A bath is not self-care, but it helps

I want to be careful with this one, because “take a bath” is what the internet says to women who are drowning, and it’s an insulting answer to most real problems.

A bath did not fix the February I had. What helped was something adjacent: I told my family, out loud, in words, that I was going upstairs for forty minutes and I was not available. That sentence was much harder to say than the bath was to run.

The water wasn’t the point. The closed door was the point.

I grew up around women who did not do this. My mother’s version of rest was standing up in the kitchen after everyone else had left it. I inherited that whole posture — the availability, the ambient listening, the sense that a closed door was a small act of abandonment.

So: forty minutes. A candle because I like the smell, not because it’s a ritual. A book I didn’t finish. The water going lukewarm while I stayed in it anyway.

Nobody needed me. That is the part that surprised me the first time and stopped surprising me by about the fourth. The house held itself up without me for forty minutes, and it turns out it can do that most Tuesdays, and all I had to do was say so.

I do it about twice a month now. Not enough. Better than none.