I have not yet enrolled our daughter in swim lessons. At five, she is comfortable in the water but can’t propel herself through it if she can’t touch the bottom.
A few weeks back we got out on the river. We buckled the kids into their life jackets and they played in the water while we rigged boats and ran the shuttle. I was pleased to see our daughter walking fearlessly into the slow waters of the Dolores. She bobbed in her lifejacket and squealed when the river guided her downstream. She grabbed for her friends’ hands to ‘save her’ while they all laughed at the game, not knowing they were practicing invaluable skills.
Later, some of us adults, still in lifejackets, jumped into the water from a two-foot cliff. We floated down a ways, and clambered back out. When Katie asked, “Who else wants to go for a swim?!” our five-year-old jumped up, and shouted, “I do!”
I was in the water already, and waited for her, surprised at her eagerness. I wanted her to have help getting down the little cliff we’d been jumping off of, but she quickly lowered herself into the water, sliding off the edge before anyone could get to her. I winced as she sunk below the surface. The water was cold and she would not have expected the dunking. Of course, her lifejacket bobbed her back up. Her screams preceded her mouth to the surface, and she kept screaming, all the way to me, and all the way onto the beach.
More impressive than the volume of her scream, however, was the beautifully-executed safe swimming position she adopted, or her body instinctively adopted, despite her tears and wails. She floated to me on her back, head and toes out of the water, arms stroking upstream, just as I’d taught her a few hours earlier. What none of us suspected was how that dunking would affect her later.
That evening, a little while after she got into the bath, she called for me to “Come look! Look what I can do!” with pride and accomplishment bouncing in her voice and eyes. She took a deep breath, put her face in the water, and braced herself against the tub sides with her hands. She pushed and held herself fully under water until she ran out of breath, and then bobbed up, water streaming over her open eyes and open smile. “I kissed the floor!” she laughed.
My mom learned how to “swim” when a relative tossed her into a lake at a young age. While neither she nor I would not have done that, our daughter did it for us, and taught herself to trust her body. It was suddenly clear to me that she will learn more from life than she ever will from me. It is my job to jump off my own cliffs, and to teach her the skills she needs to stay afloat when jumping off her own.