An epiphany

This Sunday, I awoke to the pitter patter of Nate's little feet running down the hall in his excitement to tell me it was time to make our Mother's Day brownies.  I opened my cards and gifts (flowers and a gift card for Caribou from Nate, so we can stop there on the way to the day care - guilt-free! - for hot chocolate and coffee), then after putting the brownies in the oven, kicked around the house until it was time to get ready for my "official" Mother's Day treat: a sojourn at the Woodhouse Spa for "aroma bath ritual," to be followed by a 50 minute massage.  Aromatic oils, flower petals, soothing music, a massage... what more could you ask for, right?

Well...

So there I was, in my white bathrobe and spa sandals, sipping a glass of ice water and all ready to relax.  My masseuse came in to greet me and led me back to the aroma bath ritual room (which sounds a lot scarier than it actually is... I'm pretty sure there have not been any ritual sacrifices or anything in there, but then again, I didn't ask).  We walked into the room, past the privacy screen, and voila!  There was a lovely old-school soaker tub, already filled with fragrant hot water and flower petals.  My masseuse explained how things would go (I was to get in the tub, relax, and then after about twenty minutes, he'd check on me to make sure I'm not dead and give me a five minute warning to get out and onto the massage table for part two of my decadent Mother's Day aroma bath massage session), then quietly slipped out of the room.  And this is where the wheels started to fall off.

I stood there, looking at the flower petals floating in the water, and couldn't help but think that this is exactly the type of tub they had at Tao.  My tub had less flower petals, but basically, it was the same thing.  Tub.  Check.  Water.  Check.  Flower petals.  Check.  Hot semi-naked girl?  Hmm.  I was a little giddy about the prospect of pretending to be a gorgeous, glammed-up tub-sitting girl for a little while, and dipped my toe into the water.  It was a little hot for my taste, but it's all part of the Tao - I mean, Woodhouse - experience.  I eased myself into the tub, and came face to face with a harsh reality: I am too damn tall.

It's not that I was too tall for the tub.  No, even the tallest of the tall can smoosh into a bathtub one way or another, and quite honestly, this one was pretty deep.  Rather, I realized that I am too tall to have successfully sat in a bathtub at Tao (or anyplace else) with flower petals covering my girl parts without basically lying down.

Had I simply come to this realization and moved on with my life, the next fifteen minutes might have been more enjoyable, or even mildly relaxing.  Instead, I spent the whole time squinching this way and that, moving the flower petals here and there, adding water to see whether that might help (it did cool the temperature down, which was helpful, albeit in a totally different way), trying to find at least one coquettish-yet-mostly-covered position that might look even remotely attractive to an outside observer.  Nothing worked.  And worse yet, I discovered that my boobs are not big enough to get the flower petals to "stick" at my bustline the way the Tao girls' boobs did, which, if memory serves, was how they were able to sit up in the tub themselves.  No... the petals just floated sadly around the surface, fruitlessly searching for something to land on.  I even sat up and tried to stick the flower petals directly onto my skin to see if that might help.  It didn't.  I either needed more flower petals, more boobs, or both.  Or maybe waterproof glue.  But definitely something.

When my masseuse knocked on the door to give me the five minute warning, I could barely contain my relief.  And that was when I had my second epiphany of the day: there are probably lots of reasons why I never got a career as a tub girl at Tao (or any other club) off the ground, and while it's a bit depressing in a vain, I'm-getting-old-and-that-really-sucks kind of way, that's really okay.  Tub sitting isn't for everyone, but then again neither is being a lawyer, or Nate's mommy, or, you know, an awesome like a possum Mother's Day goddess with a 50 minute massage ahead of her and homemade brownies waiting on the counter at home.