Esther McCarthy: Some spa days aren't relaxing, I found out the hard way water + shiatsu = horror

Esther McCarthy. Picture: Emily Quinn

We are playing a game in a restaurant, you know the lovely imaginary ones you have with the family when you’re trying some distraction techniques waiting for food to come.

We play a word game we made up, called, inventively, The Word Game. 

The first person says a word, then the next has to say a word associated with it (or its homophone) within five seconds and without saying emmm. It gets competitive. I usually let one of them win, but this evening we all throw in €2. 

I wipe the floor with them, €10 is not to be sniffed at in this economy, and I feel it’s a teaching moment, about resilience and being a good loser, and knowing when it’s not the time to point out that each glass of Mummy’s special juice actually costs more than a tenner.

Another game we play is ‘Would You Rather’. So I ask sweetly, as we are in between courses, and I’m trying to stop them setting the napkins on fire with the table candle, “Would you rather... be a bird who can’t fly, or a cheetah who can’t run?” Debate follows. 

Then they asked me “Would you rather eat the massive hot poo of a dinosaur but it tastes like Nutella or a small dog poo but it’s cold and tastes like poo?” They KNOW I’ve ordered the chocolate mousse for dessert, the thugs.

So I move on to another favourite, ‘Dream Day’ and there are lots of revelations there. 

The husband gets a bit misty-eyed and starts muttering about the surf in Indonesia, and all the boys’ imaginary days are spent far away from Cork, us, and each other.

“Mom’s would be a day of massages,” the middle fella says. As the only one who’ll give me a foot rub when I thrust my little piggies at them on the sofa, he’s qualified to chip in.

“I’ve had a day of massages once, actually,” I tell them. “It was one of the most traumatic events of my life.”

WATSU MATTER

This is fact, and I say it without hyperbole as the survivor of three near-death experiences (that’s another column for another day, friends).

Gather close, my children, I tell them. It was a trip with Nana Norma to a fancy spa in Spain. 

It was billed as a detox weekend, and included a consultation with a nutritionist, a diet plan, a dance/yoga/aerobics class, no alcohol (my sons snort in unison) and then a full day in the spa, starting with an hour of gentle massage — that was fabulous.

“I could get used to this,” I was thinking as I floated in for the next part — a Watsu treatment. 

I don’t have a clue what it was but suddenly they are stripping me out of my fluffy robe and pointing me at a private pool, where a small man stands. 

What he lacks in stature, he makes up for in body hair. He has his hands on his hips, so I know he means business. He is wearing a tinchy pair of black budgie smugglers, so I can also see his business.

Watsu, it turns out, is a form of hydrotherapy involving the practitioner stretching and massaging you in water. 

Did you know shiatsu is Japanese for finger pressure? I ask my boys? Well, I do. I learned the hard way that water + shiatsu = horror. 

He makes me lie against his furry chest while attempting to swirl my rigid post-baby body around the tepid pool. I found out many things that day, including that it is possible to sweat in water.

My children beg me to stop now, they are sorry they tried to gross me out with fecal hypotheticals. But I’m just getting started.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

“The next part of my ‘dream’ day, boys, is a 90 minute hammam treatment,” I continue my tale, call for another drink, and get set to traumatise them some more. My husband isn’t listening, he’s surreptitiously googling the swell in Uluwatu.

I am not a God-fearing woman, but I pray that day that there be a new therapist when I enter that steamy room. But no. Beardy awaits, wearing but a hand towel around his waist, like David Starsky. 

I’m also clutching a towel, but it’s larger and my only friend. There is a high cement slab with a pair of disposable knickers. He tells me to take off the towel and put on the dental floss. 

He then produces a bar of soap with exfoliating bits of something in it (I pray again, this time that they are not pubes) and he lathers me up, as I stand there, gaping. 

My fight or flight reflex has abandoned me, I stand opossum-like, thinking of my happy place.

When I come to, he has hoisted me on to the slabs of Satan and ice cold water rains from pipes in the ceiling. He gets a hose, just in case I haven’t been waterboarded enough, and he blasts me with cold water.

THEN! Just when I think the indignities can’t possibly continue, he gets out a large grey pumice stone, like my nan used to have, and scrubs a layer of dermis off my shivering body, even the wobbly bits.

“It was wobbly from having YOU in there,” I point accusingly in their general direction, horsing into my mousse. And now we have to find a new game to play.