Lauren is taking swimming lessons this week - today is the last day, actually. She was INCREDIBLY nervous before they began - the kind of nervous that doesn't allow you to sleep, weighs on your shoulders, etc. Dreading it. However, getting that first day over with was good for her, and she was much less nervous about the next couple of lessons. Every morning she would say, "I am nervous and excited about swimming today." So I was feeling pretty good about the decision to have her take lessons. She is taking private lessons from someone locally, at their home pool. I don't have ambitions for her to be a phenomenal swimmer, I just want her to be able to not drown if she gets into water that is over her head. So, as I said, I was feeling pretty good about things. We had the library swimming party on Tuesday night (after 3 days of lessons) and she was going underwater to pick up toys and floating all over the pool using a noodle when it was over her head and having a good time with a friends - a significant change from typical pool experiences until now.
Then, yesterday, day 4 of lessons...
I've been sitting in my car during lessons for at least part of the time. I think that she is braver if I am not there for her to run to. But I don't want to drive all the way home, sit for a few minutes, and drive back, so I've been reading in the car. Occasionally, she has come to get me to have me watch her do something new. So yesterday she came to the car and I figured she had mastered something and wanted to show me. Nope. Her teacher was asking her to try sit-diving off the edge, and Lauren was freaking out about it. She wanted me to come into the pool area and stand near her, which was fine. But she sobbed the entire time, and had a really hard time calming down. It is so hard for me to watch her be so distressed - my instinct is to not make her do it. I don't know that sit-diving is critical to the swimming process - I can't do it - but I was trying not to undermine her teacher, so I sat near L on the side of the pool and talked her through doing it. Twice. She was such a tense little trooper - I could literally SEE in the set of her shoulders that she had realized that no one was going to save her and she was going to have to find a way to make it through this nightmare before we could go home. I felt awful.
So we finished up, went home, cleaned the house, had a friend over to play, then she went to the friend's house to play, went to Book Cooks class, and came home. She asked if we could cuddle together in the chair, and told me that she was dreading tomorrow, because she doesn't want to sit-dive any more. As it turns out, it was freaking her out that she had to do it in the deep end, where she can't touch, and can't swim on her own. She thought that if she failed at it the first time, she would drown. Which I think is a fairly valid concern when you are little.
So, I am going to ask her teacher to skip the sit-diving today, or at least work on it in the shallow end. I have the gut instinct that I am bailing her out of something that might be character building...but I just can't bear to put her through it when she won't be learning anything important from it.
You know that quote about how once you have kids, a part of your heart lives outside of your body? Case in point.
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