Bathing my Father | disability and sensuality
Bathing my Father | disability and sensuality
Herbert’s spastic movements begin to soften a bit when the warm water runs down his chest. He sighs, his fingers un-gripping mine. Since he is not speaking, nor standing, eating or walking anymore on his own, a lot of our togetherness is in the non-verbal realm. I do sing, talk and hum and he does moan, mumble and occasionally wail. Yet most communication happens in small gestures of desire and repulsion, in mind-reading attempts and through much trial and error. It’s an ever changing study in consent, pleasure and pain.
I am a visiting scholar. The actual work, the commitment and the deep relationship to these experiences and studies lies between Herbert, his care givers and my mother Gertraud. Daily work, for the last 13 years of his 40 year long illness.
The shower ritual is pure physical labor and a struggle for balance. For all three of us. Olga, a proud grand mother and care giving heroine, Herbert, a former sales man, psychologist and Osho disciple in his 80th year and I, his dancer daughter who considers herself an art/life escort. The strength it takes to lift his contorting or limp body from the wheelchair, the sensitivity not to hurt him in the distance to the tub and the calculation necessary to sit him fully onto the seat is the work of a master rescue team, or of an absurd contact dance trio in an ancient drama. This performance never ends. Frustration, fear and laughter are often tight siblings in these moments. After he sits bump free, I wish, as usual, to never force his body that way again. It is still confusing to touch my father in such a way seemingly without consent. My whole life I have engaged with movement flow and ease when it comes to healing practices or assistive touch in class. We know there are endless ways to explore touch from soft, to hard, to invisible and beyond in contexts of reciprocal interest, but our daily default touch with others is supposed to be sensible and consensual, right? Is everything else a violation, or is touch as complex as its context, needs and desires?
What is he thinking, is he thinking? I won’t know. What I do know is that he is sensing. Not like a child, or like a baby, as in the regression analogy that might help some of us ‘make sense’ of adults who have entered an unknowable rational realm. No, I mean sensing more like a transformed human being would, attuned to the various intentions, tensions and sensations of the moment. To me that includes all his psycho-sensual experiences and visions from the past and the future. As you can read I am letting go of the rational in this regard and am getting to know a field where my thoughts and the psychological dynamics from our past are just one of many realms of connection. Perceiving this relational web can open a state of approval of myself, of him and of our scenario that assists me in entering a curious now. I am not trying to glorify this now as a serene state of meditation. Being together can feel confusing, boring, painful and heavy hearted at times. But even when there is little response to my attempts at obvious communication, I remember he is sensing and I better relax, tune into my surrounding, our bodies, get subtle and stay open to what comes. An unexpectedly freeing dynamic that has actually brought us closer. Especially during a time when I feel death peaking through some rattles between the breaths, this very shower scenario is our fully alive now. Our ‘live’ bathroom performance for the gods.
Herbert closes his eyes as I move the shower head around. I sense his pleasure and receptivity to the water. He used to do this with me when I was an infant. A memory trigger, a realization of non-linear reality, of uncategorizable sensuality, or the making of an analogy after all? Either way, when I take my time, showering him is pleasurable for me as well. In this moment I feel no different to when I bathe myself, a baby or a lover, yet I am bathing my father.
Societal taboos for certain pleasures and around various bodily experiences are plenty. Care givers, dancers, sex workers and people who work with the dead have known for centuries. Oddly all underpaid professions. It seems that we all are in need for assistance, for care giving and care taking, for sensuality, for relating to submission and domination and for meaning in this life drama. I am continuously surprised and grateful how my disabled, elderly parent is helping me practice these essentially human gives and takes.
Much courage and joy to your studies in your School of Hard Knocks, Heart and Sensuality.
text by M.M. August 2020