I have always loved to swim.
Some of my earliest memories are of swimming in the pool at my parents’ home in Rustenburg as a child. It felt like I was always in the water, polly-otter and all, even when it was cold outside in the way it can get on the highveld. If my memory is right, our pool had light brick around the edges and a thin wire fence.
The pool was a site of peace between my sister and I who fought often and over everything, including who would get the white tupperware bowl for their breakfast. Friends in the water, my sister and I would use a kicking board to pump the water up and down, ‘making waves’ or we’d dip under the surface playing ‘teddy bear teddy bear’, a sort of underwater broken telephone. We’d put our diaper babies on the step to watch their nappies change, or we’d float around on pool noodles soaking up the sun. We’d dip our heads into the water and flip our hair back on way up so that it framed our faces in a ‘granny perm.’
Our swimming pool was often full of other kids from mining families whose moms would sit and drink tea and talk with my mom while we worked out our energy. Most of our dads were nowhere to be found (probably not until very late at night after too many drinks at the mine pub), or when found were no fun (due to strange ideas about parental authority and discipline). But when we were in the pool we were free of all of that. The pool was a site of unfettered joy. The smell of sunscreen and chlorine is soothing to me, the way a hot bath or listening to classical music might be for others.
We had a few home videos when I was growing up, though I don’t remember us having a video camera. These videos are predominantly of my sister (who was much more of an entertainer than me, and still is). But there was one that I recall featured me. It was of a swimming gala where I was racing against other little children, (who seemed too small to be told to do anything competitive, but I digress). Anyway, you could hear my mom’s narration over the sound of splashing and screaming as she complained that another swimmer was getting in my way because of our convent school’s lack of swimming lane ropes. I doubt I could hear her at the time, but I always remember feeling loved when I watched the tape because she was so cross on my behalf.
At the local public pool where we’d sometimes go, the trees that lined the wall were so pungent that when I smell them now as an adult it’s like I’m transported back there, craving a frozen guava juice like I haven’t aged a day.
When my parents divorced and we moved to the coast both sets of grandparents had a swimming pool. My maternal grandparents would let us swim, my grandmother sitting on the side and smoking cigarette after cigarette, and my miserable grandfather (nickname: grumpy gramps) complaining when we’d drip water around the house. My paternal grandmother would watch me swim laps for ages in her pool and would always compliment me on how well I’d done when I got out. Regardless of their post swim etiquette, my grandparents spent many afternoons watching me swim, just being there.
At the coast I started a new school and swam in a new swimming team. I made a good friend, and she and I conceived that we would start a pool cleaning company so that we could spend our holidays in the water, getting tanned, and also earning money. At her house we’d spend hours by the pool listening to music, or reading, or making ‘cocktails’ out of orange juice and secrets of the valley juice. Her neighbours would always play Gypsy Kings really loud. Boys from our school would walk to her house from miles away and come and visit us, to eat two minute noodles and catch up on the latest school gossip while we dipped our feet in the pool.
When I started high school I was on the swimming team. We had a small school, and I don’t think I was a particularly stellar swimmer, but I enjoyed it and they needed someone who swam breastroke. I spent hours each week training in the pool with the rest of the team, and because I was a boarder, I was even able to make the early morning training sessions. When these happened I’d fall asleep in my after lunch classes, much to my teacher’s chagrin. I definitely wasn’t the fastest, but I remember that one session I popped my head up at the end of the lane and my swimming coach asked me what was up that day because I was slower than usual. I said ‘I’m tired.’ She said, ‘when you’re tired, focus on your form.’
At varsity I stopped swimming, and I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps it was because the varsity pool seemed crowded with cool kids and I felt self-conscious of my new adult body, and my new adult self. I did do a few early morning sessions with a friend, and once with a boyfriend though we both forgot our goggles and the chlorine was so strong that I couldn’t open my eyes on the walk home. It was six years where I did not get the peace and quiet of lengths with my head under water, where I didn’t spend a few hours a week focusing on my breath. I feel frustrated with myself just thinking about it.
Fast forward a few years and I started swimming again. I worked for a bunch of NGOs and my time was quite flexible so I’d swim at the local gym. Then when I was working at Parliament and the job was equal parts tedious and traumatic, I’d walk up to the gym pool at lunch and swim for thirty minutes, and return to work feeling a little more myself. When a serious relationship ended I swam through it, crying into my goggles, and counting my strokes. Being in the pool was moving meditation and I had a lot to meditate on.
A few years later, when I fell pregnant, I knew that I wanted to be back in the water. By this time I’d let my gym membership go, and instead had been swimming at the public pools dotted around the city. But since it was heading into winter and I knew I wanted to exercise throughout the pregnancy I signed up at the gym again. Over the course of my pregnancy I swam often, enjoying the feeling of weightlessness which was so different from the feeling of walking around with a giant belly. Towards the end I had to get out of the pool using the stairs, because I couldn’t lift my big bump over the ledge to jump out.
After I became a mom I yearned to get back in the pool. The humdrum and hecticness of the early days meant I couldn’t, and when it came time for the six week checkup I felt like I was asking my ob-gyn permission to get back to the laps because that felt like getting back to the me that I knew in some way. My first swim postpartum I felt like my entire body was disconnected. Gone was any semblance of core strength or body connection. I’d spent nine months stretching, and my c-section had not done any favours to my strength either. I felt as though I were a jellyfish, boneless and dangerous. It felt like I would never get back to inhabiting my body as a familiar place.
But I kept swimming. Through the sleep deprivation, and stress, and postpartum anxiety, and challenges of navigating balance in the world as a working mom. For the past eighteen months I have made space for myself to swim, at least once a week but usually twice. For thirty or so minutes it is just me and the water, me and my breath. I am alone. I am myself.
I am tired, but I know that all I have to do is just focus on my form.
Jen Thorpe 