The Shower

The shower is where I keep the truth. The water covers the sound and the steam covers the evidence and by the time I step out I’m fine again. Always fine.

I have cried in that shower more times than I have washed in it. Which is saying something because I shower every day and I cry most of them.

Not all day. Not all crying. Just the bit at the end. The bit where the water is running and the door is locked and the children are on the other side of it being alive and needing things and I have approximately four minutes before someone knocks and asks if I’m nearly done because they need a wee.

Four minutes. That’s what I get. Four minutes to feel everything I’ve been holding since the last shower. The anger. The grief. The exhaustion that isn’t tiredness, it’s structural. Load-bearing exhaustion. The kind that holds up the rest of me.

I cry about different things on different days. The relationship. The money. The loneliness that lives in the gap between bedtime and sleep. The eating disorder that still whispers. The body I still can’t look at. The future that’s all mine and that’s terrifying because mine has never meant safe before.

Some days I cry about nothing specific. Just the weight of it. The cumulative, compounding, interest-accruing weight of being a person who has been through everything and is still expected to function at full capacity because the children need feeding and the business needs building and the world does not stop turning because you’re falling apart in a bathroom.

The children don’t know. That’s the deal. They don’t know about the shower. They don’t know about the 3am. They don’t know that their mother is held together by caffeine and stubbornness and a four-minute window between conditioner and towel.

They think I’m strong. And I am. But strong is a shower and a locked door and a woman who is drowning so quietly that the people on the other side think she’s just washing her hair.

I’m washing my hair.

I’m also drowning.

Both things are true. Both things fit in four minutes. And by the time I open the door, the drowning is done and the hair is clean and I am fine.

Fine.

Until tomorrow’s shower.