There are so many reasons not to go swimming as an adult

Finding my way back to play

For as long as I can remember, my family had a pool of one sort or another. We were lucky that way—to have the space and the money and the readily-available supply of water. We started with a small above-ground. It was bright yellow and blue and couldn’t have been more than eight feet across. My parents didn’t fill it up all the way. In its shallow depths, my sister and I, at two and five years old, could still touch the bottom. When we took that pool down, the dead space of grass was there in our yard for what felt like years.

We replaced that pool with a series of larger above-grounds culminating eventually in an in-ground pool with a blue-patterned liner, though I lobbied hard for the black liner that would have made the pool look, in my mother’s words, like a cesspit.

This is all to say that, for all of my childhood summers, I was in one pool or another. Then I grew up and I wasn’t.

Which is how it happens, isn’t it? We look around and realize this thing that was once such a large source of pleasure and joy is gone. We’d take a moment to wonder why, only that would require noticing it’s missing in the first place. That’s just how it is, we tell ourselves. Kids spend a lot of time in swimming pools. Adults do not.

There are so many reasons not to go swimming as an adult.

Let’s start with the swimsuit. It’s almost impossible to find one that fits. The bottom is too loose. The top pushes my boobs up to my chin, creating a scandalous amount of cleavage. I reached a point in my life fairly early when I decided I would no longer torture myself by shaving the very sensitive part of my body called the “bikini line,” so it’s boy shorts or swim skirts only for me. That’s not such a hassle, but it’s a lot of fabric and it takes forever to dry once you’re out of the pool.

When I swam as a kid, my favorite part was being under the water. My sister and I would have underwater tea parties. We would go under water and say something to see if we could understand what the other was saying. Under the water by myself, I was a mermaid. I was an ocean explorer. I was a dolphin. I was a thousand things as I moved through the water, slick and graceful and perfect, like a seal. I never worried about what my body looked like when I was underwater.

Now my ears are fucked. If I go underwater, I’m likely to end up with an ear infection or water that no amount of swimmer’s ear can remove. I am now one of those old ladies who has to carefully keep her head above the water line.

Photo by Meriç Dağlı on Unsplash

When I was young, I spent the whole summer in a swimsuit that was wet or damp. What did I care? There was no time to change into clothes. My poor mother dealt with perpetual wet spots on all the furniture as we paused in our swimming long enough to eat lunch and then jump back into the pool. As a child, there was no concern about how a damp swimsuit might contribute to yeast infections. There was none of the fussiness I feel now about getting my car seat wet or dripping water into our house. Probably this is because as a child, someone else had to deal with the consequences of my wet body. Now I have to deal with those consequences myself.

Swimming, as an adult, is a project. It’s like planning the invasion of Normandy. It is a task. A chore, uncomfortable and inconvenient. No wonder I stopped doing it.

My sixty-five-year-old husband plays a game with baseball cards. It’s a game he made up when he was a kid and he’s been playing pretty much continuously ever since. He’s explained the game to me at least once, but I don’t really understand how it works. It’s a game he plays by himself, which suits us both fine. There are dice and playing cards and often, he gets to be the play-by-play person. When I lie on the couch in our kitchen reading, I can hear him in the back room, the snap of the dice hitting the table and his voice, whispering the details of each at-bat.

That this is a daily activity for him was something he revealed only after we’d been dating a month or so. “I have to tell you about my baseball cards,” he said. They occupy a large closet in our house. They’re not in mint condition. He’s not a collector so much as he is a gamer.

At first, I thought the baseball card thing was mildly amusing. A little bit cute. I was in love, after all and only thirty-two. I was a baby. Later, it occurred to me to wonder if this wasn’t a little bit weird, this baseball game thing. Was this really something a responsible, grown man did? He was a great father. Good at his job. He paid the bills and cooked and kept a clean house, except for the toilets, but we all have our cleaning blind spots. So, the baseball thing was weird, but okay.

Eventually, I came to realize that my husband’s baseball game was not just okay, but, in fact, brilliant. More than that, his baseball card game might be the key to why he is generally a happy-go-lucky person, bouncing through life with his arms swinging at his side. The lines forming on his face over time are truly smile and laugh lines, because those are his default expressions. Even when he’s staring into space, he’s usually smiling.

The lines on my face trace a downward trajectory. They speak of sadness and anxiety. Both my husband and I talk to ourselves. He says things like, “You’ve got this!” I say things like, “How could you be so stupid?”

He plays. I don’t. It took me a long time to realize what a difference this makes.

“I wish I had something like your baseball card games,” I say to my husband. It’s not the first time I’ve said this and it won’t be the last. I said this at first because I was jealous. Watching him play his game brought back the hours I would spend with Little People, those barrel-shaped toy approximations of human beings. I built whole cities for my Little People. I could get lost for hours in the intricacies of their lives. Or I roamed the woods around our house, imagining adventures for myself. Or my sister, cousin and I dreamed up complicated dramas for our cousin’s Matchbox car collection.

Watching my husband play his baseball card games, I knew I was missing out on something before I ever read about the importance of play to our mental health. Then I did a Brene Brown deep-dive and began casting around for something in my life that qualified as play.

I certainly still lose myself in reading, much like I did as a child, if now a little more prone to distraction than I used to be thanks to my phone. Maybe reading qualifies as play. I knit, which is certainly soothing as activities go, but doesn’t quite feel as fun as my husband’s baseball card game. For a brief period in graduate school I got very into Buffy the Vampire Slayer video games. But those were the only video games I was interested in and once the friends I played with moved away, I stopped playing that, too. I’ve toyed with various musical instruments, but I find it hard to set aside the judge inside me who tells me I’m not good enough, whatever that means as a fifty-year-old woman trying to teach herself how to play the guitar.

