Like a lot of married couples, VH and I have certain places in the house to which we gravitate when we want to unwind or just be left alone. His favorite spot is his workroom in the basement where noisy power tools discourage conversation and the resulting sawdust bothers my allergies so much he’s guaranteed I’ll leave him alone entirely. He’s been known to disappear in there for entire Saturday afternoons. No, I have no idea if he’s actually doing anything besides occasionally running the band- or table saw. For all I know he’s making toothpicks out of two-by-fours. The point is, that’s HIS “me time”.
MY “me time” takes place in the bathroom where I, too, have been known to spend entire afternoons. It’s not power tools you’d hear through the door, either: it’s Enya mostly, though sometimes I put on a Gregorian chant CD because, with all the tile in there, the acoustics sound amazing. Just as VH putters in his workroom mostly to have time alone with his thoughts, that’s what I’m after when I hang a sign on the bathroom door warning my family not to disturb me unless the house is on fire and all of their fingers are broken so they can’t call 911, and even then only if someone’s also bleeding. (Hey, I’m in a tub full of water. What do I care about fire?) Also, it smells pretty in there.
This last part always comes as a surprise to VH who, being a man, isn’t used to “bathroom” and “pretty smells” being in the same train of thought. All he understands is that after a couple of hours I emerge from the bathroom lotioned, powdered and perfumed with a blissed out look on my face that isn’t accounted for by the empty bottle of wine and drained glass in my hand. And for the rest of the evening I’m so content that both he and I forget my first name is ‘Venomous’.
Oh, stop it. It’s not what you’re thinking.
Point is, my bathtub time is indisputably enjoyable for me and often the precursor to what proves to be an enjoyable evening for him, too. So it’s no wonder that VH asked me the other night –after he’d spent 4 long weeks laboring away rebuilding the deck on the back of our house– if I’d mind drawing him a hot bath. Hey, they obviously work getting me to unwind, and I’m the most high-strung person he’s ever met. Surely a bath would soothe his tensions, right?
Have you ever seen the episode of Friends where Monica convinces Chandler to take a hot bath at the end of a very stressful day? She goes around lighting candles, adding essential oils and pouring in scented bath foam, and he –thinking it all a bit too girly– sinks into the tub then never wants to get out? Yeah, that’s what was going through my head when VH wanted to soak in my tub, too.
But I drew him a bath, anyway, complete with flickering candles, Enya’s Greatest Hits and a rolled towel fresh from the dryer to cradle his neck. After he’d slid into the steaming water (a process, I might add, which takes considerably longer for a 6-foot-tall man than it does for little ol’ me), I dropped in one of my favorite bath bombs: a baseball-sized bit of lavender-scented heaven which fizzes as it releases shea oil and soothing Dead Sea salts into the water.
Oh, sure, he pretended the effervescence freaked him out at first, but darned if the man didn’t stay in the tub for well over an hour. Afterward, I asked VH if he’d enjoyed the bath and, being a manly kind of man, he shrugged his shoulders, scratched and said it was “okay”. I knew better, though: he came out of that bathroom wearing the same blissed out look I’d seen on my own face.
And wouldn’t you know the next night he asked me to draw him a bath again? I have to admit, I felt like my space was being violated. The tub is mine, all mine, I tell ya! So, okay, to keep the peace I went through the whole candle-lighting thing, the fresh towel neck-roll thing, the carefully selected music process. I did everything I’d done the night before, minus the fizzies.
Then, while he sprawled in my bathtub wondering why it just wasn’t as enjoyable as the previous night, I crept down to the basement where I fired up the table saw and began hacking old pieces of wood into smaller old pieces of wood for no particular reason. Well, no reason except that it got VH out of the bath almost instantly. He was still dripping wet when he raced into his workroom to ask exactly what I thought I was doing playing with his tools.
The nice thing about being married for a dozen years is that sometimes you don’t have to explain yourself. I simply asked if he’d had a nice bath this time, to which he once again shrugged and declared himself no longer a fan of long soaks. Then he shooed me out of his room after assuring me he’d rinsed out the tub for my use.
And that, my friends, is how I learned to stop worrying and love the (bath) bomb.
