I watch my friend Jo swim laps in our neighborhood pool and admire her steady stroke, cutting through the cerulean water with little effort. As she glides to the pool’s edge and somersaults under the water, I see her swim cap bob up again without missing a beat.
She urges me to get in. “Nah, I’ll go down like a rock,” I tell her. “Come on, I’ll teach you how,” she says.
Not today, my friend. When I was a kid, my mother told me that she had a bad experience in a pool once: As a joke, a teenage boy held her head underwater until she nearly drowned. After that, she never stepped into water past her ankles.
Her fear became mine.
By the time I was a teenager, I made excuses to plant myself in a lounge chair poolside, dipping in to cool off occasionally but always with a firm grip on the pool rail.
That may have been the end of my swim story, but when I became a mother, I wanted to do better for my daughter. So, while Megan was in Aqua Tots a night a week at the YMCA, I was in the Level One Adult Swim on another night.
I won’t forget my first foray into the deep end as the teacher shouted, “Push down and roll in that direction, and you’ll flip over to float on your back!”
Right, I thought.
But teeth gritted, I forced myself to do it, and a few weeks later passed the final test by swimming the width of the pool and nearly swimming the length, end to end.
So, decades later, have I gone swimming again? Not unless I can touch the bottom or be tethered to a boat with a life preserver around my waist. My first–and last–true swim was in that class as a young mother in her twenties.
I’ve decided that dating is a lot like learning to swim–diving in the water and swimming toward the unfamiliar, or even scary, unknown. Best to dip a toe in first and move slowly so you don’t get in way over your head, I think.
After being single for a couple of years and joining a dating site, I continue to edit my profile to show a kinder, gentler me. I match with a man in Los Angeles who’s from my hometown and soon discover we have some common acquaintances. He’s #2 in my Audit; my first date was a fix-up with a guy who had no physical attributes I found appealing, even if he had quit talking long enough to take a breath and ask about me.
But this new match’s photos caught my eye with his KC Royals baseball jersey topped off with a full head of curly silver hair and eyes the color of blue agate with lashes like midnight (a friend called them “bedroom eyes.”) Yikes–a bedroom at this point is scarier than a dive headfirst into the ocean!
I might as well be 15 again and going on a first date, glasses perched on my nose pre-contact lenses. Awkward.
We meet in Newport Beach at a waterside cafe for Sunday brunch, the conversation easier after some initially nervous back-and-forth. Clearly, he was smart and tall and even better, divorced for a few years and not new to dating. He knows what he’s doing, I thought.
Phone calls followed and our discussions about the 2015 political debates were lively and fully aligned, thank goodness, on all things Hillary vs. Trump. When we finally talked about family, he asked me to help him with some editing.
“Since you’re a writer, would you look at a letter I plan to send to my three daughters?” he asked. “I’d like a woman’s perspective.”
And with that he emailed me what would soon go to his girls, ages 17 to early 20s.
The line of the letter that jumped out to me was this: “Why won’t you talk to me or see me?”
Whoaaaa nelly as they say in the westerns.
He made a compelling case to me as a loving father who says his ex-wife has likely turned the girls against him. He had done nothing to warrant this kind of disrespect and heartbreak from his kids he told me, and asked them to go to counseling with him.
I learned in therapy that I’ve been the “fixer” in other relationships, shouldering the emotional load to try to make things right. So I soon made suggestions to “fix” his letter so he could move forward with the girls.
But the longer I thought about it, my gut told me there’s more to his story. On one of our last phone calls, I asked him, “What did you do to their mother, or to them, to warrant the cold shoulder?” In my experience there’s almost always an outlier with three of anything–surely one of the girls would side with Dad if the other two were in Mom’s camp.
He assured me there was nothing, but in earlier conversations he told me his wife outearned him, and I suspected money may have been part of the problem.
I begin to put into practice what I learned in therapy and decided that if all three daughters iced him out, that’s a huge, red flapping flag in the world of Linda. My days as a fixer came to an end, and our phone calls slowly dwindled down to nothing.
A recent check of his Instagram shows a new wife whose eyes are as pretty as his, but very little evidence of the daughters.
Not long ago I spent a weekend in Long Beach with my friend Jo, the swimmer. We stayed at her friend’s magnificent home that sits just across from the inlet where sailboats and yachts share the real estate.
Jo points out to the horizon that skims the harbor. “See that buoy in the distance?” she asks. “I like to swim past it, weaving around the docked boats, out into the open water–and then back.”
The very idea of it makes my stomach lurch into my throat. “Do you ever get scared, afraid you won’t make it?”
“Not really–I’m a strong swimmer, and I’ve done it dozens of times,” she says like it’s a minor undertaking.
I later think about what I’ve accomplished since becoming single at 60: Selling the family home, moving 1,700 miles across the country, building a slew of new friendships and buying a new home meant just for me.
While I may not be a strong swimmer, I’ve learned to do life–on land–over and over, until I get it right.