Mom's Bath

Dad was always renovating something or other. He was a general contractor and when he wasn’t working on someone else’s house he was working on ours. As their children aged to maturity and independence, Mom and Dad also became more independent. With fewer financial obligations as one-by-one of their six children moved away, Mom and Dad had more time and resources to add the finer things in life to their home. I was the last of their six children with eight years between me and child number five – I was a pleasant surprise, not “the accident” as my siblings were far too quick to offer. Being the last child, I was privileged to be the beneficiary of some of the finer things my sisters and brothers missed. I saw the addition of a solarium with glistening stainless steel shades between the panes of glass. The solarium was just outside the kitchen, which was the next room to be renovated, designed by my eldest brother, in fact. But I was temporarily out of the house by the time Dad decided to redo the upstairs bathroom. I learned about it only when I returned two years later.

Dad had replaced a number of things in the bathroom I’d had baths in since I was eight years old, when we moved into that house. My bedroom was in the basement along with my two brothers’ bedroom, and while there was a bathroom for us boys in the basement, it wasn’t equipped with a bath tub, just a shower. It was darker in the basement bathroom, too. The lighting in the basement wasn’t like it was upstairs, and to make matters worse there was a window high on the wall to the outside, where it was just a few inches above the ground and anyone walking between our house and the neighbour’s could easily see into it. It wasn’t a frosted window and I could just imagine my neighbours looking in or some crazed peeping Tom hanging around outside that window, waiting for me to go to the bathroom. There was a curtain there for years, a thin curtain, but I never felt at ease using that bathroom until Dad had me put up blinds. By then I was a teenager and there was a pretty girl living next door. For some reason I didn’t mind by then if she looked into my bathroom window.

But as a young boy the upstairs bathroom held a host of interests for me. There were things in there that intrigued a boy, everything from Dad’s electric razor to feminine hygiene products with diagrams on the paper inserts. That’s also where I took my weekly bath, whether I needed it or not, and while I was indifferent about my baths at a young age, my mother was not at all indifferent about her own. She loved her baths.

Mom had been a singer in her youth. She was quite good, too, by all accounts. Monique Delmont, her stage name, sang at various locations in south-western Quebec throughout her teens in the 1940s. She gave it up when she married Dad and opted to be a dedicated wife and mother, at which she excelled as well or better than any wife and mother. But in the bath tub she relived the days of her youth. I grew up listening to her sing and, I’m sorry to say, it embarrassed me when my friends came over and Mom took a bath. It took one of my friends exclaiming to me when I was about eleven years old, “Your mom sings well!” to get me to hear her with a different set of ears. It’s as if God reached down from Heaven, touched my ears, healed my hearing, and I could really hear my mom sing through new ears. Before that I figured that every kid’s mother sang while she bathed. It was a revelation to me! I’d just learned that not everybody’s mother sang in the bath, and if they did, they didn’t do it well. I gained a new appreciation for Mom’s beautiful talent. I’m lucky, I told myself at that young age. I’m lucky to have a mother who can sing well. Imagine if I had a mother who couldn’t sing well. Then I’d be real embarrassed when she took a bath while I had friends over.

Mom loved her baths. I think it was because she could escape the realities of a difficult life: being a mother of six children, wife to an alcoholic husband (who gave up the bottle when I was four), struggling through business ventures in volatile economic conditions, and for too long only being able to feed her six children peanut butter sandwiches for dinner. The bath for Mom was an all-to-brief moment of renewal where she could relive for half an hour the happiness, the optimism, and the hopes of her youth. I vividly remember her singing La Vie en Rose so beautifully so as to shame Edith Piaf. It was Mom’s enjoyment of her regular bath ritual, I’m sure, that prompted Dad to put in a new tub with water jets, the kind that would, depending on the setting, gently or vigorously massage you with a combination of water and air bubbles.

I somewhat regret being away when Mom first used the new tub; I would have liked to have seen the next events unfold. After the new tub was installed and the other bathroom renovations completed, Mom resumed her evening bath routine. She walked out of her bedroom in her bathrobe, doubtless with a song or two already on her mind for the evening’s performance. She ran the water at just the right temperature, having added her usual amount of bubble bath. Just before stepping into the water she went to the other end of the bathroom where beneath the counter Dad had installed a timer that started the tub’s jets. Mom turned the dial to give herself a water massage for the next twenty minutes, pleased to hear soft rumble of the tub’s motor.

In the time it took for her to stand up straight, turn, and walk back to the bath tub, the water intakes had sucked in the bubble-bathed water, added air to it, agitated the combination of water, air, and suds, and spewed out enormous quantities of foamy bubbles. “Enormous” doesn’t quite do justice to the amount of bubbles being produced. I imagine in my mind a scene from a Brady Bunch episode I had watched as a boy in which Peter did his own laundry and added far too much soap into the washing machine. Soap bubbles quickly filled the Brady’s laundry room. But that was just TV and provided no measure of reality to Mom’s predicament which was much, much worse. At four feet, eleven and a half inches tall – we conceded the extra half inch to make it an even five feet - Mom saw her own Mount Vesuvius overtake Pompeii as suds were produced more quickly than she could react. Whatever songs she had in her mind for her performance disappeared, apparently as did any thought of the timer beneath the counter with another nineteen and a half minutes remaining on it. She ran for a mop bucket and returned to the bathroom. At least she thought it was the bathroom – it was slowly disappearing from view. The problem became exponentially exacerbated and soap suds threatened to quickly fill the entire room.

Mom wasn’t sure what she was going to do with the mop bucket. By now, the toilet was nearly entirely consumed and, thinking quickly, Mom flushed the suds floating in the bowl, not quite understanding why they were just spinning round and round in a circle and not going down the drain. She remembered the bucket she was still holding and vainly used it to scoop some of the suds into the sink. She saw that it didn’t matter much for in a few moments Vesuvius’ issue would reach the sink without her help. By this time she, herself, was nearly hip deep in the ever expanding fluffy foam.

Mom must have called for help or shouted. She doesn’t quite remember; everything became a great white blur at this point. She must have been said or shouted something because Dad came up from his basement office and showed up on the scene fit for I Love Lucy. Thinking quickly, he opened the cabinet door, reached beneath the counter, and switched the timer to the off position. Vesuvius became dormant before the remainder of Pompeii was consumed. Mom was thoroughly dismayed, surrounded by bubble bath and overwhelmed by the events that compromised her evening’s performance. Dad probably uttered a mild Quebecois expletive – “Osti,” comes to mind – and they eventually shared a good laugh as they cleaned the bubbly residue. I’m not sure what they did with all the bubbles. Flushing them obviously wouldn’t work.