Silence at the Swimming Pool
My daughter’s swimming lesson has changed recently. As she’s now begun stroke introduction and graduated to the big pool she is starting at 4.00pm. The pool is quiet and mostly empty at this time in marked contrast to the later slot we used to take when lessons galore were in full force and splashing and shrieking were the order of the day. The somnolent quiet and rippling blue water have a strangely atmospheric effect and I’ve been finding that it’s surprisingly easy to fall through time and into the aquamarine memories of yesteryear.
A very talented friend of mine who has a lovely blog The Lens I See Through wrote a piece this week about finding conducive conditions for writing and so I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this idea. Sitting at the swimming pool it occurred to me that this is one of my favorite places to write and simply to sit and hear my thoughts. Another cherished time for musing is walking the dog late in the evening, but I digress! Perhaps it is simply the movement of the water, perhaps it is the omnipresent blue, my favourite colour, or perhaps it’s simply the light. For, whatever the magic ingredient or combination, I find that I can work and think here.
When I’m sitting, thinking in a cocoon of silence, memories of my children dance before me like mischievous sprites. I often reach out wistfully to touch my son, back in the days when he was a wee red headed lad full of fire and fun. I was a relatively youthful first time mother. At 26 I was the youngest in our antenatal class by some distance. First time motherhood is both amazingly beautiful and difficult for anyone I think. The learning curve is so steep in those early days which are shot through with moments of wonder and sheer terror at one’s own lack of skill and the enormity of the responsibility one now carries. If you’re lucky, there are moments of sleep too! I have the clearest memory of walking in Hyde Park when our son was three weeks old feelingly completely conflicted. Pushing Dom whom I loved totally, in the buggy I suddenly realized I was walking my route to work across the park. Suddenly I was filled with a powerful longing for that magical time of morning break in the Francis Holland School staffroom and the manna of coffee which we would drink as if our lives depended upon it. I reflect now, some fourteen years later, just how helpful it was for both of us that I returned to work when he was six months old. Nevertheless there is nothing gained without loss. For me, with hindsight, it is the loss of the ‘firsts’ that parents talk about or record in baby books that I feel most keenly. Our son took his first steps with his beloved carer at nursery for example.
With our daughter, ten years later, and at a very different time and place in our lives I saw the motherhood role from the opposite perspective and gazed through the lens of the mum who stays at home. This time around I experienced as many of the firsts as there were to experience, including the heaven that childbirth can be in a first rate American hospital with a correctly administered epidural. In some other respects I did also realise just how fortunate we had been the first time around! Potty training anyone?! I could write for hours about the experience of beginning the cycle of parenting afresh a decade on and the utterly unforeseen challenges of such an age gap as well as the moments where my husband and I looked at each other happily as if to say, this couldn’t have gone any better if we’d planned it like this from the beginning. One of my strongest memories from the time of our daughter’s birth is saying goodbye to our son, still my baby, the night that we went to hospital for the induction and then hugging him when he came to meet his sister for the first time the next day. I was overwhelmed by how huge and grown up he now seemed in contrast to all Clio’s newborn fragility. Baby no longer. I felt the tiniest pinch of loss.
The clock strikes 4.30pm and the lesson is over. As I surface somewhat dazed from memory’s aquamarine depths, it occurs to me that my daughter is very near the age my son was when we moved to America and I bowed out of the theatre of full time formal travail. She has come to the same point on the road that he stood then; albeit by a different route. I reflect, as I shake out her pink hooded swim towel and cuddle her dry, that there really is no right way to ‘do motherhood’ except with a gentle yet firm hand and a heart that strives to be as limitlessly open and light as the summer sky.
