Tonight I treated myself with a bubble bath the water filled to the tippy-top, As I lie in the tub I am drawn to the effervescent sound of thousands of tiny bubbles’ pop sounds. This is a melody I rarely enjoy, one you can’t hear during the normal commotion that accompanies my usual bath time with the company of two excited children. I haven’t in fact enjoyed a solo bath since before Rosie, my now 13 month old, was born. It Makes me think about when I used to take baths regularly with a glass of wine or a bowl of ice cream just to wind down for the night. It was a delicious sensation to wile away a half hour steaming in the tub before crawling luxuriously to bed. The scene looked very different back then. My bath was covered with many bottles of shampoo and soaps, leave in conditioners, and loufas all sure to bring health and beauty, one or two curios I felt made the bathroom prettier. The decorative mat on the floor and a clean bedroom beside.
The bathroom in today’s setting is unrecognizable by those standards. The edges are now covered with toys, some still dripping from the water of yesterday‘s bath having not been wrung out properly as we chased little screaming naked bodies across the room with animal shaped towels, diapers and one piece jammies softer than a cloud. There are no longer many bottles.
All I use now is a single bar of shampoo forgoing conditioner altogether as it is no longer necessary in my ear length hair. My bath is no longer accompanied with a glass of wine, but rather a bottle of ice water fearing my tired body would succumb to the wine and sleep before I ever made it to my bed. Speaking of the bedroom - it is no longer the spotless magazine cover sanctuary I once enjoyed. It is now strewn with tiny outfits, books and more toys, many of which are likely to cause me pain as I stumble over them in the middle of the night to answer one or another child’s cries. I’ve picked some of these items up multiple times throughout the day giving up by the evening knowing they’ll be the first things to be pulled off the shelves in the morning by my baby’s curious hands as she examines each item at eye level. Can I put them in a place where she might not reach them? Yes, of course, but what would be the fun in that for my inquisitive little explorer.
My life is changed with the addition of these two little minions. My hair is much shorter, my breasts hang much lower, I no longer bother painting my nails. On paper I may appear to be a cautionary tale, but if you were to pull the page aside and look deep into my heart and mind you would see a very happy woman, one who used to live by the calendar ticking off every day until some date she looks forward to and when that day was over starting over again. I don’t do that anymore. I barely even look at my calendar and often I’m not even sure what day it is. As a stay at home mom, dates mean little to me especially during quarantine. My life no longer feels like it’s made up of days marching across the air one at a time. Instead my life is made up of moments, beautiful blissful moments, hard and challenging ones. moments I wish could go on forever and some I can barely navigate. They rise and fall with my three-year-old emotions and my one-year-old‘s hunger or teething. But if I were to stack all these moments up to tell you what my life is now you would see a sublimely happy woman, the mother of two deliciously unique children, the wife of a very special man. You would see someone so thankful for the life she was given and chosen and lives.
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