Resilient like a Cardboard Bulldozer

Sex in the shower.

The thought floated through my head as the smell of the pink shampoo bar floated into my nostrils. It was a brilliant pink, along with scattered smears of brown mystery ingredients, which worked together to create an intoxicating smell—the ingredients for a magic spell.

What a waste it would be to not let the smell float around the body, or to not feel each hot drop blast itself onto the skin. The cacophony of tangled limbs belong elsewhere.

Maybe I am getting old, or maybe the magic spell was starting to kick in.

Somewhere beyond that shower and its cloud of intoxicating smell that was buffering me from the outside world, there was a sound of splashing. The children were taking a bath, washing the stickiness of lollypop out of hair and chocolate smears down cheeks. Halloween is a messy business. It is also the business of sugar highs and hyperactivity. The splashing sounded a bit enthusiastic.

But it doesn’t matter.

My mind cajoled, almost as though it was not me talking at all, but the magic.

I should just stay. Stay and hash out the day. Just stay. Everything is lovely here.

The Day

I stood in front of the table, wielding a box of matches and a motherly tone of voice.

“Alright children. Since we are celebrating Halloween, which is also like celebrating death, we are going to light these candles in honor of our ancestors and loved ones that have passed on.” I gave a nice little speech about it all, named some people, and then sat down to my dinner. After a period of silence that sounded a bit severe, the tot spoke up.

“I want to say a prayer.”

In all honestly it took her repeating that sentence four times to translate it from toddler language into discernible American, but once done, I nodded approvingly. The tot took on a serious tone too, and gazed at the candles as she began her little prayer speech.

“I wear dresses. And I like to wear dresses. And I have shirts, and skirts, and…”

It became a possibility at this point that she did not grasp our discussion of ancestors. I decided then was as good a time as any to top off my glass of hard cider, since wardrobes are not exactly my topic of interest for debate. I had just brought that full glass near my mouth when I spotted the boy playing around with the salt grinder.

He was leaning it toward the candles, muttering something along the lines of “and the bridge goes down.” That “bridge” was going to crash into the candles, knocking them askew, and sending flame flying. I jerked forward to stop him, but instead spilled half of that full glass straight down the v-neck of my dress. The cider rushed like a waterfall down my chest, down my abdomen, down to my underwear, and even splattered down my thighs.

The boy stopped mid-movement to look at me like: What do you think I am, a toddler? I am six-years-old, I have better motor skills than that. Nothing is falling.

“Undomesticated,” I grumbled at the children as I accepted the fact that for the remainder of the evening my skin would have that special sheen to it. It was the sort of sheen people actually buy products to put on their skin to achieve. Only my version came with a special feature: stickiness.

The Night

My stickiness and I had walked half the neighborhood already, along with my children. Being a country-ish neighborhood, the houses are well scattered, and the nighttime sounds become suddenly very loud in pockets of human uninhabited darkness.

The owls called to each other. One of them took on a strange sound that was something like a baby fussing or the owl version of an orgasm. The freakish sounds filled up the night space, like the soap smell filled up the shower. The crescent moon hung in the sky as a picturesque view of a Halloween night. Lagging behind, the boy in full costume came scurrying to catch up.

The trouble with choosing a cardboard bulldozer as a costume is that you can’t really run. When you try to, the bulldozer stubbornly fights you—it throws you like a bull snorting furiously. And so the bulldozer nose-dived, and the boy, strapped within, was suspended horizontally, like a squirming hot dog within cardboard buns.

There was an ominous moment that hung in the air as the boy was righted. Surely the blade to the bulldozer, painstakingly glued in place by me, would be smashed. And then we discovered…it wasn’t. The boy shook off his distress, and the bulldozer bounced back like someone had hit the “undo” button on the invisible toolbar of life.

Back to Intoxication

Resilient, I thought as I blindly set the shampoo bar on the ledge and lathered up my hair.

That’s what we all need to be. Resilient like a hard cider waterfall which leaves its mark whether it enters the mouth or not. Resilient like a cardboard bulldozer coated in a very heavy hand of glue and a can of spray paint.

I rinsed the soap out of my hair, feeling the bubbles and the hot water rush down my back as my fingers caught in the tangle around them. Life always seems so lovely in the shower. The answers are there, just waiting to be fleshed out, or so it seems while wrapped up in pretty smells and the heat that numbs the nerves.

I should just never leave this shower. The thought lulled me as I ran the conditioner bar down my hair. But the magic was fading fast. I rinsed and turned off the water.

It doesn’t matter, I told myself in my most reassuring tone. You can carry this relaxation out into your daily life. You don’t need a magic spell. Everything in life is lovely.

Wrapped in a towel, I stepped onto the bathroom floor, and into a puddle.

Apparently a hurricane had showed up over by the bathtub, and the bathroom was at the mercy of its powerful wind and rain. A hurricane of this magnitude had never before struck the bathroom floor, but neither had I ever allowed Halloween candy addled children into a bathtub together.

I sopped my way across the bathroom rug while gritting my teeth.

“Now isn’t this just…lovely.”