Effortless

Tags

chronic tiredness, energy, family, swimming

I haven’t been posting much, because the whole “I’m tired” thing gets… tiring. It’s been weeks (months?) since I felt the slightest burst of energy.

I start out exhausted in the morning, and I remain exhausted throughout the day, to the point where it seems like an unreasonable effort to have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

So you’d think that when I tell people that I won’t get tired doing something, they could take that to the bank.

But during my family reunion, when I announced that I wanted to swim across the lake, my family thought it sounded crazy.

Now, I have always wanted to swim across a lake. My uncle had a cottage, and so did a friend of mine in High School, both on lakes. I’d be swimming or lounging on the dock, and I’d look at the line of trees on the other side and think “I can swim that far.”

But people always said, “Oh, it’s farther than it looks. What if you get tired?”

What if I get tired – what a silly question. Swimming has always been effortless for me. Oh, sure, if I swim fast enough I’ll get tired, just as you might get tired from jogging. But then I can just slow down and stop and take a rest. No different from walking, really, except that I am weightless. No sore feet, no hills to climb.

But I never did it, because other people told me I couldn’t. Or shouldn’t.

Now here I was staying on the edge of a lake for a week and the other side was there, taunting me. My family would get in canoes and kayaks and skirt around the lake. They would go on a hike and walk all the way around the lake. So why couldn’t I swim across it? I had always wanted to see if I could swim as far as I thought I could.

I am 31 years old. How long do we have to be adults before we can start making our own choices? Who could tell a thirty-something, married adult “no”?

Oh right, the people who loved me.

“What if you get tired?”

“Then I’ll STOP and REST. It’s called FLOATING. It’s EFFORTLESS. I’ve snorkled for hours without getting tired. How is this any different?”

“What if you get a cramp?”

“I have never, in 30 years of swimming, gotten a CRAMP. And if I did, I would FLOAT until it felt BETTER.”

Only PH and one of my favourite cousins thought it sounded reasonable and doable.

Finally, I compromised with my parents. They agreed to try not to worry too much IF I was accompanied by PH in a CANOE, with two life vests on board.

We told them to expect us back in three hours. Really, we estimated that I could probably do it in two.

And so we struck out. PH didn’t hover by me, waiting for me to sink. He knew he was there solely for my parents’ peace of mind. He was a dot in the distance at times.

I was fine. I was swimming, and for the first time in my life, I was swimming without any obstacles blocking me. No imaginary perimeter of open ocean to avoid. No end of the pool. Just a distant shoreline ahead of me that looked just as far away after swimming for a good 20 minutes.

I didn’t get tired. A couple of times, as a joke, I stopped swimming entirely. No leg movements. No arm movements. I just bobbed there, head and neck well above the water, while PH and I smirked at each other.

I aimed for the cliff on the far side. The water there was creepily deep and cold and clear, but it was easy to climb out on the rock, and nice and safe to jump off and back into the lake.

I worked harder on the swim back. Neither of us had a watch so we weren’t sure how much time we had taken, and I was in a rush so my parents wouldn’t worry. The wind kept blowing waves that pushed me off course.

I still didn’t get tired, and we arrived back at the beach only an hour and a half after our time of departure.

My Dad was standing on the shore waiting for me to come in. He told me later that watching me swim in he had suffered frequent waves of worry because I kept “disappearing” under the water and then resurfacing.

Owl broke away from the shore to join me in the water when I got into the shallows, and we spent another half hour splashing happily.

Meanwhile PH dragged the canoe onto the shore. “She went down three times. I had to keep fishing her out,” he told my mother, who actually believed him for a minute (to his delighted amusement).

He told me later that I had looked more myself on that swim than I had for a very long time.

I think that’s the last time I didn’t feel tired.

Kick, Babby, Kick!

Tags

babies, swimming, swimming with baby

Well, we DID go swimming and Babby liked it! The water was warm enough, although the air was not. You’d think indoor heated pool = warm inside, but it turns out the pool is heated but the building not so much. Or at least, not well enough. So while swimming was fine, his upper arms began to turn blue (meanwhile his body and legs IN THE WATER were pink *eyeroll*) so we took him out and home, which involved a lot of frantic wrapping in towels and unhappy Babby.

But swimming was great. He kicked and splashed and had a great old time. I didn’t try dipping his head under the water, mostly because with the air so cold, I didn’t want his head to get wet! Maybe next time.

Pictures!

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Now I’m trying to figure out how to get my hands on an inexpensive way of taking underwater pictures/video. A casing for my video camera is prohibitively expensive, but I think a casing for the still camera might be cheaper…

Babby Hates His Bath. What Did I Do?

