Over the
last two weeks we were mostly on the road visiting my parents. They’re living
the retirement dream on a lake with a dock, a boat, and a jetski, and it means
that whenever we visit them water plays a large role in whatever we do. For me
this is great. I love swimming and water skiing and messing around on the
jetski. I’ve done those things for over half my life. For the kids it’s a more
fraught proposition, as we are constantly having to balance what different adults
– me, Ava, my parents – want them to do and what they’re capable of enjoying.
They’ve had a gradual introduction first to the dock then the next year to the
boat and last year to the jetski. This year it was time to go all in. We
strapped lifevests on them both and let them hop into the water to swim around
with relative freedom. And they loved it. In fact, they could not get enough of
the water. We had to drag them out each day to get food into them. We spent
almost four full days at my parents and never got into our cars to go anywhere.
Every time we asked either child what they wanted to do the answer was, “Swim
in the lake.”
I wasn’t
surprised that they liked it. It just caught me off guard how much they did. I
guess I’d forgotten how much fun it is to splash and jump and paddle and kick
and bob in the water. Polly in particular was giddy. She would bob up and down
and do circles in the water over and over again. She blew bubbles and dunked
her face. She practiced her doggie-paddle and even stretched her arms out for a
couple strokes of freestyle.
I’d been a bit worried coming into
the summer about getting them both into swim lessons because we had not had
much water time last year and being 6 and 8 years old the window for getting
comfortable in the water is wide open. It turns out that all we needed was a
full week of hot weather and a body of water close at hand. By the end of our
visit with my folks – which included a three day jaunt down to the glorious
beaches of South Carolina – Pip was jumping in deep water and treading with the
calm of one who knows he can keep his head above the surface and Polly was
leaping from the wall and willingly letting her head go underwater before I
caught her. They were both experimenting with what they could do, inching along
a little further without us having to push or cajole. It was the kind of
learning one hopes for, the kind of learning that really sticks, perhaps the
only kind of learning that really works in the end.
The one
non-water related event of interest for us that came out of our visit to my
parents was the opportunity to watch a couple of games of the Womens World Cup.
At home our television is not hooked up to any outside source of programming so
we don’t have the ability to watch sporting events as they happen or even tape
them for later. My folks have both and so we took the opportunity to watch the
US-Australia game on tape and the France-Germany game as it happened.
It was hard for me to watch these
games and not view them through the lens of the last time I’d really paid attention
to women’s soccer: 1999 Women’s World Cup. In 1999 the discourse around women’s
soccer was something along the lines of, “Hey, women can play exciting soccer,
too.” It was a kind of defensive posture that indicated that this idea was
something of a novelty. As we watched the games this past week, I was reminded
of this a couple of times when my father – not a caveman but prone to
occasionally making a socially dated remark – made a big deal out of one of the
German players spitting on the field and then later asked if everyone was
wearing shin guards. It was as if he was surprised that what we were watching
was a hard-fought athletic endeavor and not some kabuki theater presentation
put on for the sake of gender equity.
Now I don’t believe that this was his
actually thought process. His words came out of habitual reflex more than
intent. And my immediate feelings of defensiveness were just the same. I wasn’t
just watching some games. I was purposefully giving my attention to these teams
as part of a larger social project. It was politics as much as it was entertainment.
Fortunately, Polly and Pip have no
such habits. They haven’t watched enough sports to care whether the players on
the field are men or women. They don’t hear the title “Women’s World Cup” and
think of that as some lesser version of the “real” World Cup. They got to watch
the games and enjoy them for the entertainment they are and not the politics
they represent. They got to watch France play Germany and get attached to their
attacking style and feel crushed when the final French shooter missed her
penalty kick all without the baggage of wondering how it compared to a men’s
game. They got to cheer when Megan Rapinoe scored that first goal for the
United States against Australia and ooh and aah when Hope Solo made a couple of
diving saves early on. And while we didn’t watch the final on Sunday night,
they’ll get to see highlights of Carli Lloyds spectacular hat-trick and revel
in the pure stunning amazement that sports can bring without being bothered by
any of the old questions. Frankly, it makes me jealous.
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