Corner View: Bathroom and Shower

I remember August's first ever bath. That bath is so vivid and clear in my mind. I remember her Papi's giant hands holding her and delicately placing her into the warm water. Her eyes got so huge and she looked at us and trusted us. Her eyes, my heart, his hands. I can still be there, and I hope that I will always have this memory swimming in me for as long as I live. Only a few weeks before, the hours I spent laboring in that bathroom. While taking one hot shower after another and wondering what would happen next and next and the second after that, and would I be holding her by nightfall or the next day or suddenly now, now, now? The footprints left on the floor of my wet feet coming out of the shower still there when I returned again and again.

The bathroom now has two tiny pieces of "furniture":  a wooden potty chair and wooden stool. In the tub sits a smaller tub that will soon be just too small. Then there are the toys and growing collection of plastic containers that miss the recycling bin and instead become tub toys.

It was this bathroom in Indiana that I first discovered I was pregnant. The road from this bathroom in room 19 to the current bathroom is quite a tale. If I only went from bathroom to bathroom...

This bathroom in an old surplus store in the oldest part of Baltimore. The building had many lives but the one that still lingered was when it was a bowling alley where GI's would dance and relax. I was almost four months pregnant and really had to use a bathroom and this was all I had available.

This was the bathroom at a cute motor lodge in Pennsylvania on our way back to Texas. It was December and I was going back and forth with the idea of a baby not born in Texas. It just didn't sit right with me.

The bathroom at a motel somewhere near Ohio where I spent my grouchiest and only uncomfortable night of my first trimester. It was cold. I never warmed up and was wearing my heaviest wool sweater under the covers.

August was supposed to be born at home. In the end my true feelings for my midwife exploded and I didn't trust her enough to birth at home so I asked to be taken to a hospital. I missed that part of the planned birth story where mother and child rest in a herbal bath together as they bond. That special bath happened months later in the shiny tub at a travel lodge in Del Rio. August was three months old when I made the special mother and baby tea soak.  It was summer and I held her in this warm bath taking in the lavender and rose scents. I used the other half in a bath taken at the duplex we rented in Oklahoma just before her first birthday.

I truly had no idea I had so much to say about bathrooms nor did I realize I had quite a collection of photos of bathrooms from my past.

Jane's corner view, Francesca hosting, thank you, Nadine, for suggesting this theme.