Naomi has joined the Surf Club, which is a
Surf Club is serious. There is a Thursday evening practice in a local pool for strength and water skills, and there is a hulking two-hour practice on Sunday afternoons on the beach for lifesaving skills, strength training, and ocean skills. As I watch Naomi navigate this world—where all of her friends have been involved for years longer than she has—I have ample time to watch my own reactions as a parent and try to figure out what messages I want to give her.
Take last Thursday night. Naomi needed to pass a 200m swim test at the pool. She had come for a practice earlier in the week and had been able to swim the eight lengths in the appointed time. No worries. But she had been working herself into a froth for days about it, nervously wondering what would happen if she failed the test. By the time we got to the pool, she was a shaking mess. She went in the pool to warm up, got out because it was too cold, sat shivering on the side, non-commutative and freaking out, turtled in silence except for the occasional rude outburst. I coaxed and wheedled and got her back into the water, got her back to start the test. She was panicking and stressed and she wante
d me by her side, as is often true in an unfamiliar place. Would I walk all the way down the side of the pool with her? Yes. So I walked a length of the pool by her side, marvelling at how quick and graceful her stroke was. And then she stopped after a single length, not even winded. I urged her to go on, but she was done, seven lengths too soon. I tried coaxing and wheedling some more, but she and I had both reached the end of some invisible rope. She held on to the side of the pool and wept. The swim instructors huddled around her, huddled around me, gently offered that maybe I shouldn’t come to the practice next week, that I was making her nervous. They suggested—with a gentle and unblaming matter-of-factness—that I wait in the car. I felt a rage inside me—not at them, but at little weeping Naomi. She had QUIT!
I walked away as they surrounded her and coaxed her into the pool with the others in her age group to do the regular practice of the rest of the group. I went outside and sat on a bench under the tall deck of the bar upstairs. I looked at the sea and wondered what I was about Naomi’s giving up that made me so angry. Giving up is a major button for me. As a soccer coach for a middle school girl’s team fifteen years ago, I was totally unphased by the loss of every single game (I was not a good soccer coach, apparently). If a girl was doing practice laps and slowed down to a crawl, no worries at all. But if a girl was doing practice laps and stopped, I got really upset. The sentence “I can’t” sets me off.
Michael came out and sat next to me on the bench and we watched the sea together. He gently asked questions about how I was making sense of this, about how she had been making sense of it. He suggested that perhaps the best way to face her was with compassion and curiosity. I laughed—I had spent that day leading a workshop about going towards people with compassion and curiosity. And now here I was actually faced with a situation which pushed my buttons and I was, I decided “pissy and punishing.” I sat on the bench and wondered about whether I should give up my regular consulting gigs and come up with a curriculum to teach people to be more pissy and punishing. I amused myself for a few minutes wondering what role plays I might suggest, what structures I might offer that would help people hold on to that pissy and punishing mindset. I wondered what, evolutionarily, made it easier for us to hold on to a pissy and punishing place than a compassionate and curious one.
Naomi was dramatically upset for the rest of the night. She rushed into her room from the car, slammed the door, and wept at the top of her lungs. Perhaps fearing this would not have the volume she wanted, she opened the door to her room and cried at the top of her lungs that way. I was unmoved by the drama. She came out to tell me she was quitting Surf Club, that she’d never go back. I told her—at first gently and then more firmly—that quitting was not an option this year. Back into her room, more tears. It wasn’t until the weekend that we could talk about it and work out our next steps—she would try again on Thursday, and she’d try again until she passed.
And then Sunday dawned grey and cold and raining. This is her on-the-beach day. I finished fixing the house for the open house and walked down the beach to find her in a too-small wetsuit (and I thought she had to be wrong about that—it was so big on her last year), jumping up and down to keep herself warm and hurling herself into the sand as directed—and then into the sea. If she had quit then, if she had said “I can’t” when faced with the raging sea (which frightens her on a sunny day), if she had complained about the sand chafing inside her wetsuit—all of these things I was prepared to forgive. Unlike t
he mysterious behaviour at the pool, where the quitting was bizarre, this quitting here would be justified. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I was prepared for it, and I faced the idea with equanimity and compassion.
I didn’t need any of those things, though—just a warmer hat and maybe a pair of gloves. Naomi dove in the sand, leapt through the waves, jogged along the shore. She did it without complaint or fretting. And I discovered—as I have rererediscovered in so many situations—that we can never understand another person’s demons, never really make sense of what drives or moves or frightens those we love the most. Why would I be less curious and compassionate about one potentially-frightening scene rather than another? Her quitting in a setting I didn’t think was scary or uncomfortable (like the pool) troubled me, but her quitting in a setting I’m not sure I could handle (like this beach on this windy cold day) seemed reasonable. On one hand this makes sense—we understand the things we understand, after all. On the other hand, it’s absurd for me to react differently to the same outcome in different situations. It isn’t me, after all, who determines what’s overwhelming or scary to Naomi. I’ve learnt that lesson many times over the years of dealing with scary noises and monsters under the bed and (this one still drives me crazy) her ear-piercing screams upon the discovery of a bug. I am compassionate in the face of fears and worries I share, and I am irritated—and sometimes even angry—in the face of fears I do not. How many other people’s fears and demons to I diminish because I do not share them? How many times do I privilege my own experience? Thousands? Millions? Billions of times?
Tonight, one week from the huddled Naomi terrified and quitting at the pool, she was back again. This time we talked about it, planned the whole thing out. We decided this was just a “dress rehearsal,” that it wasn’t the real thing. We decided that Michael and I wouldn’t watch her, but would be close by (nowhere that required us to move the car, was the bargain). I watched her (from a perch where she couldn’t see me) sitting with her friends, waiting her turn for the test. She was alternately laughing and joking and urging them on and chewing on her nails and looking terrified. When it came time to do the test, she stopped after two laps, but then began again a few minutes later, slowly backstroking her way down the lanes, zig-zagging across the pool. She was off time by 50 seconds, but still emerged strong and engaged. She hadn’t been really trying, she told us, which made it all feel so much better. Now she knew how much time it took when she didn’t even try and she was convinced she could do it next week—certainly those 50 seconds would be easy to recover if she tried a little. I do not yet understand this logic either, but the outcome of this is clear. For this week, at least, the demons are gone, and she’s just a little girl swimming and laughing with her friends. And I am a mother who is incrementally wiser, and who can see the bravery in the smallest acts and courage in the arc of an arm slicing through water.
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