Call Me Charlie

Issue 276

You guys,

My toddlers love to swim in our pool. George will tell me to go farther away. Farther! So he can swim a great length to reach me. Layla will squirm in my arms and say, “Let me swim back!” Then kick away from me as she heads toward the big step for safety.

Unfortunately neither of them can actually swim.

George’s body will be fully submerged, just his face breaking through the surface of the water, and I see him struggling and reach for him. “No!” he screams, using what little of his breath he has to scold me for coming anyway near him. After Layla insists on kicking away from me to “swim back” she sinks like a rock. I’ve never seen anything like it. Where George is buoyant, Layla is a brick. Even when her body bobs back to the surface, I cannot convince her to lift her head out of the water to breathe.

I would be fine with their fearlessness if they didn’t swallow water. They go under for too long and come up and I stare at their faces. “Did you hold your breath?!” Yes. “Did you swallow water?!” No. And then they cough, that deep guttural cough which turns into a burp, and I have the truth.

“You guys are not practicing safety in the pool!” I bellow. “You have to hold your breath! You cannot swallow water! It’s DANGEROUS!”

I do not know just how dangerous it is, and because I don’t know I fear it means death. That later, when they sleep, they will essentially “drown” because there is too much water in their lungs. I think I heard that somewhere. Rather than look it up I just leave that story in my head and get louder and more panicked as the pool session goes on. So loud that the next time I see my next-door neighbor who moved in last year, who I barely know and rarely see, I wonder what she thinks of my two very different personas—front yard Charlie vs. back yard Charlie. In the front yard I smile and laugh at my kids. When they interrupt my conversation I bend down and say, “What, peanut?” In the backyard I am a monster. I have decided that our fence is a steel wall that extends to the clouds and blocks out the sound of my threats and demands.

My kids want to go in the pool every day, and every day I drag out the process of getting on bathing suits and sunscreen. Sam and the kids walk out the back door and I say, “I’ll just go get the towels,” so that my pool time with the kids will be slightly less than Sam’s. He can handle it. I am not cut out to teach my kids how to swim. But we tried private lessons with three different teachers. George screamed every time he was in the water with them. The first was an older woman, and as soon as he heard the gate on the side of the house creak open he screamed until she left. It was she who told us the evils of puddle jumpers—those floating devices kids wear to keep them above the surface of the water. Puddle jumpers would keep our kids from learning how to swim, she said. And so I never purchased them, even though I remember wearing swimmies as a kid and loving them. My mom would dip them in the water and then slide them onto my arms, one at a time, so they didn’t get stuck. And then when I was six years old I took swim lessons and I learned how to swim. No problem.

But I didn’t grow up with a pool in my backyard, unless you count the circular white baby pool with the pictures of wild animals on the outside of it. The water came up to my knees, or if I was lucky and my mom filled it up all the way, to my waist.

We have an in-ground pool without a cover, without a fence, so no puddle jumpers in this family. Instead I stand in the pool, watching my kids seemingly happily choke on water until I yell, “Out! Out of the pool! You have to take a break. You’re not LISTENING!”

Finally, one Saturday afternoon, I go in the pool with the kids. Sam always comes in with me—I tell him he has to, I can’t do it on my own—but today he has “a million things to do” in the yard, so I do it on my own.

There are specific rules when there is only one parent present, and I ask the kids to tell me what they are. “One a time!” Layla says, always the good student before we begin. Yes, one at a time. That means one kid can “swim” to me, and the other kid has to stay on the step and wait their turn. “What else?”

“You have to hold your breath,” George says. “And if you don’t follow the rules?” I ask like an annoying teacher.

“You have to take a break!” They jump up and down on the step, eager to get on with it.

George is first. He tells me to go farther away. I take an imperceptible step backwards. He takes an audible breath, closes his mouth and puffs out his cheeks, then pushes off from the step and plunges into the water. He is fully underneath, kicking and moving his arms, and reaches me, then lifts his head above the water, panting.

He wants to go back to the step now. He doesn’t have the step to push off of for momentum, so I move a little closer. He tells me to stop. He releases me and is underwater again. When he reaches the step his head shoots out of the water and he turns and beams at me.

“Bud,” I say, beaming back at him, shocked at my low levels of stress, unable to recognize this feeling in the pool. “You’re swimming. You’re like really swimming.”

Layla is next. Her deep breaths are loud, a clear indication that she is about to take off. She pushes off and sinks beneath the water. When her hands are near mine, I prepare to lift her face out of the water, but then, she does it.

“Good, Layla!”

“Let me swim back!” she says, and takes a sharp inhale.

“Hold on hold on hold on, we have to go a little closer,” I say.

I step closer to the step. She is like a fish and I can barely keep a hold of her. I release her, staying much closer to her than I do with George, prepared to lift her when it seems she’s been too long holding her breath. But she reaches the step, and her little head lifts out of the water on its own.

“Papa!” I yell. Sam is too far away, cleaning the Blackstone grill. The kids are bouncing on the step, looking from me to Sam, giggling. “Papa, come here! You have to see this!”

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Until next week,

Charlie