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When I was a child showers were magical things they had in America. In Ireland, we had baths...once a week. I didn’t experience the joy of a shower until 1973, when my brother came out as a handyman, rigged a hose to the bath tap, hung a shower head on a nail, and lined the bathroom walls with tile-on-a-roll, a ‘70s sensation.
It was grand for about a month. After that, you had to hold the peeling tile-on-a-roll in place with one hand while trying to shower with the other.
Still, I loved that shower and it beat the usual routine—us kids taking turns in the same lukewarm bathwater as my father crooned “If you wash me in the water where you washed your dirty daughter, I’ll be cleaner than the whitewash on the wall.”
Baths? I loathed them. The shower used less water so even with hot water in short supply, you could have a shower every day. And I did. I was probably the most hygienically clean, germ-free adolescent in North Dublin.
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Looking back, my obsession with cleanliness was likely a reaction to my mother’s lack of it. In 18 years of living at home, I saw her take a bath only once, before being admitted to a drying-out clinic. Her normal routine was to strip down to her vest and skirt at the kitchen sink and give herself a quick wipe-down with a facecloth: arms, neck, face. Suffice to say she didn’t smell the sweetest. Just one more item on the list of things that mortified me: a tipsy, malodorous mother, a slightly unhinged father, lopsided homemade clothes, elephant ears, and a nickname to top it all off—Deirdyweirdy.
I was the textbook shy, retiring type. I tried to be invisible, but it’s hard when everything about you makes you a target for ridicule and bullying. Over time I realised that the meek hadn't a chance of inheriting the earth, so I learned to fake confidence. I embraced the weirdness, leaned into the laughs and grew up to become the clown you all know and love!
After all, if you have to do the time, you may as well do the crime.
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Posted in response to galenkp's weekend experience
prompt asking "Are you confident and outgoing or shy and reserved? and Shower or bath? What's your preference and why?
The images are mine
and that's why we love to have you in our lives. if there is even a slight chance you actually exist it is a real win for humanity.
i always felt showers were a way of the system to get us accustomed to austerity. rationing water. but i was never big on the too hot baths either, it seemed like a tremendous waste.
now if i had my land i would feed it to the graden or let the ducks bathe in it AFTE ME, taking a cue from deirdy's family history.
blessings!
I agree entirely!
I think you have gone way too far down the conspiracy rabbit hole!:)
You've obviously never tried to get a duck into a bath...as I have!
i am yearning for learning from my PRACTICAL mistakes, so you would recommend against having ducks then?
it sounded like such a good idea
They're wayward little feckers. I was babysitting 2 ducks for a friend. I couldn't get them to go into their shelter or use their pond and they terrorised the hens and the dogs. I was delighted to get shot of them.
In support of my anti-duck stance I offer this notice I saw on a walk recently
Your stories are always fascinating - no matter what is being said. Your experiences moulded you in a super funny storyteller - not shy at all about your superbness. 😀
As my family moved around - by the time I returned to the UK - electrical showers were installed over baths. Now this generation would never understand your stories with all the modern showers - even homes without baths.
It is good that we do not all take after our parents.
I've made it my life's work not to become my mother. My house has five showers!:)
Chimneys have been phased out in new-built houses in Ireland. Hopefully they won't come after our showers next.
I hope so - I cannot think of a better alternative.
Do you still fake confidence, or did you find it? Your writing certainly seems soaked in confidence, and the bathtub amount, not the tile-on-a-roll shower sprinkle 🙃
Hahaha, thank you very much! I am either an accomplished dissembler or proof that by acting as though I am, I become.
Well it sucks that you had to go through all that angst, but the results are wonderful. You have one of the quickest wits on the block and you have found a home here, amongst us other weird folk and misfits lol. You're in good company!
Quick-witted? Why thank you very much. It's got to be better than half-witted. And yes, I feel right at home here in Nuts Corner amongst the great and the good.
lol quick-witted better than half-witted and dim-witted as well! Always fun to be had here in Nuts Corner :)
I love the image I see of a younger you trying to hold up a wall while blissfully showering. I suspect this is where your love of men with plumbing skills began.
As an American, I have never had to live without a shower! Hate baths. I do not have time for that nonsense. How do you get clean, unless you get out of the soapy dirty bath water, drain the soapy dirty bath water, fill the tub back up with clean hot water (while you freeze your ass waiting), then get back in? Not for me. A quick shower, and I am good. If the shower is outdoors, so much the better.
🤣🤣You're almost as funny as I am!
I do not hold a candle to you my dear. Not a flicker of a flame am I to your blaze.
Hahaha, you're getting there! I think I'm bringing out the comic in you!:)
You're bringing out my purple prose. I'm a regular Dickens in your wake.
The parents influence the children, if your mother lacked washing and you became obsessed with cleaning, can be the opposite mother obsessed with cleaning and children hating it then
Indeed! One of my siblings is a clean freak and the other takes a shower once a year... whether he needs it or not.
I find in you a textbook but not a shyness one. I'm learning a thing or two with your writing(English included, which I thought I knew but now I see I don't).
Anyway, allow me to disagree with you in the clown thing, I don't personally know you( unfortunately), but those I read are no clown words at all, there's a huge amount of wisedom behind and yes, hard times too, still I'm leaning from them.
I know, I know... I'm just another fun.
But we do agree in one thing ...
SHOWER BABY
I think there are actually two things we agree on, my wondrousness and baths!:)
Yes, you are right, despite I can be daramatic somemtimes I don't like to be, but that's also something we agree on.
now you're talking!
It was the most wondrous invention in a generation. When we got tile-on-a-roll, we thought we'd moved up to the middle classes!
Indeed! Know what you mean about the shower, too.
I grew up in a family of six with one bathroom and just a bathtub. We didn't have a shower until we moved to another state and my dad built us a house as his retirement project. That house had a shower upstairs and a bathtub in the basement! I still like to soak in the bathtub now and then, with Epsom salts and some essential oils.
As my father never tired of telling me, he lived in a tenement, 9 families in one house and one toilet on the ground floor. We all expect multiple bathrooms and en suites these days.
#hive #posh