2006 to 2007, Sunnyvale, California

By Arcadia Conrad

I taught my daughter to swim this year.

It’s the best thing I have ever done for her, besides giving birth to her and nursing her for as long as I did. When I watch her moving through the water like a strange fish, I hope that the joy and the freedom she has learned to feel can counterbalance the other things she’s learned this year.

This is the year my daughter, now 6, learned what the word “divorce” means. The year she learned to go back and forth between two new “houses” – my apartment and her father’s mobile home. The year she learned that not everybody gets an award at an award ceremony. The year we learned to fight about homework.

This is the year she graduated from a great preschool and started kindergarten in a school we deemed better than it turned out to be. The year she spent a lot of time in the office doing math problems. The year she frequently went to school with cocoa on her shirt. The year she struggled to make friends.

This is also the year I learned to negotiate with her father, the man I no longer live with after 16 years. The year it got worse before it got better.

I’m grateful that I taught my daughter to swim.

The first thing I did after leaving her father was check into a Doubletree, and the first thing the three of us did as an amicable yet awkward, fractured family was swim together in the hotel pool.

Surrounded by mirrored walls and tourists, we – or at least I – felt strangely free. It reminded me of so many milestones marked in the water: baptism, sweet 16, grandfather’s death, wedding night.

When we moved into the Doubletree, I saw the pool as a place to be that wasn’t in the apartment. It’s a nice pool; not creepy, the way some complex pools are. It’s up-to-date and well-maintained, and it doesn’t overlook a parking lot. It’s pleasant.

When we moved into this complex, my daughter was still wearing a life jacket in the pool. Clinging to me. Insisting on wearing a mask, flippers, and a life jacket. She carried a pool noodle every time we headed out. She tromped around the corner from our apartment to the locked gate like a miniature Jacques Cousteau, dressed for the part of swimmer. She then stiffened up in the water, grabbing at my hair and at the straps of my suit.

That was last summer, when we first moved here.

I knew only one thing to teach her: she could trust herself in the water because the water was a place people could be. Slowly, with her hanging on to me, I taught her to blow bubbles, float and kick. I lured her to me by swimming away from her and having her throw her little body toward me until I caught her in my arms. I made sure that she didn’t choke on the water. I held her when she did.

I eventually left my daughter alone to make mistakes, to feel her way around the pool, while I hung out and watched from a distance. I was ready to save her, but I also knew that it was OK for her to learn to save herself.

Eventually, she started to push off the edge, then jump. Now people notice that she swims well for her age. She’s pretty safe right now in the pool, and she’s pretty free.

Today, after our complex friends headed home to dinner, I looked at my daughter from across the pool. Catching her attention, I said, “One, two, three.”

We jumped in at the same time and swam toward each other in the cool blueness. I opened my eyes and saw her, a miniature version of me, smiling, open, free, and fearless.

As we broke to the surface, I was so grateful for her, for the healing, and for her childhood being restored in that water.

Arcadia Conrad is an arts educator, director, actress, writer, and proud mother of a wonderful daughter. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 | Email This Post

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