holy water of self-love

My great grandmother’s green bathtub was small and cozy. A bar of soap too big for my hands fragranced the air like incense. I remember the arch of my great grandmother’s back as she’d bend over the side of the tub. She’d take my feet in her hands, one and then the other, and gently wash them, being careful to clean with soap between each tiny toe. She rinsed them off with holy water straight from the faucet.

Now, 20 years later, I lay here, body suspended in my own bathtub-sized piece of soft, salty water, and I remember being a child in my great grandmother’s bathtub. Knees, breasts, and neck peeking above the water, I remember how I trusted her. I didn’t know that the future would soon run dry of this sort of trust—the kind that isn’t afraid of how other people might see your body. Or worse, how you yourself might see it.

I sit up, reach for the spearmint soap, and try to wash my own feet—one foot and then the other, careful to wash between each toe. As I observe my own hands caring for these feet like my grandmother once did, I try to remember what her wrinkly, age-spotted hands looked like.

 I always liked age spots. I asked her what those spots were once, and I can still hear her laugh aloud and say, “oh, just old person marks I guess!” I could tell she didn’t like them, but this perplexed me because I always thought they were beautiful—at least on the hands of my grandmothers they were. I also think of how I can see a few of those spots on my mother’s hands now, and imagine mine will look similarly someday.

Rinsing the soap off of my hands and dipping my feet in and out of the water, I can’t help but remember that this body is a baptized one. It has been baptized in water and love and hand-me-down traits of the people who raised me. And for a moment, at least my feet are suspended in the soft warmth of their own embodied belovedness. And at least my hands are safe in their likeness to my grandmother’s. This Maundy memory of her green bathtub has somehow floated to the surface, as if trying to convince me of my own worth.

I know that I’ve spent more time hating my body than loving it, more energy inflicting violence than blessing. I don’t know where I learned to hate this body. I don’t know when I learned to flinch at loving hands reaching out to me, or how I learned to separate body from mind. But perhaps these feet can teach the rest of me to feel love, too.

My body carries characteristics of saints—of my great grandmother, my mother, her mother. If they were here, I’d wash their feet. But because they’re not here, maybe the closest thing to washing their feet is washing my own.