This isn’t the first summer my kids have done swim lessons. It’s not even the second. But this summer, in ways, has been a pool turning point.
For one thing, my son swam by himself for the first time. By himself! First time! I have to emphasize that here because the other poolside moms sitting next to me when it happened were not adequately impressed, even after I pointed it out to them. Repeatedly.
If you’re a math person, right now you’re thinking: Wait. Is it possible for a child to be in swim lessons for years before learning to swim? Years, plural? And the answer is yes. You can start your baby in swim lessons when he’s 6 months old. It’s madness, and there are wait lists. The classes are composed exclusively of firstborns.
If you’re a baby person, right now you’re thinking, “Babies in swim lessons! How adorable and life-saving.” And absolutely it can be both of those things. Except, some babies really do not like baby swim lessons. They don’t like swim diapers. They don’t like being towel-dried, slicked down with lotion, re-diapered and wrestled back into regular clothes and their car carriers with wet hair—a full-production ballet requiring more time than the actual lesson.
Picture a screaming baby. Now picture 12 of them. Now plant that picture on the bleachers of an indoor pool with tiles and a high ceiling and little echo squiggles that can reach babies in outer space.
I don’t remember baby swim lessons from when I was a baby. I don’t think they were on tap in present form 30 years ago, and it’s just as well because most baby swim lessons are awful. Most of them are taught by bored youths looking embarrassed just to be there, much less sing the songs and do the Rubber Ducky dance.
You can tell the youths are not parents. Parents are so far past embarrassed. About 90 percent of what parents of small children do on a given day would be embarrassing—to anyone else. Today I held about 40 one-sided conversations with an infant and waited for a prescription stroller-pacing the wine aisle of Rite-Aid, longingly. Then I breastfed in the wine aisle.
You must dive in, youths. Go the distance with the ducky.
Now I have a 4-year-old, and experience. I’ve shopped around enough to weed out the bored teens. Our swim lessons this summer have toys. They have hula-hoop games. A heated pool. A head teacher named Miss Amber, who is the swim whisperer. These lessons are so good I lied about my 2-year-old’s age to get her into the lessons with the 4-year-old. They’re so good they knew I lied and they let her stay in anyway.
They’re good lessons. Objectively, they are good.
Our collective outlook on them could stand for improvement.
On any given day: My kids hate their goggles. They love their goggles. They want nothing to wear but their goggles … so that later they can burn them, or at least fling them from their faces in an act of defiance against the water spirits and the red rings left behind round their eyes by their goggles.
My daughter spends the lessons clinging to Miss Amber’s back like a barnacle. Every lesson. It’s an unspoken agreement between them. On some days, she’s Zen and half-sleeping back there. On others, she subjects Miss Amber’s left ear to frenzied screaming for the better part of 30 minutes. Recall here: I was not technically supposed to enroll my daughter in these lessons. Miss Amber, God bless her soul, doesn’t flinch.
For my son’s part, he recently got ear tubes, and with ear tubes you have to wear earplugs in the water, then a swim cap over the plugs. He’s not wild about any of this, and I can empathize. I hate swim caps because I had to wear one the summer I did swim team, which is seared in my memory like a permanent sunburn.
My swim team: If you hadn’t joined as an embryo, you were behind and never going to catch up. I did a full season at age 9 (geriatric) and can’t recall having made a single friend. I was too nervous to make friends, even from day one, when we were split into two groups, mornings and evenings. To my memory, the morning group had to be there at some ungodly hour, like 6 a.m., even though it was probably closer to 8. I was assigned evenings, but the initial impression stuck with me: That pool wasn’t heated, and these people weren’t screwing around.
The best memory I have of swim team is my parents sending me to one of my meets under the care of an uncle who subsequently dozed off, leaving me unsupervised and in a position—irresistible—to skip both of my meets. Also, I think there was a poster contest that day and I won a ribbon for one of my posters, which was my one positive takeaway from swim team.
I do like swimming. I like swimming the way people like meal prepping, which is to say, in theory. There are only so many hours in a day. But say there were 56 of them: One of mine would almost certainly be devoted to wishing I were in the water.
Of all the ways there are to swim, snorkeling’s my favorite. I can say that unhesitatingly, because it is the best. I’ve snorkeled two times in my life but that wouldn’t stop me from listing it as a personal interest on a resume, and feeling sufficiently honest about it: I’m always open to a future containing high snorkel potential.
In particular, I like snorkeling for its lack of competitive element, which seems to weasel its way into just about everything else. In my kids’ swim lessons, there are already parents who will have you know that, in their case, the group lessons only serve to supplement their daughter’s private swim lessons, where I imagine the teacher has her doing butterfly-stroke flip turns with her little 3-year-old shoulder blades. “She’s a fish,” her parents always like to point out. “Bound for swim team,” I always reply.
My parents forked out for private swim lessons for me, too—for us, a choice driven more by necessity than pride. For years, my father would drive me from our home in Manassas to the Chinn Center in Woodbridge for my private lessons with a woman who labored tirelessly, trying to teach me to dive. My dad still loves bringing this up and did so, unprompted, this past week: “You just couldn’t do it. Your feet always went first.”
But you know something? I didn’t mind. That lady was really nice. I don’t remember anything about having to wear caps. Dad always sprang for a treat from the vending machine afterwards. The whole thing had a real snorkel kind of vibe.
If you’re a counting person, right now you’re thinking, a third child was mentioned. Is the wine aisle-feeder in swim lessons, too? The answer there is no. For the time being, I’m sparing my third child the caps, the swim diapers, the politics. At 3 months, he’s not old enough, for one thing: I read somewhere that third-child swim lessons aren’t available until they’re at least in the fourth grade.
There’s no rush. We don’t own ocean-side real estate. Our friends aren’t fancy enough to have pools. I have zero swim-team expectations of anyone.
Although, if they ever come to me just begging to join, I always keep some great poster ideas in reserve.
(August 2018)