BABY’S FIRST BATH!

He was a very, very young baby boy, and I, then 42, was an old, old first-time mom.  Only home from the hospital a couple of days, it was time to give him his first bath.  My husband, 11 years younger and someone who had grown up around babies, inexplicably let me take the lead.  This made no sense whatsoever.  I was completely inexperienced, and unfortunately, when the hospital nurses were teaching all the new moms how to give a bath, I stepped away to take a phone call from my husband, who was at work in a factory.  By the time I returned, the demo bath was over.  But I had successfully bathed myself for over 40 years, so how hard could this be?

John poured warm soapy water into the baby bath tub on the kitchen counter, while I got Patrick’s limbs and trunk free of his two layers of tiny baby clothes.  We had all the supplies at the ready on the counter so I gently placed all seven pounds of him into the soap bubbles and immediately lost him.  He was not in sight.  I instantly panicked and grabbed down into the soapy water, splashing water everywhere and felt an arm but when I tried to lift him up, I could not believe how slippery he was.  His arm zipped right through my hand like I had no bones or muscles to grab him with.  I somehow got his head above water but I lost my grip, and kept trying to grab other less slippery body parts to get ahold of him.  There were no less slippery body parts.  He was panicking at this point, too, probably confused about suddenly being back in the womb, but why is it so soapy this time, and who are these crazy people?  All that was above water now was his face, and I was reaching for more baby somewhere, anywhere.  He slipped back under the surface when I tried to adjust my grip, and in a full panic now, I just grabbed his entire body under his armpits, hauled him up out of the tub that I am never ever going to use again and put him in a kind of hold that even an NFL tackler couldn’t break.  John threw the towels around us and we hurried over to the couch to dry him off.  My heart was still in atrial fibrillation but at last I could finally breathe.  

All of this, of course, was John’s fault.  If he hadn’t called me at the hospital at that one critical baby-bathing moment, we all wouldn’t be soaking wet on the couch, my son wouldn’t need therapy in ten years and maybe even he wouldn’t scream when he was within two feet of the shore for the next five years.  I didn’t push bath time again for six months.  I often thought about getting a cat who could just lick himself clean.  Maybe Patrick could learn to do that.