Doing the Moroccan Full Monty

I’ve seen the Taj Mahal. I’ve hitchhiked in Corsica. I’ve ridden a camel in the middle of the desert. But I hadn’t, up until now, gotten naked in a public bath with my mother.

I almost fall asleep in my blissed out coma when I suddenly feel sandpaper coursing across my skin. “What is that?!” I say

Well, not totally naked. There were underwear involved. But when it comes to exposing your breasts and stomach flab to the woman who birthed you thirty years ago, it’s naked enough, believe me.

Truth be told, the weirdest part was not seeing my mother naked. It was more the shock of seeing someone else’s mother naked.

My mom and I were in Morocco in the small beach town of Mohammedia. We were staying with my friend Sanaa’s family – a girl I had met just twice in Bordeaux through a mutual friend, who planned my entire Moroccan dream vacation in the space of ten minutes, complete with accommodation and travel arrangements.

My mother and I made fast friends with Sanaa’s family, enjoy her older brother Ali’s North African drumming, her middle brother Amine’s Michael Jackson impressions, and her younger brother Mohammed’s slapstick. Her father was very sweet, and drove us all around, buying us bottled water without us even asking, so we wouldn’t get some horrible Moroccan gastrointestinal disease. But most of all, we couldn’t get enough of her mother’s cakes.

Cakes, cookies, baked goods. Call them what you want – they were, in a word, glorious. We stayed three whole days with the family, and each night after a day at the beach or in town with the brothers, we arrived home to plates full of orange flower-flavored date cakes, coconut cookies, honey spirals of sticky loveliness and sesame seed covered sweet bars. All homemade and prepared by “The Mamma.”

“The Mamma” did actually have a name (Soraya) but we preferred to call her by her given Godfather name. After all, she fit the part.

She scrubbed, she cleaned, she cooked, she baked – a thankless job that she did day in, day out, as her knees and ankles swelled along with her middle. While her husband Melek worked, The Mamma was there, chopping potatoes and tomatoes for the evening’s couscous, and sifting sand out of Mohammed’s shoes after a day of beach soccer with Amine.

She was more than The Mamma. She was the glue. One had the distinct impression, even after such a short stay with them, that all would fall apart had The Mamma not been there.

But now, I am in a small YMCA-style Moroccan bathhouse, naked with The Mamma and my mama.

My mom and I start out by awkwardly filling up the turquoise and royal blue plastic buckets from the many faucets gracing the walls, and then sliding them back across the cream tiles to “our” bathing area. This is what The Mamma has instructed us to do. And so we do it. Because no one fucks with The Mamma.

It is not nearly as glamorous in here as I’d expected – no separate rooms for scrub-downs with essential oils and crushed shell bits, no massaging showerheads, no paintings of orchids or lanterns or anything remotely picturesque – it’s a four-walled rectangular room with nothing but one another’s full frontal to distract you. And honestly, there’s plenty of that.

Across the low wall that separates and mildly enlarges the room sits a teenage girl with jet black hair that cascades down to her butt and slinks leisurely over her modest chest and skinny arms. The woman beside her, presumably her mother, is squatting over one of the blue buckets as her flab and ample breasts flap over the elastic band of her black underwear. She is scooping water from the bucket and splashing it on her daughter’s back repeatedly. The girl sits completely unfazed, rubbing the water out of her eyes from time to time.

Next to them is an older woman, also with back-length dark hair, who is scrubbing her arms vigorously with a tough green loofah, and another mother/daughter combination – this one not so merry. The poor girl, who’s maybe around 10 years old, is crying hopelessly as her mother stands above her with a red comb and attempts to get through the immense rat’s nest that is her daughter’s hair. For the next five minutes, we listen to high-pitched screaming that only a young girl can produce. Very, very relaxing indeed.

Over on my side, it’s not so dramatic. But I am still in post-shock and trying to deal with my mother’s nudity.

“Okaaaay,” my mom slurs, sending me full buckets of water – one steaming hot, one freezing and one lukewarm. The Mamma is filling up two more and laying out an elaborate assortment of soaps and shampoos before us on the tiles. In reality, most are probably basic staples of Moroccan bathing life – it’d be like me buying Herbal Essences and Dove – but here it’s all oozing brown soaps, grainy textured black loofahs, lava stone foot pumices and peaches n’ cream hair products.

My mom and I laugh awkwardly at each other, trying to avoid gazing down into that uncharted territory known as “the boobs.” Just don’t look, I think. Just don’t look. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look, don’t lo—

I look. It’s too much. I just have to know what happens to one’s chest after childbirth and thirty years of sagging.

They’re surprisingly flat. Quite flat, in fact.

“Well, there’s nothing to look at, so just take it all in!” My mom smirks, catching my gaze.

“Yea, well…” I try to think of a friendly comeback but, well, no one’s happy about having their boobs dry up into tiny mosquito bites.

The Mamma, on the other hand, has plenty to share for everyone in the room. After five children and a life in the kitchen, her chest looks like a pair of men’s dress socks that have been filled up with one mango each. Her two bowling balls rest peacefully in her lap, where mine may someday be, by the looks of things.

