Swimming Lessons

How to Keep Your Head Above Water

My mother’s childhood ended when she was eight years old. Her mother was institutionalized that year at the Yankton State Hospital for the Insane. It’s a story I’ve written extensively about elsewhere, so I won’t go into the details here, but let me just say that the 1930s were a rotten time to be a mother of six with postpartum depression and an alcoholic husband.

My mother never learned how to ride a bike or swim as a child. When she was an adult, with four children of her own, she decided it wasn’t too late. She taught herself to ride a bike by borrowing my 1968 Schwinn cruiser and practicing in my elementary school parking lot after dark. The next winter, she signed up for swimming lessons at the junior high school pool down the street. At the age of forty, she snapped on her rubber swim cap, pulled her Lycra one-piece up by the straps, and learned how to float on her back, swim the front crawl, and jump off the high dive.

The summer my sister and I were six and seven years old, my mother signed us up for swimming lessons at Bush Lake near our home. We took the bus every morning at 8am from the school parking lot five miles west to the lake. It was chilly on those June mornings, and the sunfish nipped at our legs at the small docks where we learned to hold our breath and blow bubbles into the algae-laden water. In the days that followed, we learned the basic strokes, swimming into deeper water as we mastered them.

To pass Beginners, you had swim out to the Big Dock, a very intimidating floating wooden dock anchored fifty feet from shore. It looked very, very far away and I was sure that if there were sunfish at the little docks, there were massive northern pikes under the dark water of the Big Dock. I chickened out each time we were tested.

After two summers of multiple sessions at the lake, my mother finally registered us for lessons at the junior high pool. On testing day, my legs shook. Our instructor explained that in order to pass, we must jump off the diving board and swim the crawl the length of the pool. With some trepidation, I jumped off the board into the water, sputtered to the surface, and looked down the length of the pool at the turquoise blue water. And swam.