Friday, July 05, 2002

Swimming Lessons

I’ve been putting in a lot of time poolside this summer, watching my 5-year-old brave her early swimming lessons, and squinting anxiously into the future as my 8-year-old launches onto a big kids’ swim team. Even after dozens of lessons, I’m a nervous parent – the kind teachers dread, I’m sure – too apt to scurry over to comfort a teary child, unable to keep quiet if I feel instruction is lacking. Like much of parenting, our children’s swimming lessons are equally lessons for us – lessons in separation and trust, as we hand our children over to teachers responsible for helping them sink or swim – literally.

Still, I had mixed feelings about the flotation belts worn in the 5 year old’s class – it just seemed misleading about the truths of the physical world. But I changed my mind when I saw how it enabled my daughter to loosen her grip on fear and open her body to the water’s pleasures. Even with a bit of added buoyancy, it is still a leap of faith to stretch out on top of the water. I admire these gutsy little backfloating bodies, properly splayed out, tender bellies exposed and arms outspread, faces screwed tight against panic...until the moment they lose faith and self-protectively curl up, when, if not for the belts, they’d be sunk. It’s me, then, who needs a psychic floatation belt to bolster my faith in the children’s instincts to scrabble to the surface, to remember their own buoyancy.

In Anita Diamant’s lovely novel, The Red Tent, the Old Testament’s desert-dwelling Dinah, after a lifetime of struggle, finds a loving companion whose faith in her allows her, late in life, to stretch out on the Nile and float. But I also think of Stevie Smith’s poem, “Not Waving But Drowning,” in which the dead speaker rebukes onlookers both literally and metaphorically for not realizing, “I was much too far out all my life/ And not waving, but drowning.” As we watch our children – and our partners and friends – grow, the metaphor haunts me – that we might mistake as signs of independence and change their more dire signs of drift. That our cherished ones might lose faith in the buoyancy of our love and slip under.

For now, though, buoyancy’s more literal concerns beckon, and as I watch my youngest swimmer ricochet between confidence one day, fear the next, then confidence again, I am realizing freshly that stories of progress are rarely smooth, regardless of the tidy trajectory we might impose on our memories of a child’s learning to walk or talk and invent herself. In fact, growth and change are much messier, full of plateaus and tearful relapses before there’s another burst forward. Watching a child learn to shed her hominid habits and have faith in the biological memory of her fishy skills is like watching in reverse the late Steven J. Gould’s vision of the jerky progress of evolution.

With my older swimmer, my learning curve has been almost higher than hers, as I scramble to find my footing in the unfamiliar world of athletics, filled with older children and competent parents who speak a language I can barely follow: “Yeah - my son’s doing the 100 fly and a 200 IM.” Uh huh. . .? My daughter is more accustomed to feeling her way through new territory (because this is what much of childhood is) so she becomes my teacher, along with all the other younger kids gamely backstroking into walls or hopping out of the pool a lap short of the finish line, and cheerfully hopping back in to try it again. I hang onto their enthusiasm, their increasing independence, bobbing along on their faith that before long they’ll be “butterflying” with the big kids.

I remember my eldest daughter’s comforting and buoying presence in utero – a somatic flotation belt – when I was the one swimming laps every day in a borrowed black and white maternity suit that made me look exactly like Orca. On the day of my best swim, well into my ninth month, I emerged triumphantly from the pool, ripped off my brand new goggles with an odd sucking sound, and enjoyed the unusually large number of onlookers admiring – I thought – my glorious belly as I strutted to the locker room. But once inside, a quick glance in the mirror confirmed the embarrassing truth – that my too-tight goggles had left a shocking pattern of broken blood vessels, making me look like a hugely pregnant woman with two blackened eyes – the object of pity, I realized, not admiration. I had been waving, but others feared I was drowning.

Swimming lessons are an essential education in Northwestern Indiana, where, I have learned, lake culture is central to adolescent life. On our last beach visit I studied the teenage girls clustering on the boardwalk – hip, tanned, and sandy, with confidence and insecurity washing over them in waves. When my own daughters are that age and all three of us have shed flotation belts of one kind and another, I hope the buoyancy of our love will keep us all above water, in our independent currents, perhaps, but close enough to do more than wave.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on July 05, 2002
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