Dear Tim; we need to talk about our bathroom

By that I mean “my bathroom,” but whatever. You’re still here a lot, in my head.

When we first came to look at this place, I couldn’t help but laugh when we went into the master bedroom and bathroom suite. I think the whole thing was the size of my first apartment… and the bathroom equal to or larger than the kitchen in my first apartment! My god. It was ridiculous. I loved it, in a kind of “this is fucking crazy” way.

And I did enjoy that tub, even though it had a small crack in one edge, and while it was stupidly wide, it also had a stupidly bothersome angle toward the bottom. I could either put my legs all in, or if I sunk down and lifted my feet and ankles out, I could sink my shoulders in. It had some stains in the bottom that were clearly from someone putting potted plants in there for a long time, but they were the kind of stains that weren’t going to come out – I know, I tried with all kinds of cleaners – so I didn’t let it bother me too much. Honestly I was more worried about the floor holding up with the weight of all the water in a tub that big. The first time I wanted to take a bath, I actually filled the tub to almost full, first, and let it sit there for a couple of hours to make sure the floor would hold up. (It’s not that anything about the floor gave me pause, other than me not being able to see what was happening under the tub, so I didn’t know if there was any kind of previous-to-us damage.)

I wasn’t thrilled about the wall color – the same wall color of the entire house, because the flipper had done the entire house in Sad Contractor Brown. I didn’t love it, but at least it wasn’t white and showing off every speck of dirt. And … I don’t know, I just didn’t care enough about the color to interrupt your schedule to paint the bathroom. And that was pretty much it, until you died.

After you died, every time I looked at the tub, I saw the corner of it that you had hit when you fell down, having  your stroke while getting dressed just out of the shower. I saw the scattered bottles. I wondered how much it had hurt, or if you had even felt it since that was the side that was paralyzed. You had a bruise, there, for about a week, but not a very bad one and none of your ribs had been broken. I pointed it out to the doctors on the first day and they reassured me that it wasn’t concerning. Just a bruise.

But I still saw it, every time I looked at that corner of the tub.

I started keeping things there. Stuff to clean the shower. Watering cans, for the plants. I kept moving stuff around and trying different things there, hoping that one day I could look at that corner and not think of finding you on the floor, half paralyzed, holding one hand to me to help you up and your face not understanding why I wasn’t helping you or maybe not understanding what was even happening. I wanted to be able to take a bath without giving that corner major side-eye. I wanted to be in the bathroom without thinking about it. Not to not think about YOU, but to not think about that moment. That moment I knew the other shoe had dropped, after your stroke the week before. The moment I knew nothing was ever going to be the same again, because my grandmother had had a stroke and lived with us for years and I knew the kind of care you would need. If you survived. The moment I became scared and was scared every minute of every day for the next 100 days. I really, really didn’t want that swirling in my head every time I was in the bathroom. Every time I saw the corner of that bathtub. That bathtub that was far from perfect but was still my second favorite bathtub in all the places I’d lived – second only to that place I lived in the Duckpond that had a claw-footed tub.

I planned, after you died, to go ahead and repaint the bathroom, knowing it would take me a while. I got samples, I painted little swatches, I wanted to do something a little crazy. So I was going to do two walls in a dark green, and two in a light yellow. And I was going to put peel-and-stick tiles up around the shower.

I really loved the tiles, but the longer I lived with the green I just didn’t like it that much. It was too bright, even for being a dark shade….? I don’t know how to describe it. And then the peel-and-stick tiles started to unstick in places. Not everywhere, and not even close to the water/above the shower. They started to peel off on the wall next to the shower. And I knew I should do something about it but …. everything just felt so insurmountable, in that first year. It was everything I could do to sound like a human being, let alone keep redoing my bathroom.

Then it was time to redo the floors in the house, and I wanted to get that put in the bathroom as well, because that tile had always been janky. The grout all came up before we’d been there a year, and most of the tiles were loose, some cracked. Plus, there was the water damage to the wall, from that leak above the fireplace. They were going to have to take the shower out, in order to get to and repair that wall. That’s fine, I really hated that shower. First off, there was that damn plastic/glass door. It didn’t matter how much I scrubbed it and what with, it always looked grungy. And it was always sticky – I had to push it with my foot every time to get it open, even when I had just cleaned it. Plus, at the risk of sounding like a lunatic, I’ve seen way too many haunted house movies where the person gets trapped inside a shower like that by the ghost/poltergeist/entity and has to risk life and limb trying to break out of it. Oh, and the benches inside it? I get having A built-in bench, but TWO of them? Right across from each other? So the only place you can stand is in the 18 inches between them, right over the drain? Both of the seats were at least 12 inches deep. That took up more than half the space in the shower! So what was the plan, if the shower got damaged taking it out? Fuck, I hate that thing, I just ordered a new shower and said “replace it with this.” So then what was the plan if they got as far as the end of the shower, but the damage to the wall actually went past that, into the area where the bathtub was?

In for a penny, in for a pound. If I’m ordering a new shower, I’m also ordering a new bathtub. One that I love the look of. One that doesn’t have that corner that always caught my heart when I saw it.

I lived with it like that for a while, and then I started thinking… I really should get around to finishing the bathroom. Not in a “god, I suck, I can’t believe I still haven’t done this” way but in a “I deserve to have a bathroom that feels like a refuge” way. I looked into more/different peel and stick tile. I found some with a color I liked that matched my new shower curtain (although I decided to leave the brightly colored tile that was holding up well, still. I got enough I could replace it if it ever started to fail, but so far it seems to be hanging on). I had so much yellow left over from doing the kitchen (since I contact-papered the cabinet doors instead of painting them) that I decided to use it to paint the other three walls in the bathroom. I thought more about the shower curtain and the new tile color and I thought about greens and finally took a strip of the tile into Home Depot and bought a similar light green, and painted over the dark green. I found a print I’d had up in my office in the Gainesville house that I’d misplaced upon moving in here, and I felt it fit the bathroom perfectly and have hung it up so I see it every morning.

Now, the bathroom really is mine. You’ve never seen it like this. You didn’t fall into the corner of this tub. I didn’t find you half on the bathmat, half on that cold, impersonal tile. I can stand anywhere I want to in the shower and I don’t have to kick the shower curtain to get it to move.

I love the bathroom now.

But I’m also sad. I should have painted it while you were alive, even if it interrupted your schedule. We should be sharing this. I shouldn’t be enjoying this all alone. You should be coming out of the bathroom and telling me how spacious you think the new shower is. You should be teasing me about spending hours in the tub, calling you to bring me a new drink.

I love that I have it and I hate how unfair it is.

Sigh.

Grief is weird.

PS. My new tub is legit the deepest tub I’ve ever been in. I can almost completely submerge. My shoulders and feet can be in it at the same time. I had to get a little set of stairs AND install a grab bar so I could get in and out of it without killing myself. I fucking LOVE this tub. And the shower’s not bad either.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.