Margo à la Maude

Sunday was Margo's first swimming lesson.

As a pure coincidence, Sunday was also my first lesson at handling an 8 month old baby that feels that you have completely and utterly betrayed her confidence that you are there to protect her. Funny how those coincidences work.

As I mentioned before, Brewer Pool is known to be a little chilly. Personally, I didn't find it to be that cold, and as a matter of fact, they cranked up the air temperature really high to the point where cooler water was a blessing.

The pool must put all the kids' swimming lessons together because there were kids of all ages all over the place, to the point where, having missed the first couple of weekly classes, we weren't sure that we were there at the right time. When I asked another parent, she confirmed that we were on time and all that, and then asked how old my little boy was.

This happened to our friend and her daughter in New Brunswick, too. Apparently, bikini tops are pretty much expected for girls at any age. It seems absolutely ridiculous to wrestle Margo to put another piece of unwanted clothing on her, and granted, the other mother did try to backpeddle on her slip a little. Assumptions are never a good thing. I mean... she was pretty ugly; I didn't assume that her cute daughter wasn't genetically related to her.

Getting Margo undressed and the swim diapers on was... well, a little tricky, what with the dirty diapers, but Margo stayed cool, really unsure of her surroundings.

The class started by parents getting in the water and facing their kids who were sitting on the edge of the pool, then singing some garbage song about frogs sitting on lilypads, and then grabbing the kids and dunking (I just dunked her to the neck) them at a certain point, and repeating three times.

Having my hands on Margo's ribcage, I actually felt her tiny chest muscles and skeleton convulse in a combination of shock and fear.

Three times.

Have you ever done something, had a bad feeling about it, but did it against your best judgment? Then after the bad thing happened, you do it again, because you figure that it can only get better from here. And then when it gets worse, not better, you do it a third time, because you figure that, what the hell, ain't gonna break any worse than it already is.

That was swimming lessons.


She eventually calmed down when I gave her something to chew on, but I was a little concerned, because she was concentrating so hard on the chew toy, almost like she was trying to retreat to her happy place.

I don't know. I don't know if the swimming was a good thing or not. Most of the other kids were old enough that they could either speak to their parents, or at the very least, understand what their parents were saying. Margo was the youngest, by far. I don't know if the experience was good at this age.

I guess that it was; I probably wouldn't have pushed her past the first tear. In time, she did start kicking her legs. Not so much swimming as looking for something firm to stand on. But the tears were never more than 3 seconds away.

Sadly, the experience after swimming was the worst part.

It finally happened. I finally dropped the baby.

Drying and changing yourself and a baby alone is hard. The kind of hard that gets blood pressure up to 230/160. And when I placed her on the bench and turned to start drying myself off, I turned back in time to watch my upright sitting baby slowly tip backward, in slow motion, and fall off the change bench to the tile floor. Luckily, her back hit first, and I don't think that her head hit at all, but she was probably hurt and winded. I'm a big believer in not sheltering kids from harm, but that stops waaaaaay short of concussions.

Tears flowed. I don't think that it was a good day for her.

The strange thing is, I think that the fall made her smarter. Like radioactive spider bites, or being born on a super Krypton planet, or whatever made Batman do his thing. That night, during our usual bedtime ritual, she was doing things without being prompted, like turning pages at the right time and doing what the book was saying (it was a texture book, and I used to have to run her fingers along the textures. She would just look at them if it was up to her.) Maybe it was the fall. Maybe it was the fear of the torture of being subjected to the water again. I guess we'll never know, but just in case, I plan to put banana peels all over the house when she starts walking. Some may say that that's cruel, but I've seen how much money and power Nobel prize winners get, so you tell me who's cruel and ruggedly handsome now?

- Michel

Labels: event

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 8:09 p.m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.