Zibby Mag

By Jessica Pearce Rotondi

It became a ritual that connects me to the mother I lost.

Find “me time” while you still can, seasoned moms cautioned when I told them I was pregnant. Pamper yourself, they said. Perhaps a bath? One friend suggested.

I had spent the past thirteen years in various New York City apartments, the kind where the bathtub is a place to hand-wash bras or occasionally chill wine for house parties. I was a shower person, through and through, wanting as much distance between me and the grout as possible. I once nearly fainted after unclogging a Brooklyn bathtub drain, the tangled hairs of former tenants long enough to make Rapunzel want a haircut.

The tub was not a place of relaxation; it was a thing to delay cleaning as long as possible. But when my baby bump grew so big that shower steam left me dizzy instead of euphoric, I realized it might be time to take everyone’s friendly advice and learn how to become a bath person.

My husband and I recently moved to the suburbs. Our house came complete with a 1980s jetted tub. Scenes from Pretty Woman played in my head, Julia Robert’s legs for days wrapped around Richard Gere.

But I did not feel like Julia Roberts. I felt like the Elephant Woman. Even months after moving in, it was a place I avoided. It gave me the same feeling I had when I babysat for neighbors in high school: like I was tip-toeing around someone else’s home, evidence of the intimacy of their marriage suggested in the curve of molded acrylic and the faded place where a picture had hung on the wall.

My husband is a bath man. His near-nightly ritual includes Epsom salt, candlelight, and a soundtrack. In the spirit of date night, he talked me into joining him one evening. I agreed on the condition that we take the temperature of the bathwater since experts warn that anything over 100 degrees is bad for baby.

After much stressing and measuring of the waters, I removed the fuzzy robe I’d been living in for countless pandemic weeks and cautiously lowered my body into the water, my mind racing with all the scenarios in which I could slip and fall.

My belly was so big we had to go head to toe, Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style, half our bodies rising out of the water like passing ships in the marital night. The baby immediately started kicking, pinching the edge of my stomach against the wall. My right breast floated up, my nipple’s northward climb telling me the air temperature was well below 100 degrees.

There wasn’t space for me to turn around to tell my husband that this was a sweet gesture, but I needed out. I’ll spare you the details of how I managed to remove myself from the tub, but needless to say, it involved a lot of displaced water and close-up views for my dear husband of my newly stretch-marked body.

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I wasn’t always this bath-averse. My first word as a child was not “Dada” or “Mama” but “Duck,” the name of my yellow rubber ducky that floated with me during every bath.

“You loved the water,” my dad tells me. “You’d stay in there until your little toes and fingers were wrinkled and we’d have to coax you out with the promise of extra bedtime stories.” (I can still be lured into leaving most evening activities, from dinners to dates with friends, by the promise of a good book waiting for me at home.)

During a particularly intense bout of pregnancy-induced lower back pain, I found myself standing before my old nemesis — the tub — as the water filled the blank space on which I’d projected so much disdain. This time, I was determined to practice that mindful “me time” I had been putting on my calendar and ignoring.

I folded two towels and placed one on the floor to catch slips and the other on the lip of the tub so I could hop out at a moment’s notice. I placed a novel on top of the towel. I lit candles. I disrobed. I entered.

And that’s when it hit me — the real reason why I’d been avoiding bathtubs.

My parents built my childhood home in 1991, far enough into the ’90s to avoid some of the worst ’80s trends (chintz, mirrored walls) but not the jetted tub phase. They ran out of money before the house was fully finished, so the hole where the tub was slated to go — beneath a slanting roof boasting a skylight and a window onto Mom’s garden — was sealed with a sheet of plywood.

The white tile stairs lead up to the platform, which was often draped in Dad’s laundry. It was just outside my parents’ closet, where Dad’s suits and Mom’s blazers brushed arms in the dark.

The plywood perch became the favorite resting place of the family cat, who sunned himself where beams of bright light were intended to grace bubbly waters.

Years went by and the temporary solution became a permanent fixture. Friends would come over and mistake it for a trap door. One friend creepily compared it to a mausoleum, but the only thing that had died was Mom’s dream of the perfect master bathroom.

And that’s when it hit me — the real reason why I’d been avoiding bathtubs.

I graduated from high school and moved an hour away for college. During my senior year, Mom was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. On visits home, it was becoming increasingly clear that the temporary plywood, now faded from the sun, would outlast her, a boarded-up dream of “me time” that Mom would never get to have.

After Mom died at age fifty-six, my father put the house on the market. At the advice of his realtor, he finally installed that tub. I only saw it once, sparkling and white, a completely blank space where my mother’s body should have been.

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I lower my own body into the tub, my baby’s feet jerking to attention beneath my ribs as my skin hits the water. It’s no use. This tub, carved into a corner space in our bathroom, is not long or deep enough for me to be completely submerged. If I let my knees stick up, the baby presses upon my lungs.

I switch to a semi-reclining position, my head and shoulders above the waterline and my legs folded beneath me. For a moment, I think it just might work; that the water is enough to hold me. I watch as my stomach and swollen nipples rise out of the water, pink archipelagos. These changed parts of my body can’t be submerged. They dominate every sleeping position, every attempt at comfort.

I look down at my body, a mother’s body, and see the ghost of Rubber Ducky floating on by, my mother’s hands above me with a washcloth, waiting.

Towards the end of her life, my mother was too weak to bathe alone, so my father helped her in the shower. How sweet it would have been to lift her up — she was so light then! — and place her in the bath she’d dreamed of overlooking her gardens, the sun from the skylight on her upturned face.

I wonder if the strangers who bought the house use that tub, if they know the woman who created such a perfect space for calm never got to experience it herself.

Being still in water is not something my adult body can sit with easily. Like my mother, my to-do lists sprawl in my purse, a list of projects still unrealized, a tally of wants and needs I’m saving for later.

I bring the washcloth to the stomach that holds the grandson Mom will never meet and I make a promise to give my body the care and compassion my mother didn’t have a chance to give hers. In letting myself care for my growing stomach and son, I’m pouring water back, back to her.

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Jessica Pearce Rotondi is the author of What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers, which O, The Oprah Magazine, named a best book of summer 2020 and Salman Rushdie called “exceptional.” She has written for Reader’s Digest, Vogue, Salon, The Boston Globe, The History Channel, Atlas Obscura, The Huffington Post, and Refinery29. Connect with Jessica on Twitter and Instagram @JessicaRotondi or visit JessicaPearceRotondi.com.