My inner monologue last Sunday while sporting swimwear during a month when it usually snows.
Ninety degrees on a Sunday afternoon.
Lake water, breathtakingly cold.
Trees not fully leafed out.
Four pontoons parked by the not-yet-roped-off swimming area spilled forth dogs and people amazed at the sunshine.
Twenty children balanced on life rafts and screamed with laughter.
Teenaged boys shook off water like puppies.
The radio commercials talked about spring coming soon.
I think it's already here.
"You know," he said, "if you put up your finger, sometimes they'll land on you. That way they have a place to rest all the way out here."
We bobbed in our life jackets in the middle of the lake, the boat floating nearby. A dragonfly hovered around the little angel's head as she stared at it, fascinated, then looked to the horizon near where the baby eagles made their nest as if measuring the distance in dragonfly wingbeats. She held her finger up a little higher.
"I think I just saw lightning," his wife said. "We'd better go in."
The clouds held pink as the sun sank to the horizon. We swam toward the boat, slowly, regretfully.
As she paddled, the little angel held one pointer finger up to the sky. Just in case.
Do you love character-driven novels? I loved the older heroine in The Beach Trees and how her story influenced the main storyline from a character development point of view. My review is up at BlogHer Book Club today.
I am preparing for a last-minute business trip (read: what, my toenails look like I live in a cave and I'm not sure what I have clean to wear), but today when I picked up the little angel from summer camp, she said:
"Mommy, I have a green band! I can swim in the big kid's pool!"
And we did a little happy dance around the parking lot.
And I told her over and over again how proud I am of her.
Then we went to swim lessons and made a bunch of extra sandwiches for lunches and picnic dinners at swim lessons while I am gone, and she helped me pack, and the Celebriducks had a show in the bathtub in which the Celebriduck Dorothy may or may not have sung an extremely off-key version of Over the Rainbow.
That's the best way I know to celebrate. Hope you're having a good week. Posting this week will most likely be bizarre as I attempt to navigate the NYC subway system on less sleep than I would prefer. This month is totally bizarre for me.
Also -- I saw all your comments about ladybugs. I went to Ace Hardware after swim lessons, but alas, no ladybugs. WE WILL PREVAIL. The search continues.
Last week, the little angel started crying at bedtime. Howling, actually. Because she was the only kid in her summer camp class that failed the swimming test.
Swimming has been a challenge for her.
My heart broke, again, as it does every time. I'm not a great swimmer myself, and I know that feeling of being the one who can't seem to get it in the pool. I manage to get across the pool and back, but part of my paranoia about her in the water stems from my marked inability to save anyone from drowning, almost not even myself.
The next morning, I talked to the swim instructor at camp. I asked what we could work on with her. She started to tell me, and I started to seize up, because I knew I would be useless at teaching my daughter what to do -- I hardly know how to do it myself. I think the instructor thought I was trying to convince her to let the little angel go with her friends even if she wasn't ready, but I wasn't. I was asking for help.
She offered to give the little angel one emergency lesson before she goes out of town on vacation for three weeks and before the little angel's two-week intensive swim lessons start in mid-July. I thanked her, moved some stuff in my schedule around, and girded my loins for the water. The lesson is in a few hours.
This morning, the little angel tried to talk her way out of the lesson. She said she didn't care if she was the only kid with the babies in the shallow end. She said she hated swimming lessons. But I know she was upset this weekend when I made her wear her life jacket in the deep end when none of her friends had to. And she commented at least eight times how happy she was that everyone was wearing their life jackets when our neighbors took us out for a surprise boat ride last night.
"It's done," I told her as we got in the car this morning. "You have to. There are a few things in our family that are nonnegotiable, and wearing your seatbelt and learning to swim are two of them."
After I dropped her off, I started thinking of other things that are nonnegotiable in my brand of parenting: reading/writing/arithmetic, learning to drive, learning about credit, basic first aid. Then there's a deep gray chasm filled with things I want her to master: how to cook, how to sew on buttons, how to iron and do laundry, how to break down sales pitches, how to blog -- but these things don't fall into the life-and-death arena for me.
Swimming does.
She'll hate it, I'll hate it -- but this? This could be the year. She is so close. She can dive for rings and dog paddle -- she just can't do the crawl across the pool yet.
Hoping for salvation this summer.