But my extra ten pounds don’t seem to bother me so much here. If nudity is the great equalizer, then I smell world peace on the horizon. Once all the clothes come off, so do the rules. No one is skinny or fat, a size 6 or whatever. Skin is just skin, hair is just hair, fat is just fat – staring at you quite unabashedly.

And so we scrub.

“What is this one?” I ask The Mamma, holding a ceramic bowl of cinnamon-smelling crushed clay that is slowly starting to melt with the bits of water that splash in it. She smiles her coquettish smile, her eyes crinkling into sideways half-moons and her incisors protruding just a hair. She instructs me to turn. Then she is rubbing me.

My eyes widen towards my mother, who is sitting next to a bucket and beginning to splash herself with the lukewarm water inside. She grins.

The Mamma has surprisingly strong hands. Must be all of that dough-kneeding and vegetable chopping, I wonder. She uses the clay mixture for a bit, then switches to the black soap for which the Moroccans are especially proud, that is somewhere between saltwater taffy, Jello and hair paste in consistency. She takes out dime-sized bits from the plastic it is wrapped in, rolls it around in her fingers before covering me with it.

How extremely lovely to have your back rubbed by a mother, even when it isn’t your own. When does anyone rub your back past the age of 6 ot 7?

I almost fall asleep in my blissed out coma when I suddenly feel sandpaper coursing across my skin.

“What is that?!” I say through tight lips, my back shooting vertical. The Mamma can’t speak English but my mama can.

“She’s using the scrubber,” she says.

“Is she trying to kill me with it?”

Soraya gets to my right arm next, then my left, my skin turning a particularly vibrant color of lobster red. My eyes water. Then she flips me around to face her.

The Mamma scrubs my thighs, calves and the tops of my feet with a forcefulness I have not experienced since my last romantic encounter. I feel mildly sexually harassed yet at the same time liberated. It takes a certain type of mindset to be rubbed down while half-naked by another half-naked woman you’ve met just two days before. Whether it’s all the scrubbing or the suffocating steam in the room, I’m positively blushing.

Next, The Mamma rubs my mama.

Just as when my dad or brother give her a neck massage, my mom’s head bobs back and forth like an out-of-water fish on his deathbed. As The Mamma uses the same black soap, my mom is all silence and silly grins.

The Mamma squats around in front of my mom and starts scrubbing her arms briskly with the same loofah torture device she’s just used on me.  She has my mom’s outstretched arm in her hands while my mom looks straight at me and says, “my hand is on her boob.”

“What?” I choke.

“My hand is on her boob!” Then she cracks out a short, bursting gaffaw, the laugh that means something has actually really struck her as funny, the laugh I only hear when my brother does his tyrannosaurus rex impression or during a particularly good Jim Carrey movie.

“Jai'yed!” The Mamma says to my mother. It means “good.” The only reason we know this is because the family’s favorite activity since we got here is to make us say words in Arabic and then we all laugh at how ridiculous our accents sound. And then my mom and I say words in English and exact our revenge.

My mom and I smile and nod happily, and repeat our new vocabulary. My mom throws in a “Zweena!” meaning beautiful. Who cares if it’s out of context. We speak Arabic!

We continue scrubbing each other down until we are all ooey gooey inside like pudding and cookie dough. We wash each other’s hair, we splash each other with water, we giggle like school children. It’s every teenage boy’s wet dream – minus the ass fat, double chins and hairy armpits.

As we change in the communal locker rooms afterwards, the other women staring at our strange uber-white backsides and short, mannish hair, our skin is steaming to the touch and all stress has rinsed down the drains with our tons of water and soapy delight.

We walk to The Mamma’s minivan – her husband and oldest son Ali have been waiting for who knows how long to take us home. It’s already 10 p.m., just in time for The Mamma to go home and cook an elaborate spice-filled tajine, which will undoubtedly be served between 11 p.m. and midnight – the unofficial Moroccan dinner hour.

“So, was it good?” Mohammed asks us excitedly in French when we get home, his incisors protruding just like his mother’s when he smiles. He is sitting on the oriental-print couch in the main room of their rambler style villa, which is also the brothers’ bedroom. Like India, couches, beds and personal space are all precious commodities here. So is time, which literally stands still – Ali’s favorite proverb to tease us silly Americans with is “He who is in a rush is one step closer to death!”

And sleep. We’ve half forgotten what the word means since arriving here two days ago, as our midnight couscous, cookies and Coca Cola dinners keep us up for hours afterwards. A week later, when we go to stay with Sanaa’s extended family in Fes, we are horrified to witness her 18 year-old cousin Jamila kept up until 1 a.m., while her mom and older brother watch Arabic music videos on their communal couch-bed, the night before her ultra-competitive college entrance exams.

But all I care about right now is my skin. My beautiful, baby soft, buttery skin. And so I repeat to Mohammed what my mother said in the bathhouse: “Zweena!” Beautiful. I finally know the meaning of the word.

And best of all, I didn’t even have to see my mom’s bush. Because frankly speaking, traveling to a foreign country can be stressful and strange enough without that.