Swimming Saga

On not giving up

I grew up by the seaside but I didn’t learn to swim until I was fourteen years old.

That summer, my mother took out a leisure centre membership for me to give me something to do over the holidays. I did lengths of the “big pool” while she was in her hydrotherapy class (that was in the warm pool at the bottom of the slides). We went everyday. I built my confidence to leave the floats on the side and go up and down the lengths in a breast stroke that I neither knew nor cared if it was technically correct. Under the guidance of no one but the lifeguard, I kept going.

I didn’t learn to swim until I was fourteen. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t in pools or out in the sea in a dinghy by myself or with my three siblings throughout my childhood. We grew up by the sea, we were in the sea all the time in the Summer.

I was terrified of the sea, of drowning, and probably quite rightly so because I could not swim. Not at all.

I waded, I paddled, I walked, even, submersed in the water. I could flap my arms about and kick my legs while I floated on inflatables but once my feet couldn’t touch the bottom, I would panic. I didn’t know what to do.

I remember being taken to a party at an indoor waterpark in primary school. It was for one of my best friend’s birthdays, but I didn’t want to go. I especially didn’t want to go on the slides. When I finally plucked up the courage to try the one where you slide down in a rubber ring, it all went wrong. As I came to the end I flew out of the ring and went straight under the water. I didn’t know how to get out again. The birthday girl’s dad picked me up out of the water and I spent the rest of the party watching from the sides.

Now what is maybe surprising about my not knowing how to swim until I was fourteen is that I attended two terms of school swimming lessons by that point.

In primary school I remember standing in the water jumping up and down as I could feel the water closing in on my neck. As other children stood calmly, I wasn’t tall enough to do so. I remember watching other children swim from one end to the other perplexed why they had a skill I did not. With armbands on, I watched the others learn.

In secondary school the gap between the knowing and not knowing was wider. These girls were swimming at a level I would only compare to professionals I had seen on the TV. In fact, our swimming lessons were no longer based on learning to swim, but on survival and flair. We did both lessons where we were taught synchronised swimming and where we wore clothes and bobbed in the deep end, learning what to do if we were stranded at sea for a long period of time. These lessons assumed you could swim and I was the only one that couldn’t. I took part but I wore armbands for the entirety of the lessons. I was the only person who didn’t get any certificate of any survival skills or swimming artistry. In fact even at the end, after all those hours in the water, I still couldn’t swim.

I felt such shame wearing those armbands.

I wondered why we hadn’t learned to swim properly. As one of four children, swimming lessons at a young age were probably out of the question. My parents’ method was to just chuck us in - we’d learn eventually - but I hadn’t. I never took the armbands off. I never trusted I knew enough.

I was determined that any children I had wouldn’t suffer this same fate. That I would teach them properly. When I was pregnant, one of the things I declared I would like to do on Maternity Leave was to take the baby swimming. I wanted the baby to get used to the water. I wanted them to be like the other students in my class who sort of glided in and out of the water without flinching and dropping their feet to the ground like I did. I wanted them to have that confidence from the very beginning.

In fact I was so keen on my son being a water baby, I opted for a water birth based on the fact that I had read it would help the baby get used to water early on. Looking back this is clearly absolute bollocks, but at the time I thought it made perfect sense. Even if it wasn't a clear driver of a child’s love of water, it made sense that by keeping children away from pools and water at a young age, that would drive a fear of it. So I certainly wanted to avoid that.

But of course my first child would have been in the baby swimming class in the spring/summer of 2020 and we all know what happened then.

My going back to work then having another child meant that it is only now when my son is old enough to go in the water alone (with a swimming teacher) that we can consider lessons.

We have been going once a week for just over a month and he has been in the water twice. He hates it.

I watch the other children and I see what he has missed and how I failed in creating this water baby I had imagined.

I see him seeing what I saw all those years ago. Children as young as three face in the water, diving and splashing with a confidence I didn’t understand. Children that little bit older gliding under the surface and coming up to finish the length with elegant arms and long legs. As an adult who can barely do a few lengths in a wonky breast stroke, my head never going under the water, I am in awe.

I tell my son he could be like that too if he just got in and let the lady teach him. Instead, he sits on the side with his feet in the water.

I can imagine what he is thinking because I too have been sat where he is now. The fear of the water on his face, the tight pull of the silicone cap, the noise, the heat, the cold, the worry that those skills are unachievable and that he will never get there. The feeling that he is already a failure.

We are at a point now where the swimming teacher is losing patience. She teaches the six children individually as they all stand in the shallow end of the pool, marking off their accomplishments on her iPad.

My son refuses to get in when she asks him to. She coaxes him and splashes him, but she doesn’t try for long. She has five other children to teach, she tells me. After the last lesson she suggested 1-on-1 lessons. That they might build a bond, a level of trust, that might make him more complicit. Her colleague suggested he try the preschool class that is on an hour before - it’s more fun, she said. But neither is available or affordable.

Another mother stopped me as we were about to leave and told me she knew how I was feeling. That this had been her son too. As she hovered on the side by his class, she explained that he wanted to have her near still. She pointed to him proudly ahead of us in the water in a stage 3 hat. He had looked round to check she was there. He had made it through these lessons again and again; he was learning to swim. “Just keep going,” she said. She smiled and I felt an acknowledgement of how hard I was finding this. I hate watching him be the child I was knowing the shame that I felt.

When I was younger, they put armbands on me and they didn’t try to get them off. They let me float and participate in advanced swimming lessons with no intention of teaching me the one skill I needed above all else. I wasn’t at the same level as everyone else so they gave up on me.

The difference with my son is that I am not giving up on him.

I am going to keep trying, just like I did in the pool those Summer mornings when I was fourteen.

Are your kids learning to swim?
What was your experience like learning to swim?

Come join me in the comments, I would love to hear your stories. Until next time,

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