The Woman Who Bathes

I want to be the type of woman to take a bath at the end of every Sunday, after we’ve shared the last homemade nourishing meal with our offspring, the summer light fading. We’ll bathe the children first and sometimes, after, you’ll join me when their dream-filled breath joins the hum of the breeze flowing through open windows. You’ll add yourself to me in the small container, not always to join as one, but to tangle our limbs, the slip of warm moisture between our oily love-scented skins. You’ll breathe in my neck and hair, your legs wrapped around me, arms too, and I’ll inhale the scent in the crease of your nostrils, your upper lip, your lids and lashes. But I want to be the woman, too, who takes her Sunday baths often alone, enjoying herself, re-entering her self so that she may be her best, give her best, do her best in the week to come. I will sit still and sweating with my cold drink to my side, my music on–maybe the kind you do not like–and I will be with me so that I can come be fully with you and all we have made together.