A Sample of My Work Published in the Waterlines Anthology
Bubble Bath
Heather watches the unbridled joy of her babe, her wee pink mouth forming an O, her arms stretched upward in an attempt to touch the bubbles wafting toward the ceiling. Bath time is the perfect end to every day, water this babe’s element.
Pudgy hands slap the surface sending splatters onto the wall tiles, but no words of restraint are uttered by this mother. No, this mother eggs her on, the gurgles, the laughs infectious.
Heather remembers the binding ropes of bath-time etiquette when she was young. Tub time was for serious scrubbing, a cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness routine. Everything was done with efficiency and purpose, another duty to perform, and she is bent on redefining this family dynamic.
Amidst this present joy, a niggling worry creases Heather’s forehead. While browsing the internet last evening, she stumbled across a meme that said, “All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries when she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother.” Suspecting this was fake news, she consulted a reliable medical source and was surprised to discover that this fact was indeed true. This means the seeds of this sunny child were formed in Heather’s fishlike body when she was floating around in her mother’s womb. What drugs were infused in that soup, she wonders.
Heather’s mother mostly managed what we now call Bipolar disorder with pills that rattled in plastic containers. What did they prescribe in those days for the type of devastating depression that sank her mother into her bed, the blinds pulled to shut out the sun? What drugs levelled her out during her manic phase when she yearned to soar too close to the sun like Icarus?
Echoes of this condition sometimes manifest themselves in her own disposition. Thankfully these echoes are faint and can be managed with exercise, walks in the nearby forest, meditation. She maintains a regiment of self-care, because she has witnessed the havoc mental illness has on mood, on energy levels, on the ability to accomplish daily tasks. She remembers waking each morning when she was a child and her first thoughts would turn to her mother. Would she be happy? Would she smile and play or would she turn away, crawl back into bed? Heather is mindful of the pitfalls, her own tendency to dwell on worries, for example, and credits her female friends for the part they play in her well-being—the talks over a glass of wine or a pot of tea, the laughs, the rants—that keep her relatively sane and balanced—talk therapy really.
Bam! Her daughter slams the surface with such force, a spray of water drenches Heather’s face and jolts her back to the here and now. She remains kneeling beside the claw-foot tub as she relinquishes the bubble wand and reaches for the towel, one hand always free in case the babe tips over or willfully decides to lay full out on her stomach and attempt to breathe water like a fish.
The towel obscures Heather’s face for an instant and when she reappears in her child’s visual field, the babe shrieks with joy. Heather takes this cue and disappears herself again. She pops out from behind the towel. “Peek-a-boo!”
Heather sees no sign of darkness in her baby girl’s eyes. She prays she will remain that way, that her maternal genetics will have no dominion and the paternal line, that the sunny disposition and positive perseverance of her father’s genes will win the day. Time will tell. For now, she dips the plastic wand into the purple container and blows into the dripping round, sending fragile orbs into the humid, impartial air.