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I don’t swim. Many a brave soul has tried…and failed…to teach me. I took classes as a child. Yes, passing a swim class is necessary to graduate from high school (or at least it was when I attended back in the Dark Ages). But the requirement was merely that you passed the class, not that you had to swim. In fact, I was compared to a pontoon. It was that bad.
I married a man who does not swim. What are the odds of that? He hates it more than I do, if that is possible. He also tried to learn many, many times. We don’t really even like being on the water, much less in it (though I can tolerate it better than he).
Enter our biological son. Guess what? He screamed like a banshee the first time we stuck him in the baby bathtub! It didn’t get better from there. It was so torturous trying to bathe him, that his Dad finally took him in the shower with him and bathed him that way until he was a toddler. When we tried to switch him to a tub again, he, once again, screamed his head off! We finally got him accustomed to it, but it was work!
I had a co-worker, at the knitting shop where I taught, who was on a swim team and had a side job as a lifeguard. She loved my son and wanted to teach him to swim. Can you see where this is going? There are 93-year-olds that get in a pool faster than my child did. Step. Step. Pull back. Step. “No, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to!” Step. We eventually got him to the point where he would put his face in the water (with goggles on), but he refused to put his head under, thus we could not progress.
Enter his new brother and sister. Love the water. Love to swim. And they come into our family. The non-swimmers. In one conversation I had with their birth mom, she told us how much the kids loved swimming and asked if we swam. Silence. Crickets chirping.
Apparently, their birth mom swam like a fish. She even swam competitively. She was really hoping that the kids would continue their swimming because it was such a big part of her life. The pictures we get of the kids older brother, who lives with his maternal grandparents, are usually taken of him in the water. He’s often sporting a tan that would put George Hamilton to shame, indicating his many hours in the water and in the sun.
Well, summer is almost here. I signed the kids up for a boatload of summer enrichment classes. Including swimming. All three kids. Twelve weeks of swimming. Every summer weekday will find those kids in the water, if all goes according to plan. The two youngest should love it. The oldest will do it because he’s at that stage where his youngest brother simply cannot be allowed to best him at anything. I’m using that to my advantage!
I did all this because I want to preserve that tie between our children and their birth family. I want to tell their birth mom that they are continuing in the tradition. I want to send her pictures of the kids frolicking in the water. It’s important to me to honor such a simple longing in her voice.
Photo credit: Stock Xchng
