Swimming with Charlie

Tuesday afternoon I got into a long conversation with a friend about race and a sociology class she’s teaching and had to run out to my car. I made it home with five minutes to spare, Charlie looked at me intently through the window as the bus pulled up and the aide said “hurry Charlie time to go and get a snack,” he indeed ate a (large, as usual) snack, we went the pharmacy to pick some things up, we came home and we went to the pool.

Charlie went right to the pool’s edge smiling and stood looking into the water, then sat with his feet in. He often likes to start slow—a change from when he was younger and would hurl himself into any body of water that he came across—and my coaxing, which probably feels more like coercing, is not helpful. So I went to the swallow end and started to swim the length of the pool, back and forth.

Three generations of a family were in the pool. An elderly man was swimming the butterfly in a lane, with powerful thrashes of the water. Three boys of varying ages were at the deep end, and got told not to dive and then whistled at when the youngest started to swim across the ropes setting off the lanes for adult swimmers. Their mother, in a blue swimcap and goggles, hurried over.

Charlie had gotten into the pool and was standing just where the water reached up to his chin. He was jumping and splashing and floating and I called out to him as I swam past; he grinned and twisted in the water. I swam to the wall of the deep end and turned around. From behind me came the mother with the blue swimcap and just as I passed Charlie I went a little to the right to give her room and my foot stopped and I stopped with a bad feeling. I turned in the water and knew I’d accidentally bumped Charlie’s head with my foot.

He cried, softly, and then he wailed. Everyone stopped swimming, the lifeguard blew his whistle and looked at us, everyone was looking at Charlie. I stood and—feeling like a triple times over failed parent—told him that it was my mistake, I was trying to avoid bumping the other swimmer and I made a mistake. I was sorry.

This went on for what seemed like fifteen minutes—Charlie’s voice loud and sad, sometimes saying “I’m sorry”—me trying to speak minimally, calmly, and directly, and sighing at myself. Gradually people started swimming and Charlie swayed a little in the water and started floating about, put his face in the water, dunked himself under. He came up and went under again, blinked the water out of his eyes, put his face in and powered his shoulders and splashed a trail of water behind him.

I followed him. There were even more people in the pool, mostly parents with children Charlie’s age or a little older or younger. As we went through the water, we could hear parents saying “pull your arm back, back, back!” and “it’s your head…..” or, actually, ni-de tou-tz, as the mother was speaking in Mandarin to her son, who was a few years younger than Charlie. At one point two of the three boys we’d seen earlier were all doing the butterfly stroke beside their mother and Charlie and I paused and sometimes treaded water to stay out of the way. In the shallow end, one mother spoke (in Mandarin) to her son, her voice quick. “You don’t need to race me,” she said. “You should race against your team!” “I don’t have a team,” said her son with a little cry and threw himself forward into the water and started swimming, really fast. His mother stood and sighed. An older woman slowly, methodically swam the breast stroke horizontally past us.

Charlie kept swimming towards the deep end and I found myself doing so many laps that I said to him, I might be too tired to blog later.

It was 7.45 when he asked for the stairs. We changed and went home and I stir-fried vegetables and shrimp and made rice and Charlie asked for YouTube.

As for being too tired to blog—-something about swimming with Charlie, in the pool, in the ocean, wherever, always reenergizes me, reminds me, how lucky I am to be the mother to my lovely, lovely boy. And so:

From October 1st to October 10th, I’ll be a panelist on the Science Blogs Book Club for a discussion about Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure by Dr. Paul Offit. Hope you will join the discussion and would much like to know what you think—my first post appears today and here’s Kev on why Dr. Offit’s book is so important, and Orac on science pushing back antivaccine lunacy. Professor Bob Park, former chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland will also be posting, and Dr. Offit himself, too.