Tags

babies, bathtime, swimming, water

So, before I was even pregnant I told you all that I wanted to start swimming with my baby as early as possible.

That’s still the case. I was waiting because our pool is heated, but still cool, and I wanted to make sure he could maintain his own body temperature first. My other option was to enrol him in a class at a public pool, which would probably have a specially heated baby pool. The youngest class offered around here, though, starts at four months of age.

So a couple of weeks ago I picked up a Swimmi bathing suit, but before I could enrol Babby in anything, he took a sudden dislike for his bath.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!

I test the water before I put him in it. We haven’t scalded him. He hasn’t had any scary experiences as far as I can tell,  but suddenly he hates the bath.

He used to love the bath. When he was just a newborn, we put him in his bathtub while he was shrieking his head off and he settled down within seconds, moving his arms and legs dreamily through the water.

Babby's first bath at home (complete with Modesty Duckies)

His Spa Baby tub, which a friend of us gave me, supposedly imitates the confined environment of the womb. I don’t know if it does, but it takes up less space than your standard bath and Babby certainly found it soothing. For months we’ve put him in his baby bath every two or three days and he has splashed about, played with his toes, and attempted to drink the bath water. We have even resorted to it as a “pause” button when he was having one of his rage fits, because as long as his body was submerged, he’d be calm.

Babby at two months old - still calming down as soon as he hit the water

Now, all of a sudden, he screams and his fists shake with rage and he refuses to sit down in it. When Babby is mad, he gets stiff as a board and stands straight up. Last night we bathed him standing upright with his feet in the water while he screamed like an air raid siren, so it was more of a sponge bath than anything else.

We tried the big tub, in case the little tub was just getting too small and cramped (although it’s supposed to be fine for 12 months and up). He wasn’t too bad if he could nurse in the water, but if I took him off the breast, the rage reappeared.

Why? Why??

I want him to love to swim. I want him to love his bath. I want to clean him without it turning into a traumatic episode of temper.

What do I do? Assvice will be welcomed gladly.

General Updatey Thing

Tags

acupressure, anxiety, counselling, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, Perfect Girlfriend, Perfect Husband, pools, swimming

Yesterday was my third session with a new counsellor lady. The shrink at the women’s reproductive mental health unit set me up with her. It sucks to drive an hour into town for a counselling session once a week, and I don’t really enjoy them (how can you, attending something that invariably makes you cry??) but I go because I know it’s good for me. The counsellor is okay. She’s a young graduate student originally from Shanghai, and I’m clearly one of her “practice” patients. She spends a lot of time getting me to rub various parts of my body, supposedly acupressure points, to try and release my tensions and open up my energies or something. I’m willing to try it – with labour approaching, any kind of relaxation technique could be valuable. She spends a lot of time on breathing exercises, too.

I always feel kind of shaky and vulnerable after counselling – being forced to talk about all the stuff you try not to even THINK about kind of messes you up for the day. But she had talked to me about how we can’t change feelings but we can change behaviours, and thus change thoughts, and thus eventually change feelings, so I decided to do what my CBT group leaders would have called an “anxiety exposure” and go to the pool on my own.

It was awesome.

In the recent heat wave that has hit Vancouver, I’ve thought of the pool several times. But I had never gone alone before, and besides, some part of me feels that if I start swimming by myself, Perfect Husband won’t take me any more (he tolerates swimming but doesn’t really enjoy it) and I love swimming with him. But the pool was deserted and swimming and thinking, swimming and thinking, then pulling out The World According to Garp and reading on the steps in the cool water was definitely a good way to recover from the counselling session.

I’ll go again today. Perfect Husband is very proud of me.

My friends are planning a baby shower for me on July 25th, which I’m looking forward to, but here’s a shot of me, many months ago, receiving a massive care package from Perfect Girlfriend:

Me at 3 months pregnant. We didn't know it was going to be a boy yet, but Perfect Girlfriend had a hunch

"What's THAT, Mom?"

Lift me up

Tags

babies, swimming

I can fly.

It’s something that a surprising number of people cannot do, including Perfect Husband. Yet I have been able to do this for as long as I can remember… and longer. I have always been able to move this way.

I never needed wings to do it, as other children I knew did, and I scorned them for it. In fact, I actually managed to convince a friend of mine at age six that if she DID wear her wings, a monster would eat her. It’s impressive how well someone can actually fly when they put trust in themselves and stop clinging to their wings. (It’s also impressive how cruel children can be, but that’s a side point.)

