Swimming

[ladyofastolat]

I can't swim. The reason is quite obvious to me. Neither of my parents can swim, so I was never brought up to be happy in water. They didn't want me to be like them, so they did send me to swimming lessons when I was 8 or so, but then I'd already had 8 years listening to my Mum's terror of water. "You can never trust water!" is one of her most common sayings. She won't say, "Oh, look at that lovely babbling brook!" just, "Oh no! Step away! There might be a flash flood!"

I had a series of lessons, but in the end, the teacher threw me out of class. "I wash my hands of her," he said. "She can swim, but thinks she can't." Looking back at it, this seems quite shocking to me. I hope it wouldn't happen nowadays, and that children like me are given the help they need to build up their confidence, and aren't cast out in shame. He was on to something, though. In Primary School swimming lessons, my teacher noted that I could swim (well, sort of; it was a frenzied doggy paddle, since I didn't want to risk getting my face wet) when wearing flat armbands that I thought had air in them, but couldn't swim without them. She found this quite amusing, but didn't follow it up.

We had swimming lessons at secondary school (aargh, those memories of easing my painful way into that hideously cold outdoor pool!) and the teacher was similarly unsympathetic. (Not surprising, this. This was the same teacher who snapped to my Mum, "she's an intelligent girl; of course she can play hockey.") She once decreed that nobody could go to lunch until I'd swum a width, and made the whole impatient class watch as I flailed in my desperate doggy paddle, half my upper body out of the water. I did my width, but it certainly didn't fill me with any desire to ever get in a swimming pool ever again.

I remember being on the Arthurian North Wales pilgrimage in 1993. It was gorgeous weather, and we all went down to the beach at Harlech. Everyone else ran out on the long sands, into the shallowly sloping water, and out into the distance, to swim under the blue sky. My fellow non-swimmer and I stood watching them, and both said that this was the first time in years that we wished we could swim. I almost felt the same yesterday, when having lunch down on Ryde Sands, a similarly shallowly sloping beach.

Maybe I should try to learn to swim. Pellinor keeps offering to teach me, but the trouble is, when you can't swim, you're not used to wearing a swimming costume - I don't possess one - or appearing in public wearing one. Society decrees that as a woman, I'd have to shave myself in annoying places. I'd have to learn in a public place, where everyone else would see my desperate flailing. I shudder at the memory of the horrible cold of it, and the smell. There's just so many reasons (excuses?) not to. But maybe I should...

Comments

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

This was my problem with swimming. I never learned to swim properly, and refused to have anything to do with the compulsory swimming lessons when I was 10 for reasons I no longer recall but may have been to do with not wanting to be in a swimsuit around the boy in class who was pestering me. But I was able to swim the length of the pool using a strange self-taught form of doggy-paddle. However, I never really believed I could float, because when our father was teaching us to swim he started with floating, and I invariably sank like a stone unless I held my breath, which seemed to me to be defeating the purpose. Then I started getting ear infections and irritation from chlorine, outgrew the free pool membership, and when I tried swimming in a lake once age 17, sank like a stone and barely managed to claw my way back to the shore, and have been too nervous and full of body issues to try again.