In Their Own Time
"Rubber Duckie, You're the One" by Daniel Rothamel is licensed under CC BY 2.0
As a father, I can find examples of life through what my son does. One of the ways is in my son taking a stronger interest in learning how to swim.
Some time ago, we signed my son up for swimming lessons. When I checked out the facility, I was super excited. The pool had a very gradual slope into the water. From the kids’ entrance, it took awhile before the pool was even 3 ft deep. Also, there was a little slide in that shallow kids area. I thought that my son’s first swimming lesson would go great. Oh, how wrong I was…
By this point, his only experience was in the type of shallow wading pools that you’d associate with splash pads. In other words, he hadn’t really been in a real pool yet. Fast forward to the first swimming lesson and the instructor took ahold of my son and started to gradually carry him out. Almost immediately, he started to whimper and, then crying. Immediately, my concern was that he would be profoundly traumatized and not want to return to the pool. While my son started crying, I was waiting for the instructor to bring him back in a little bit. I couldn’t be sure but I think that the well-intentioned instructor thought that taking him out deeper would strengthen his courage. Well, the crying went from bad to worse and my son became hysterical. I kept motioning for my son to get brought in. I thought to my own past experience. My mom once told me that she signed me up for swimming lessons and I was so freaked out that I didn’t want to return. I didn’t take swimming lessons, until I was eight. I was afraid that the same thing would happen to my son. After we took our son and calmed him down, I asked him, if he wanted to return and he emphatically said no. Safe to say: he didn’t complete his lessons.
The period between then and now was not in vain. My son would go to splash pads and into our city’s kiddie wading pool. He even went to a schoolmate’s birthday party at a water park. So, at least, he didn’t have a complete aversion to water. A huge development was, when during our Cleveland trip, he wanted to go into the hotel’s pool on both of the nights that we stayed. He had on his life vest/floaties and we took really good care of him. HE LOVED IT! Our victories: going into the pool was his idea and his resulting eagerness was all him.
I can remember some people telling me he would try my patience. I would say that, above this, he is helping me to develop my patience (a work in progress). During this whole swimming situation, I came to see that he wouldn’t pursue swimming lessons in our time but in his. We couldn’t force him back in by putting him in the deep end. Only when my son said that he was interested in swimming lessons again, would he know that he was ready to resume his swimming education.
As grown ups, our egos makes us forget that things have to happen in their own time. Maybe, sometimes, it isn’t such a bad idea to take a cue from my son.