I found freedom in flight. I could swoop, I could soar. I could somersault, and spin. The world stopped being the two dimensional plane on which we spend our lives, and I experienced the joy of true three dimensional motion. I loved to drop things, then dive down and catch them before they landed on terra firma. I discovered aerodynamics. I found that when I was moving at high speeds, a sudden banking of my arms could send me swooshing off in another direction. I found that tilting downwards would push me down, and that tilting upwards would push me up. Pointing straight up would bring me to a quick stall. Grade seven aerospace class was entirely without mystery to me. Of course that’s how planes work. How natural.

Moving on land is cumbersome. I would look up at the window I wanted to get to, and think about how much easier it would be to just bring my arms down and propel myself upwards effortlessly, rather than go in a door and up all those stairs. I dreamed of a world of windows, where everyone just landed on the sill after a few lazy kicks, instead of dragging their bodies up hills and stairs.

I must have been only about a year old when I began to learn how to fly. My parents were just moving to a new house, which had a glittering blue swimming pool, complete with diving board. They took immediate steps to prevent it becoming a death trap for their only child: baby swim classes.

I was still mastering the art of walking when I began swimming, and I took to it with just as much, if not more, alacrity. Fear the water? Why should I, when it gave me a freedom that I could never have on land? All I knew was that in the water, I could soar. My parents have pictures of me, barely three years old, leaping out into the wild blue yonder with carefree joy on my face.

When we moved to the Caribbean, I could swim 365 days of the year, including Christmas Day. My friend and I would go to the beach every Saturday afternoon, and often her father left us alone while he went windsurfing. There was no danger. When you grow up in the water, swimming is an effortless thing. Staying afloat took no more energy (in fact, less, it seemed) than standing up did. But I didn’t care about staying afloat. I wanted to dive.

My mother would take me to snorkeling, and wearing my mask, snorkel and flippers, I would spend hours among the coraline metropolis of the reef, stalking its jewel-like residents. I would dive among a glittering silver shoal of bar-jacks, trying to surround myself, watching them break apart around me every time I tried. I wanted to live in their cool blue world, darting and soaring, spinning and gliding effortlessly instead of plodding and sweating on the dusty, heavy ground above. But it was a world which I have been increasingly forced to live in.

We left the Caribbean and our house in Nova Scotia didn’t have a pool. I had to rely on the occasional outing to the local sports complex, if I could get someone to come with me. Hardly anyone else I knew could swim. Oh, they could probably all have kept themselves afloat. I hope their parents would have taught them that much. But paddling and struggling to maintain a back float… that is to swimming what the Wright brothers were to flying – a good start, but that’s it. So I went months, sometimes years, stuck to the ground.

The instincts never leave you. So many times, running late to a class, it seemed like I should be able to push off with my legs and dart off, as the crow flies, to my destination rather than plod along the sidewalk, huffing and puffing. The insipidity of air, its inability to carry my weight, is a constant frustration. It has become something I unquestioningly accept but continue to dislike, like menstruation and bra straps that slide down over one shoulder. I would almost forget what it was like to live without the weight of my body holding me down. Then I would slide into a pool and discover that weight lifted from me. I could fly.

One of the biggest selling point, in my opinion, of our new house was the swimming pool building not thirty feet from our front door. My doctor keeps strongly recommending exercise, like walking and jogging, because exercise is apparently great for depression. But I rejected these out of hand. The idea of having to walk or jog is inherently depressing, I think, because they are exhausting and jarring and very un-fun.  However, swimming is excellent low-impact aerobics, and seems like an ideal solution for everybody. I’d be happier, and I’d probably lose weight, too.

Except our damn pool key doesn’t work. We’re supposed to mail it to someone to get it reactivated and of course we haven’t done this. We’ve been planning on getting into that damn pool for two months now, but we will, OH we will… and then I will make my poor Perfect Husband swim, even though he swims like a polar bear paddles while I spin, laughing, out of his reach.

So why am I telling you all of this?

Because I’ve been researching the infant diving reflex, that’s why!

I saw a documentary about it once when I was a teenager, and we’ve all seen the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind which features a 3 month old baby swimming under water. I always wondered whether I would have the guts to actually try it with a real baby.

It turns out that people I know have actually tried this, and more and more swim programs are being made available to young babies. Because swimming allows for much more movement than on land, it works as the best tummy time ever, improving baby’s health, intelligence, even sleep patterns. The more I think about it, and the more I research this, the more I know I want to take my future children to the pool when they are babies.

I want them to grow up being able to fly.