swimming
It is a summer day in the late 90s. I look up at the surface of the pool from its bottom. The afternoon sun glitters in fragments. I feel lighter in the water, like the chlorinated blue is holding me up from every angle, touching all my skin at once. I come up for air and swim to the edge of the shallow end.
I’ve been swimming for hours. There are only a few other kids in the pool. One is my brother, six years old to my nine, and none seem too interested in my solo water wandering. The sun has made its way from the street side of the pool to the alley side and I am getting tired. I prop my elbows on the curved edge to poke my head above the water and spot the lounge chair with my towel. The one next to it—along with the rainbow mesh bag and tumbler of ice and Dr. Pepper—is gone.
A panic creeps up my throat like I swallowed pool water through my belly button.
I spin around in the water looking for my mom. I need her to take me home and fix me something to eat. I need her to put drops in my ears so the pool water will run out. I need her in view before the panic turns into tears. The water around me follows my movement lazily as my eyes make frantic sweeps of the area.
I spot her tanned body laid out on the other side of the pool. Though she is too far away for me to smell her tanning spray, the air around me instantly takes on a coconut oil scent and I can breathe again. I duck my head under water and swim, swim, swim until I feel the other edge of the pool with my wrinkled fingertips.
I climb out and lie next to her on the hot concrete to dry without my towel. I want her to comb my hair with the watered down detangler spray, to call my brother to go home, to wrap me up in her sun-baked arms.
But I don’t ask for these things. It is enough to be next to her.
When I’m around my mom now, I always feel like I am swimming. There’s a feeling of effort, of movement, of resistance. Swimming is both pushing off of the water and pushing through it.
There’s a sense of having left the shallow end, my childhood, and an idea that if I can keep swimming I’ll make it to the other side, to adulthood, where my mom has situated herself.
The pool in my mind is the distance between boundaries: the space between child and adult, between self and other, between mother and daughter. To understand the difference between the two or to learn what one’s self is in relation to another or to move from child to adult requires a coordinated effort of kicks and held breaths.
I want desperately to reach this other side, to get to be an adult with my mother, to enjoy her without wanting to travel back to the warm concrete to ask her to hold me.
But for now, I am swimming.
