TIFU by traumatizing my kitten for years

This happened in 2018.

So, I never had a cat growing up. After being with my wife and her cat of 4 years, we decide I'll get my very first car/pet. We go to the local animal shelter and find our perfect lily girl. A month in, we decide she needed a bath. I ask her, the car expert, how do you bathe a cat? Her response, "just like you would a baby."

Say less. I have nieces and nephews. I am also someone who took a bath. Baths are bathtubs filled with water and you plop the body in it. I fill the tub with water and get the shampoo and towels ready to lather and dry her.

I grab lily and drop her in the tub of water. Yes. Just full on unlatched my fingers from beneath her like the dropping water slide at water parks.

I proceed to stand there unsure of what to do as lily flails and flops in the water, manages to jump out, and run around the bathroom. I wrap her up and question my wife on why it didn't work.

She is bewildered at why her instructions failed and how I thought what I did was correct. It took 4 years, but she is finally able to get into an empty bath tub without skinning my arms.

TLDR I misunderstood how to give my first ever kitten a bath and threw her into a full tub of water.

Edit: the tub was "full" to kitten standards so it was only a few inches up. The human baby part was meant that human babies take literal baths in pools of water. Giving a kitten a "bath" is not that at all. I now know giving a kitten a bath means pouring a gentle flow of water to wet her and then massaging shampoo into and rinsing. So when I dropped her into the water, she freaked out.

Edit 2: we had just got her. It's been a while so I don't recall the reason we bathed her but I want to say it was because she urinated on herself and smelled like pee. Again. It was in 2018. I don't bath her every day or week or month like a human or even as regularly as our dogs. I said in one of the comments, but it's usually once a year if they start to smell really bad. Even when their coat gets kinda icky feeling like our dogs before their baths, I don't bathe them. We have been advised by vets and done our fair share of reading online articles.