Swimmies

It’s summer again, and both of my children are in a day camp near our home. Swimming is part of the camp schedule several days a week. It’s part of what we do in the summers, since we don’t have a pool of our own. We actually DID have a pool, when we first bought our house, but we had it filled in before our kids discovered it. I didn’t want the risk or expense of a pool, and I wanted them to have a swing set, like I had when I was a child. No doubt they will find out about the demolished pool, perhaps plotting their own Mommy-Dearest-style memoirs of their deprived childhoods, but I do not care.

Swimming has bittersweet memories for me. When he was young, my father was a champion amateur swimmer in Taiwan. And after my brother and I were born, he tried to mold us into excellent swimmers. His methods? Short-lived sweet pleas, desperate bribes, barking orders at us, and sullen silences. Because he only saw us once a month, after he and my mother divorced, nothing much that he did would move us, other than to dig in our heels and refuse. YMCA swim classes and the swim unit in junior high P.E. were not my strong suit either, probably because of the bad associations I had with swimming.

But swimming is an important part of my kids’ lives. Several years ago, when my daughter was two or three years old, we began toddler swim classes. It began as my husband or me in the pool with her, carrying her around and playing Ring Around the Rosie with other parent-child pairs, and led to independent swim classes. Every summer for the last six years, she has had swim classes in one form or another. And last year, when she was in second grade, her teacher recommended that we try the local children’s swim team, the Santa Monica Sharks. She tried out and made the team, and thus I began the great Monday, Wednesday, Friday schlep across West Los Angeles, ferrying her after school through heavy traffic to swim team.

Some days she complains. But most days she’s focused on what her pre- and post-swim snack will be, and whether or not she’ll be allowed to do at least a few laps of breast stroke, or when she’ll perfect her butterfly stroke. And she admires her own muscles and the sport’s accessories (cute suits, towels, and lollipop-colored swim goggles and caps).

My son is enthusiastically trying to catch up with her swimming abilities. He is working on his back float and the basics of back stroke and freestyle (I’ll never get used to not calling it “the crawl” anymore). Next year he wants to be on the swim team, if he is ready to swim 25 yards on his own.

When I think about why I place such importance on swimming, I know that it’s partly about competence. I try not to be too safety-obsessed, but learning to swim is one of those “no duh” ways to prepare for survival. But I also know that the perverse and rebellious preteen that refused my father’s monthly swim clinics has become the grudging adult who knows a part of him was right.