My son takes swimming lessons, which is just another thing to remember in a long list of things that go with children. Call out spelling words, pack lunches, get them to school, hug them and tell them you love them, but good gracious can’t you just get out of the car.
Usually I drop off my son and take work calls, in the place that says “this is not a drop-off location.” He runs inside with his towel and swim trunks and a half hour later he comes back to the car, dripping and starving. One time I simply read a book. I mean, it’s his lesson, not mine. Then we got an after-school nanny, and she took him so I could work a little longer.
But this particular day, I went with him. I decided I’d take a day off work, so I walked inside holding his little hand that was formed almost nine years ago.
“You’re going to watch?” he asked. He looked up at me, those brown eyes with long lashes that will always and forever will make me melt.
“Why not?” I said. There was a viewing room where parents could sit, although I wondered why any parent would honestly be that interested.
But the room was packed with parents, staring at their children swim, holding their breath for their kids advancing through the swimming levels, taking out their cameras and capturing all the various moments. One mother was holding a pink polka-dot bag that held towels and goggles with what I can only presume was her daughter’s initials stitched on it. This was serious business.
I saw my son in the window, at the very end of the pool, trying to pass Level Number Nine. He swam freestyle and breast stroke and nodded his head to the instructor. The mother in front of me in this little room, the one with the pink bag, explained that she had to miss last week and failed to see her daughter move up to level five, but that the little girl’s grandparents had managed to come and filmed the whole thing.
Oh, honey you need to get over it, I thought. There are so many little things. You can’t see them all.
“This is my first time ever,” is what I actually said.
She couldn’t tell if I was kidding or serious, because what kind of mother wouldn’t come to her son’s swimming lessons, and she just half-chuckled but also looked concerned, like my child was neglected or maybe I was someone who liked English peas or liver with onions or maybe I wasn’t the mother at all but just some neighbor due to the mother being in the hospital with cancer.
I didn’t care. I watched my son’s legs kick like a strong frog through the water and his head pop up for air. And every time he turned around and looked at the window at me, I waved, or gave a thumbs up, or simply smiled. Once I stood up and danced a little, which made him shake his head in embarrassment and turn back around. I didn’t look at my phone, and for thirty glorious minutes I watched my son show me what he’d learned, with so many looks and thumbs up and smiles that I lost count.
I think it was possibly the most delightful half hour I’ve ever spent, so perfectly content and absorbed in simply watching my son swim across the pool, this way and back, over and over again.
“That’s your boy, there at the end?” the woman said.
“It is,” I said. I was so proud, so full of syrupy love.
He passed Level Number Nine. I let him buy bouncy balls from the machine at the swim store, which I never do. I let him walk around and show me the large pool used for swim team. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave and leisurely waited while he changed and we went to the car.
“I love you,” I said. We buckled our seat belts and the dinging stopped. I turned around to him in the back seat. “I love you and your sister more than I thought I can ever possibly love another human being. And it never stops being true.”
“You always say dumb stuff like that, mom,” he says. “Do you have a granola bar? I’m starving.”
Sometimes you won’t be there. Sometimes you miss out on the transitions or levels or progression through their tiny lives. But sometimes you catch one. A fleeting glimpse of them as they move through life, and you hold it like a gemstone. This was such a moment, and I lived fully inside of it.
My son takes swimming lessons, which is just another wonderful thing in a long list of things that go with children. And I didn’t miss this one. I close my eyes and envision his strokes, his head, his legs through the water. But mostly I remember him turning around and looking for me, waiting for my smile, to feel seen.
