Swimming Lessons
I’m about six years old and I am at swimming lessons. I have been here everyday for a week and I have yet to get in the water. I stand paralyzed on the pool deck staring in horror at the big body of water. The swim instructor, Valerie, is gently trying to persuade me for the umpteenth time to get into the water. My mother is in the stands yelling to Valerie, “throw her in or I’ll come down there and throw her in myself”.
The interesting thing about this is that my mom has a deathly fear of water. As she is fond of saying, she gets disoriented in the shower. So why would she want Valerie to chuck me into the drink so mercilessly? For precisely that reason. My mom was determined that I would not go through life with the same fear of water with which she lived.
I don’t really remember this incident. It is family folklore but apparently I did end up in the water (with “help”) and I have never looked back. Once I got in, I did not want to get out. I was a fish, just like my big sister, my big brother, and my dad. In fact, it is safe to say, that I have some serious water-loving genes. I swim regularly and the rumours persist around my transformation to Mermaid during full moons.
Are you confused? How do the scared kid and the Mermaid fit together and what, pray tell, is the point of this story?
My point is this: my natural inclination is to love water and feel perfectly safe in it. My learned behaviour was to fear water. My mom never told me to fear water, I just felt her fear and adopted it as my own. That’s what kids do. They feel our responses to things and make unconscious interpretations based on those feelings. I felt my mom’s fear of water and decided at an unconscious level, that water was scary.
Thankfully, my mom did not allow me to stand pat on my erroneous interpretation about the scariness of water. She made sure I got past my adopted feelings and found my truth.
I think it is really important for all adults to be aware of this phenomenon. We all have our fears and insecurities. We may be very good at hiding them from other adults because adults can be fooled by camouflage. Kids can’t. They’re not paying any attention to our carefully constructed “presentation”. They are little sponges, hanging around, soaking up our true feelings and making sense of that information as best they can.
I want to be more aware of the signals I send to kids. If I think some hang up of mine is affecting someone in my area of influence, I have to be able to talk about it. I care enough about the kids in my life, to push myself out of my comfort zone and talk about my fears. In fact, being willing to do that, has been the catalyst for actually looking at and addressing some of those fears.
And I continue to examine my fears to make sure they are my own, not someone else’s that I adopted long ago and carried with me into adulthood.
Challenge for the day: pick a swimming pool you’ve been avoiding and jump in. You never know . . . maybe you’re a mermaid too!
Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."
