getting in the tub

Long ago, I took a year's leave from graduate school to live in a persistently rainy yet charming university town in Belgium. Mike had a Fulbright to study and write his dissertation there. I took a couple of classes at the university, interned in Brussels, rode my bike to the gym every day, developed a love of Trappist beers, and read lots and lots of books. So many books. One was a collection of short stories by Michael Chabon called Werewolves in Their Youth. In one story, a divorced man's four year old daughter asks him to get in the bathtub with her.

But it's complicated. He is haunted by memories of his own sexual desire for a four year old little girl he babysat when he was thirteen years old, and he happens to have grown up to become a psychologist who makes claims to know all about how to raise kids.

Frances asked me to get in the bathtub with her on Friday night. She looked at me with a hesitant smile that suggested she wasn't sure if what she was asking was allowed, but she would very much like to do it anyway. We'd had some moments of classic Frances-Mama tension that evening, the sort during which I feel as if I am reading from a script, strangely helpless to improvise my way out of a scene that I know is going nowhere good. Our relational bad habits can be so hard to resist.

With romantic partners, sex can be the perfect way to reset - to confound the mechanics of a bad pattern. When you live with someone, all kinds of muck inevitably accumulates between you, gumming up the works. While words can and often do serve to clear it all away - so that you can really see each other again and remember how much you love each other - it sure is nice to have other avenues of expression to arrive at that sense of clarity. Physical intimacy is a way of communicating before words, around words, in the spaces between words. You allow yourself to be vulnerable; you allow the other person the same.

But, as that Michael Chabon character was painfully aware, sex is just not okay with kids. Yet physical closeness seems essential between parents and children and can work in a similar way, sweeping the avenues between us clear to make space for affection to move freely again. It is extra important for young children, for whom the limitations of language and self-understanding can be especially frustrating.

Frances and Gabriel can't keep their hands off one another. They like to spend long stretches of time rolling around, making the sorts of ridiculous noises that only siblings really understand, pushing the limits until someone gets a foot in the face and starts crying. Then a few minutes later they're right back to wrestling on the couch. (The picture above is of Frances's feet with Gabriel leaning over them, inside a fort this morning). It's like they're sealing the deal over and over: you're mine and I'm yours. Just where exactly you end and I begin is mysterious, so we'd better keep rolling around until we figure it out.

But you can't quite wrestle like that with your parents. The nature of the relationship is so different. When Frances asked me to come in the bathtub with her, she was asking me to be vulnerable with her. To trust her, to come into her space. To be naked! She was asking me to affirm my love by eschewing some of our regular boundaries and norms.

So I did it. I washed her, and washed myself, and answered her questions about our bodies' differences without giggling too much. It's one thing to get dressed in front of my kids; it's another thing entirely to sit naked in a lukewarm bathtub together. When I rose to step out and toweled off, she looked up at me with her eyes sparkling and said, Mama, that was so fun to take a bath with you.

Was it? I don't know if I would characterize it as fun. Intimate, yes. Stretching the limits of my comfort zone in order to give her some reassurance, yes. But my body used to be her home, after all. After she was born, it basically still was. As she grows up and leaves babyhood farther and farther behind, both of us have to negotiate the growing physical boundaries between us without losing our physical closeness, with its power to heal whatever hurts we rack up in daily life. (Maybe its power to connect Frances back to the safety and simplicity of being a babe in my arms, too.) It's not always easy.

Being naked with bigger kids makes adults squeamish, all the moreso when the child is of the opposite sex.  Who knows how I would react if Gabriel wanted to take a bath with me at age six? I'm not sure why, but I might respond differently. Are we parents afraid of what we might do, some psychic hurt we might inflict without knowing it? Yet I suspect withholding our bodies from our children when they are longing for physical closeness is a potentially more damaging position to assume.

Maybe getting in the tub is about sharing myself without being afraid. Maybe it's modeling vulnerability. Physical closeness with children can facilitate integration - we can accept all the parts of them with gestures that speak more resoundingly than words. You can be loud, or mad, or wild, or crying for no reason or drawing the same picture over and over all afternoon. A gentle touch can say so much: you can be all those things. You can feel all those feelings. You will still be you - a person I love unceasingly, unconditionally. I would like my children to know that deep down, in their soft skin and growing muscles, neural pathways and pliable bones. Because what we know in our bodies counts for a lot.