Floating Home

Dear Readers:  Please know that the following story from my past reveals my birth name, because it's about me long before I gave myself the nom de plume of Gossamer Penwyche. 

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: "I'll go take a hot bath."
- Sylvia Plath

I was a breech birth.  That was the first and probably most meaningful sign in my life.  Despite its deep significance, I didn’t learn about the circumstances of my birth until I was thirty-three years old.

Although I knew nothing of numerology, I’d favoured the number three since childhood when I learned that good things (and sometimes bad) happen in threes, such as the granting of wishes by fairy godmothers.  No further thought or reason went into keeping three as my favourite number.  Anything to do with fairies was good enough for me.  So a couple of decades later, as my thirty-third birthday approached, I had a deep feeling I was entering a very good year, and invited a few friends over to celebrate.  My mother came over before the other guests to help me set up for the festivities, after which she would leave to let me party with my friends.
While my mother was still there my guests seated themselves rather demurely in the living room, glasses of wine in hand, waiting to bring out the weed once my mother took her leave.  My friend Calvin, ever the provocateur, changed the very polite, slightly stilted conversation by posing an unusual question to my mother. 
“So, Mrs. Remkins,” he asked, “was Silvia an easy birth?”
I cringed.  I was certain my mother wouldn’t discuss my birth with a dozen strangers, because she’d never done so with me.  I thought she’d be embarrassed and evasive.  After a brief, reflective pause she spoke.
“Well, no, actually.  It was very hard.  Silvia was a breech birth.  The doctor had to turn her around three times before she came out."
I was gobsmacked, not only for my mother’s uncharacteristically frank answer, but because I was hearing this information for the first time in my life, and on my thirty-third birthday no less.  All at once the number three took on even more significance.   Three times I turned my back (or feet) on entering the outside world before I was forcibly removed.  It was an it’s a sign moment long before those three words became a mantra of mine. 
As I pondered my mother’s extraordinary revelation, my roommate Toria, who was sitting next to me, leaned over and whispered “That’s a sign you didn’t want to be born.” 
Talk about signs of things to come.  Suddenly my whole life made a little more sense.  The new knowledge of my entry into life explained many of the choices I’d made, as well as some of the things I liked and didn’t like.  It certainly helped me understand my love of warm baths and hot tubs.

When I first discovered this cheap, accessible form of therapy, I sometimes spent so much time in the tub I’d fall asleep.  (There was never any danger of drowning.  Taking water in through the windpipe has a way of rudely and very quickly waking you up.)  And it was never about washing to get clean.  I didn’t lift a finger to perform any sort of ablutions.  I just lay perfectly still, submerged up to my chin.  Within a few weeks of beginning my multiple soaks a day, I noticed an unsightly, dark ring forming around my neck.  I had no explanation for it, nor did I connect it to my daily soaks.                                
I didn’t figure out why I had a muddy-looking circle around my neck until I met my sister for lunch one day at an outdoor café.  As we chatted over wine spritzers and salad my sister suddenly stopped in mid-sentence and stared at my neck.
“What’s that ugly ring around your neck?”  She’s never been one to mince words, at least not with me.
“I don’t know.  It was very faint a few weeks ago, but it’s getting darker.  I just can’t figure out - Oh..."
Then it dawned on me.  The ring around my neck was the water mark I’d developed after weeks of submersing myself up to my chin in still water.  Even though I wasn’t dirty, the body’s natural oils floated to the surface and stuck to my skin.  I’d contracted a case of bathtub ring.
The ring disappeared quite easily with some soapy scrubbing.  Okay, so my bathtub ring didn’t really have any metaphysical significance, but it was a sign that I was spending way too much time in the bathtub. Since then I always add some bubbles to my bath for self-cleaning purposes, and move around a bit to stir up the water.                      
Water is one of the best conductors of sound, which means that a growing, free-floating foetus feels vibrations from sounds and emotions originating outside of the womb.  My mother was three months pregnant when she and my father were married.  I don’t think I was an unwanted child, but I certainly was an unexpected one.  Add that to an unexpected husband after a rapidly arranged marriage, and setting up new living arrangements, my mother must have been under considerable pressure while she was pregnant with me.

The carefree time I spent submerged in the safety and warmth of the womb also explains my love of floating.  When I spend time in any body of water larger than a bathtub, which is usually a fresh-water lake or river, I prefer bobbing around and floating on the surface to actually swimming.  The element of water is where I prefer to relax or play, not exert myself.  Just let me breathe deeply while doing a gentle breast stroke and I’m exactly where I want to be.  The Australian crawl is for Type A personalities, which I’m decidedly not - another thing my resistance to being born and taking on life in the “real” world would seem to have presaged.  Floating has always been my preferred speed and style.  That’s probably one of the reasons I like my wine and weed.
I’m sure not everyone who’s born breech feels as I do.  But I’m a writer, which is why I can’t ignore a major metaphor that describes the most significant passage in my life so far.  Being born is a struggle, even for people with uncomplicated deliveries.  If everyone remembered the major trauma of their birth, we’d all suffer from PTSD.  Not an auspicious beginning. 
Near death, paranormal, and extreme events aside, death is the other most powerful passage in a person’s life.  If I have any control over how I take my leave of this mortal coil, it’s because I’ve been reading the signs along the way.  I don’t intend to rage against the dying of the light.  Although Dylan Thomas’s poetic advice on how to die is an exquisite metaphor, it’s not mine.
When I go, I hope I float.
- g.p.