly captures the confusion and hope of living in a large city in your twenties.
Articles and Essays:
“What My Jeans (of All Things!) Taught Me About Love” (Cup of Jo): Another Catherine Newman heartbreaker/heartlifter here.
“I Woke Up with Cold Urticaria” (Outside): a thoughtful, gripping piece about grief and the evolving body. (Coincidentally, I began getting hives during the latest cold snap, and had to see an allergist.)
Loving
This quick-to-make coffee cake recipe has been cheering our mornings. It’s also freezable!
A smooth-writing refillable gel pen recommended by Carley Fortune in her newsletter.
Are you into horoscopes? These monthly horoscopes by Susan Miller have been a tradition of mine for years.
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