I'm currently trying to improve my English grammar and I'm strangely fascinated with tenses. I just came across a sentence structure that I find quite difficult to analyze. It's probably not too hard but I'm kind of stuck.
First, here are some example sentences (probably incorrect ones)
I went to the mall after taking a shower
I will go to the mall after taking a shower
I have gone to the mall after taking a shower
I'm never quite sure how to handle these modifiers (if that's what structures like "after taking" are called?).
In this case, "taking a shower" is an action that happened before something else (going to the mall). So the former should be in some kind of "... perfect" tense, right? Let's take the first sentence as an example:
I went to the mall after taking a shower
Here, "taking a shower" should be in past perfect, right? But how would that work here? This sounds really wrong and I don't think "hading" even exists:
I went to the mall after hading taken a shower
This kind of sounds better but shouldn't be the correct tense:
I went to the mall after having taken a shower
Without the "-ing" form, the sentence is not that difficult:
I went to the mall after I had taken a shower
Or if the shower happened immediately before going
I went to the mall after I took a shower
How do the tenses work with these "ing" forms? I'm really curious. Thank you for any input :)