baby's first swimming lesson

Cacophony. Noises echo, and rebound, completely unintelligible to his ignorant ears. His father holds him, an anchor to the real world, the place that makes sense, instead of assaulting the senses. The infant tries to burrow into his father’s arms, to retreat from the madness. He looks at his mother, and wonders why fear is written on her face. The words she speaks and those of the father are lost to time and distance and age. The noise dies down, and the infant’s father holds him out at arm’s length. The child is frightened and does not know what is happening, but he hears the sound of water, and he is calmed by the thought of a bath. A bath would be nice… soothing water, soapy bubbles, and momma’s sweet voice wordlessly humming a soft melody.

A whistle sounds. The baby feels his father’s hands go away, and the fear comes back, as the weightlessness of falling is the only, all encompassing terrible thing he feels.

His tiny body assumed the instinctual limp pose that all infants go into when falling. His body knew, even if he did not that the shock would be less in a short fall in this condition than rigid and resisting. The fall took forever in his six month old mind, so he had time to reflect upon why his father, his anchor, his rock had dropped him, it seemed almost on purpose. Just as he was convincing himself that it had to be an accident, he hit the water.

Was it a bath? If so, where were his mother’s hands? He was sinking, and the bath water was never this deep in the lion clawed enameled iron tub at home, so this must be something different. A pressing need to breathe made him try to draw breath, but there was no air to be had. He started to thrash beneath the water’s surface in a desperate attempt to find air, but where was that air? Not down, left, or right. Up! From above, he came into the water. He needed to make it up to the surface if he was ever going to breathe again.

He moved his arms and legs in a parody of crawling, a movement he mastered over the last few months, but adjusted to upward movement. This was much harder than traveling over land, to be sure. He felt his face breach the surface and sucked air. After two or three, he looked around for his parents, and saw other babies all of them around his same size in the pool around him, all of them swimming, some of them crying. Finally espying his parents smiling faces, he made his way over to the edge of the pool, where they were slipping into the water as well. More lost words were spoken by loving smiling parental faces, and the child knew that everything was right in the world.