A quote from Sylvia Plath’s novel, “The Bell Jar,” hangs on my bathroom wall: “There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.”
When my daughter, Lila, was an infant, she’d rest atop my chest like a little chick — belly down, legs tucked, as I bathed in the wee hours. It was the only way to get her to go back to sleep. As the steam rose around us, she stayed dry on her perch. We’d float together in the tub — mother and daughter — united by the healing powers of a bath. And our ritual worked just as well at 5 pm as it did at 5 am.
“Wow,” my husband would say, watching Lila and me take bath after bath, “what a Mommy’s girl.”
The rhythmic bathwater must have sounded much like a womb, and it calmed Lila even on her crabbiest days.
I completely understood why. I love baths — I take them when I’m happy and when I’m sad. A long, hot bath, a glass of cold Coke, and a best-seller is my idea of heaven. Add some bubbles, and I’ll disappear into the tub for hours.
My little mermaid and I shared the tub with Bathtime Elmo, assorted rubber duckies, and a plastic submarine. I could dig it — I’d resigned myself to never taking baths alone again. And for a couple of years, that’s how things floated on.
Then, one week, I took three baths in a row without Lila. Each time she heard water pouring into the tub, she ran from the bathroom in a panic. My husband was concerned — had we gotten soap in her eyes? Had she slipped underwater by accident? Had she watched a scary movie about water? No, no, and no. Our daughter had simply transformed into a 2-year-old. Ignore it, I told my husband and in-laws: “Oh, she’ll bathe when she’s ready.”
“Well, you’ve got to do something about it,” my father-in-law said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. But something.”
“She’ll take a bath when she’s ready,” I repeated, this time with no confidence at all.
I considered sending Lila to swimming lessons, just so she’d get an occasional rinse. What if she were schizophrenic? Don’t schizophrenics hate to bathe? I called the pediatrician’s office. After the receptionist finished laughing at me, she connected me to a nurse.
“She’s 2,” the nurse said. I could hear her shrug through the phone. “She’s exerting her independence.”
After a day at the playground with Lila, I took her sandals off and looked at her tiny, dirty feet.
“Would you like to play pedicure?” I asked.
“OK!” she said. “What’s that?”
We gathered all the necessary supplies: a princess folding chair, a big bowl of soapy water and pink nail polish. I scrubbed the dirt from her toenails, all the while talking to her in a high-pitched voice: “You come here often? What’s your name? You have good-lookin’ toes!” Afterward, I proudly displayed her freshly painted feet to my husband.
“Wow!” he said to Lila. “Wouldn’t it be fun to have clean hair and clean elbows and —”
“I no wanna take a bath!”
There was an upside to all this — whenever my husband and I wanted to have a private conversation, we retreated to the bathroom, where we knew Lila would never bother us.
But it was summer, and the girl-who-wouldn’t-bathe began to smell a bit gamy. I sponged her down with soap and warm water — she tolerated that with some mild whining — but there was no getting near her hair. My solution was dry shampoo powder, found in a beauty-supply store. Sure, the product was for old ladies who wait a week between appointments for a wash and a roller set, but it might be just strong enough for a stinky toddler.
My husband drew the line at dry shampoo. On his day off, he announced that he was giving Lila a bath. I left for my job and wished him luck. Half an hour later, I got this e-mail:
“The screaming that burst seven mirrors in our neighborhood was not a wildebeest in the death grasp of six lions. It was just the sound of a 2-year-old — whose hair smelled so bad from three straight days of near 90-degree temps that she was attracting flies — getting a bath. Her father finds it creepy that his wife uses aerosol ‘soap’ sprayed on bedridden patients. Father regrets the decision.”
Oh, the melodrama. How bad could it be? I waited a week, then tried giving Lila a bath myself. When she slipped away like a greased pig, I gave up. There had to be an easier way.
I got the idea of putting her in her bathing suit and filling her kiddie pool with suds — an outdoor bath. Lila went for a tub in the sun. The neighbors asked if we were renovating our bathroom. I nodded and smiled. The bathing pool worked all summer, but as fall approached, I wondered what we’d do.
It became a joke in our house. The answer to any question revolved around not taking a bath.
“Do you want a popsicle?”
“I no wanna take a bath.”
“Let’s put your pajamas on.”
“I no wanna take a bath.”
My husband asked me where I’d put the car keys.
“I no wanna take a bath!”
I bought cool bath toys and kids’ body wash with princesses on the bottle. Bought the kid her own towel, and a special visor to keep water out of her eyes and ears. Nothing worked.
At this age, Lila loved to talk about the things she liked: strawberries, princesses, snacks, kittens…
“Is there anything you don’t like?”
“Baths,” she said instantly. “And bumblebees.”
When she woke up scared after a bumblebee nightmare, I gave her a butterfly net to sleep with. That solved the problem instantly. Why wasn’t there an instant solution to her fear of bathing?
Marshall, my older child, had never acted this way. He’d loved baths all along, starting each school morning lying supine in a tub of water, floating up to his nose and mouth. Now a tween, he’d graduated to showers.
A shower! That was it — give the 2-year-old a sense of control, the parenting books advise. I attached a handheld nozzle to the faucet and tried to sell Lila on the idea — which, I’m embarrassed to admit, I called a “princess rinse.”
“No!” she screamed, running naked down the hall. “No princess rinse!”
I came to enjoy my time alone in the tub. I read, stayed up to my chin in bubbles — I got my privacy back. I wondered if Lila wanted her privacy, too.
“You want to take a bath alone?” I asked, my brain filled with visions of myself hovering in the bathroom doorway.
“I no wanna take a bath!”
Then, just as quickly as her fear of bathing had come, it was gone. I had my little mermaid back. We shared baths again as if nothing had ever happened. Are you kidding me? Was this all just a phase? Maybe it was just a period I had to ride out — albeit a less convenient one than, say, my son wearing a superhero cape for two years.
Yesterday, when I put before Lila her favorite lunch — peanut butter on an English Muffin — she wrinkled her nose. The next phase was already starting, and I was ready for it — filled with the faith that it would pass without any regard to how or when I wanted it to.
“I no like samwidges!”
I looked in the fridge for an alternative and began counting the days till her third birthday.
Anna Seip is a mother of two who works as an editor at a college in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at [email protected].