Of course, I also write. To some people, writing is play. At least, that’s what they claim. Most of the time, I am not one of those people. I certainly can lose myself in writing, though that, too, is made difficult by the erosion in my attention span that comes with living in the 21st century. I am often more excited about the idea of writing than I am delighted by the actual act of writing. Imagining what will happen to my characters next is close to play. Writing it down? Not so much.

Where is the play in my life? This is one of the central questions of the middle of my life. It’s not exactly a crisis, but it is a puzzle. Why can’t I find something that’s play for me? Did I break that part of myself? Can whatever I broke be fixed? I spent most of my childhood hanging out inside my imagination. What happened to that little girl? Where did she go?

Many times as I’ve been on my morning walk in the summer, I’ve watched the old ladies pull up in their golf carts and head into the community pool, noodles tucked under their arms, chatting happily before their water aerobics class. More than once as I was plodding along in the hot and humid southern Indiana air, I’ve thought I should be in the pool with them instead of out here on the concrete.

Then I became one of those old ladies. Or at least, my knee decided that I was now an old lady. A case of occasionally annoying arthritis bloomed into a painful and debilitating condition. There were no more morning walks for me. Some days I could barely hobble around my house, let alone make it down to the river.

It was pain that finally forced me back into the pool. I signed up not for the water aerobics class, because I wasn’t sure my poor knee could handle bouncing around on the bottom of the pool. Also the water aerobics class was full with a waitlist twenty people deep. Instead, I opted for deep water jogging, even if I wasn’t exactly sure what that was.

The registration e-mail said I would need something called a jog belt, so I faithfully ordered one. The only swimsuit I owned had bottoms so old the elastic was going and they were constantly falling down, exposing my butt crack to anyone who cared enough to look. The top revealed entirely too much cleavage than was appropriate for ten o’clock in the morning, the time when the class was scheduled, but there was nothing to be done about it. I’d signed up and I’d have to go in the suit I had.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

The morning of the first class, I drove down to the pool and hobbled through the locker room and across the concrete deck to the ladder into the deep end. I was anxious that the ladder would be too much to navigate with my bum knee. They’d have to lower me into the water with those crane contraptions you see sometimes at big swimming pools. I was too anxious about this possibility to pay much attention to the temperature of the water as I eased myself in.

I spent a few minutes struggling with fastening the jog belt and trying to decide if I should wear it in front, where leaning on it served to highlight my cleavage, or the back, where its buoyancy kept threatening to tip me over. I paddled around the deep end trying to suss out if any of the other women floating around in a little circle and gossiping were in fact part of the deep water jogging class.

Eventually an ‘instructor’ showed up with some general suggestions for what we might do, but it’s not rocket science, is it? Move around. Just treading water is exercise. Some of the ladies gathered together and talked. Others struck out on their own, doing zig-zag laps through the little clusters of people.

I did some scissor kicks. Some jumping jacks. I dog-paddled in the little roped-off section of the deep end. I chatted with some of the ladies.

It was a beautiful morning in July. It was hot, but not oppressive. The temperature of the pool was actually perfect, once I took the time to pay attention. Not bath tub warm or a shock to the system frigid. The sky above was a gorgeous blue.

“How was it?” my husband asked when I got home.

“It was good,” I said. “It was really good.”

The rest of the day I felt what I can only describe as a sort of bubbliness of body and soul. My knee didn’t stop hurting, but each step felt the tiniest bit lighter. It was a delight to get out of the house when my pain threatened to turn me into a summer recluse. It was good to talk to people and see all the women splashing around in the pool. It was a relief to be able to move around in a way that didn’t come with excruciating pain.

It wasn’t until the second time at the pool that I realized the bubbliness was due to all of that, but also much more. There was music playing at the pool. After chatting with the ladies, I struck out on my own. I dog paddled around and started doing a little wiggle to the beat of the music, my hips swinging one way and my arms another. I sang the lyrics to the song under my breath. I felt that bubbliness again. I smiled, one tiny moment of reversal to those frown lines on my face.

Every morning when the time for deep water swimming class comes around, I debate whether or not I’m going to go. I can still come up with lots of excuses to skip it. I have a new swimsuit, but it’s not without its own imperfections. My knee has not miraculously healed because I’m finding at my age that very little heals miraculously anymore. Some mornings I tell myself that the air is far too chilly. On other days I have entirely too much to do to make time for the frivolity that is floating around in a pool. As an adult, even play is tinged with the taint of chore. Play requires work as an adult and I still haven’t gone underwater.

Still, most mornings I put on my swimsuit and drive down to the pool. Each time, walking across the concrete feels a little easier. Some days the water is warm and some days it’s cold as I ease myself down the ladder and into the water. This community pool is different than all those backyard configurations, but in the end, a pool is a pool. It’s a contained bit of liquid joy.

I put on my jog belt and I feel, for that briefest window of time, like a kid again. Under the guise of exercise and health and all those deeply adult things, I am playing in the pool. Enjoying that other world that is the water. For a little while, I feel a little less of the gravity that is adulthood, always anchoring us to the solid ground. In that moment, there is nothing under me but water, holding me up. I could let go of the jog belt. Let go of the noodle. Let go of the pain in my knee and the inadequacy of my swimsuit and how hard it might or might not be to pull myself back up the ladder onto the concrete. For that moment, at least, I could let go of everything and just float. For that moment, I play.