I wonder if the reason I'm having trouble writing blog posts lately is that my two older sons have started setting an alarm so they can be downstairs playing Minecraft before I wake up. Even though, as the parent, I technically have the right to say "Begone, wretches!" and shoo them away so I can sit down with my coffee, I tend instead to wander off to the schoolroom for my iPad and settle down in the rocking chair with it. And although I can blog from my iPad, it's not quite as comfortable. On marginal mornings this might just be enough to destroy the muse.
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Jamie asked me yesterday if I would write about swim lessons, so I will.
I was made to have a few sessions of swimming lessons as a child, which left me able to mess around in a pool without drowning. And that was good enough for me until after I'd had two babies.
Back when my oldest was three and my second was a baby, we had a family membership at the YMCA. I was sporadically lifting weights and using an exercise bike, Mark was running, and we were putting the three-year-old in swimming lessons for the first time. As I brought him to the pool and picked him up afterward, I would watch swimmers swimming laps, literally something I had never done for fun or exercise.
Swimming seemed to me a magical, mythical exercise. It seems so difficult to arrange, all that changing and showering. And there is the mysterious lap etiquette by which three or more swimmers can share a lane without hating each other, despite not being able to rely on eye contact because of their otherworldly goggles. And I heard that it requires inhuman acts, like getting up early in the morning (isn't that what swimmers do? swim early in the morning?) and possibly going outside with your hair wet in January. Also, I didn't know any swimmers. I just saw them in the locker room, peeling off their caps and heading for the shower as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
I found myself, though, saying to people over and over again: "Oh, I lifted weights during my pregnancies… as long as I could… but I kind of wish I could swim better, so I could try swimming during my next one. I can't really swim though." I said it to H. often enough that one day she said to me, "Well, why don't you just take lessons then?"
And after a while I thought: Indeed — why not? We were going to the YMCA at least once a week anyway. I could have a swimming lesson and Mark could make sure the kids were settled (the one-year-old did not always like staying in the YMCA child care). It would be a real once-a-week appointment to get some exercise, if nothing else. I asked Mark if he could commit to it, and he happily agreed, and so I picked up a schedule for swimming lessons at the front desk.
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At the time, the YMCA had two kinds of adult swim lessons: the one for people who are uncomfortable or fearful in the water, today called Basic Water Adjustment, and the one for people who aren't afraid of the water and who have some ability to maneuver around in it. I was the latter kind, so that's what I signed up for. Today that class is called Stroke Development.
I dug in my out-of-season clothes and found a swimsuit. I didn't have goggles or a swim cap, so I didn't bring any. I changed self-consciously in the locker room — not because I was unused to changing, but because I was unused to putting on a swimsuit. I felt that everybody could tell that I was not really a swimmer. (Imposter syndrome had, apparently, followed me home from graduate school.)
There were two other adults in my first class, both women. The instructor was a woman who also taught children's lessons; I had seen her in the pool when I brought my four-year-old to the pool deck. The first thing she asked us to do was to swim from the middle of the pool (just before the bottom started sloping down towards the deep end) to the shallow-end wall so that she could see what skills we already had.
From that ten-yard swim, the instructor could learn that I remembered some of my childhood lessons: I could put my head in the water, and I had the basic idea of what a front crawl should look like.
But I learned something even MORE important: this department-store swimsuit was not going to cut it. I do not remember much from that first lesson except that I spent it alternately trying to follow the instructor's instructions and trying to stuff myself back into my suit.
(Perhaps the imposter syndrome was, er, truthful in this case.)
One week later I appeared at the swimming lesson with a brand new Speedo suit from the local sporting goods store. Also a pair of goggles, which I did not know how to adjust. Things went better after that.
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I took swim lessons from the YMCA for a year. By the end of that year I had a passable front crawl and backstroke. I had had three different instructors. They had all tried to teach me breaststroke, and I could do each of the pieces (pull, breathe, kick, glide) but I could not put them together more than three times in a row before getting mixed up and decaying into thrashing and sinking. I also gave up on learning flip-turns after it became clear that I always came off the wall pointed downwards, which hurts the ears in the deep end and the head in the shallow end.
But I was now able to swim laps, which I'd always wanted to do. It was time for me to start practicing and learning on my own.
…. and I think I'll write about that in another post.
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