Unforeseen benefits of parenthood

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I’m really bad at learning new things. It’s not that I don’t want to learn them, or that I can’t, but that I hate to be bad at things and I’m really self-conscious about being seen to be bad at things. This makes it quite difficult to start anything new unless it’s something I can do in private without a teacher! One thing I wanted to be able to do was to dive into water. I’ve never really had any proper swimming lessons, only a few basic guidelines as a group at primary school, but I have managed to learn to swim reasonably well. But diving is something I never learned. I have tried a couple of times but couldn’t ‘get’ it, and I felt silly and also a bit scared of injuring myself. If there were other people in the pool I felt sure they would be laughing, inwardly at least, at my pathetic attempts, and if I was the only person there I was sure the lifeguards would be sn1ggering too (sorry MyLot won't allow me to spell this word correctly) – after all they had no-one else to watch! So I haven’t tried again since my last attempt about 25 years ago. But then Big One mentioned that she would like to learn. The girls and I were away from home, in a place where there is a great swimming pool, deep enough to dive into and open at most reasonable times to anyone who wants to turn up – no need to sign up for a membership or download an app or negotiate some tortuous online booking system, just go there and pay the entry fee. Our normal local pools have all brought in some ridiculous system after Covid and as a result we haven’t actually managed to go swimming since last summer! We went on the Tuesday and everyone had a good time, so much so that we decided to go again next day, and the next... in the end we went five times over the week, and on the Saturday we got there when it opened for public swimming at 10 am and were the last people in the pool when the session ended at 1 pm. This intensive activity made such a difference. When you do something just once in a while, it isn’t easy to make progress, but when you do it every day the situation is quite different. Over the course of the week my swimming technique definitely improved. Little One has overcome her nerves about jumping in and is now in and out of the water like a jack-in-the-box, and has also learned to float, turn somersaults, duck-dive to retrieve hoops from the bottom of the pool and even swim on her back, which she couldn’t do before, as well as getting better and much more confident at swimming a length of the pool. Big One was pretty confident in the water anyway but she enjoyed honing her skills. And Big One and I have both learnt to dive! As I said I could never bring myself to do it before, I felt too stupid and self-conscious when younger, and as a middle-aged woman perched nervously on the edge of the pool I would have felt even more ridiculous so certainly never dared. But with the three of us all attempting to learn together it was a different matter. I looked up some step-by-step instructions then attempted to explain them – a classic case of the blind leading the blind – but then the simplest way to test whether the method worked and to show what I meant seemed to be to try it out myself. And anyway how could I expect Big One to do what I told her if I wasn’t prepared to do the same? So I had to pluck up my courage in order to test the method and demonstrate the results. Then we encouraged and critiqued each other, and it really worked! After four sessions we can now both successfully dive from a standing position and achieve a decent entry rather than a belly-flop or just a jump. Now we both feel very pleased with ourselves, and even Little One invented her own brand of ‘no-arm diving’ so she could still hold her nose and not get water up her nostrils! Maybe we should try to learn some other new skill together! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2022.