Bathtime Reflections

This week we've looked at how our lives have changed since we were children and how our time usage had altered. I realised that my time went from being mainly time to myself to do what I liked to being mostly for others with little time to me. I wrote a piece, projecting myself forward some ten years or so and looking back to when my children were small. Its incomplete and needs some working on but here's the first draft.

The end?
She reclined into the warm bath, soft scented bubble floating around her. The bathroom had taken on a fantasy atmosphere, lit as it was by candles flickering in the draughts. She closed her tired eyes and exhaled a deep sigh.
Today had been a busy day, helping her children to move out of home for the first time. One had gone to a flat share with a good friend, the other to live near a new job. Why it had to both be on the same day Louise would never know. There had been a big flurry of packing and repacking of boxes as childhood memories had been transported to their new abodes.
Louise settled her shoulders under the warm water and reflected on how things had changed. How life had been when the girls were small and family life was just starting.
Back then there had been precious little time to herself, certainly no time to indulge in the luxury of a candlelit bath. She remembers hurried early morning showers as she rushed to get washed and dressed for work, praying that the children would stay asleep just that bit longer so she could get her make-up done without helping hands. Once she was ready the Nanny would take over and the children would become her responsibility... well apart from the time she'd managed to lock herself out when she went out to empty the bin and the girls had been sitting indoors watching TV... Louise had made it home in record time that afternoon.
It was constantly like that then, a never ending round of work, shopping, running the washing machine, time with the children and sleep. Although sleep was something squeezed into the time remaining after everything else was done.
Then as the girls got older and went to school the after school activities had started and they were all over the place after school.
How she managed Louise never knew, life became a blur of survival, whirling from one crisis to the next, a helter skelter ride you couldn't get off.
Except she had...finally.
The children had left home to start their own treadmills and she was free....to do... what?