Stop Frightening Your Children With Your Old Fears

The first time I learned to swim, I was four. My mom and I were living with her boyfriend, in the very southest Texas, on the Big Bend river. We lived in a small house — a shack, really, and barely scraped by.

But it was beautiful there, no matter our poverty. The land was stunning, a scrub desert of rusts and oranges and dusty greens, cut through with unexpected ravines filled to the rim with lupins of such a rich blue-violet that they seemed to be glowing.

Anyway, swimming. There was a water tower on the property where we lived; it served only us (and the empty house my mom’s boyfriend was caretaker for). So, in the evenings, sometimes, they’d carry me up the metal ladder and we’d climb over the high metal edge and into the water. Above us, the sky was white with stars, and the water reflected them up into our faces.

I remember swimming across the water to my mother, the tower walls echoing with her laughter, the night sky shimmering overhead.

The second time I learned to swim, I was twelve or thirteen, I think. That memory is much hazier, and much less happy. It was a crowded public city pool, with screaming small children at the shallow end, and the class of anxious students at the deeper end. I was the oldest child in the group, by at least two years.

I was terrified of the water. I believed that if I got wet at all, I’d drown.

At six, I stayed with my grandparents for half a year. I don’t know what my mom was doing at the time, but I loved living with my grandparents. They lived in New York, and I enjoyed running up and down the hallway of their apartment building, and playing in the parks. My grandmother had the best candy (jelly fruit slices, which I love to this day).

But every night, as she stood me in the tub to bathe me, she told me that water wasn’t safe. That a person could drown in an inch of water in their own bathtub. (She neglected to tell me, an imaginative child, that the person would have needed to be unconscious and face down, and even then it would be difficult. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure she’d thought about the actual practicalities of this drowning method.)

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