Grown-ups need a special magic word

I was five or six years old and walked together with my mother a warm summer’s day.

We got to a lake where kids were swimming and playing. I didn’t have a swimsuit with me but my mother agreed that dipping my feet was no problem.

I kicked off my shoes and socks and walked out on a wooden pier and sat down, by myself, dangling with my feet in the cool water, while my mother sat down on a bench nearby.

It didn’t take long before a worried grown-up appeared beside me, asking if I could swim. “No,” I replied. “Well” the troubled grown-up said “the water is deep here.” And then he left.

I looked down into the black water.

Deep for me was deeeep. Not just deeper than I was tall. It was Ocean-deep.

And since I had no intention of getting into the water, and still this grown-up was so worried, then the deep water in itself must be dangerous. Like it could jump up and engulf me.

Suddenly I felt uncomfortable and walked back to my mother, telling her I wanted to continue.

Completely unaware of my fright for this lake, my parents put me in a swimming class practicing here. I was a terrible and difficult pupil who refused to be in deeper water than to my waste.

Once after class my parents tempted me with a little extra money, if I walked along the pier, in the water, until I got my shoulders wet. This, of course, with the intention that I would see that there were nothing to be afraid of after all.

I was terrified, walked a small step of the time, into deeper and deeper water, completely prepared that the bottom of the lake would suddenly disappear below my feet. At the end of the pier, my shoulders were still above the water. I bent my knees, dipped my shoulders and rushed back up.

Nothing learned. Deep water was still dangerous.

I did not learn to swim that summer.

I don’t blame my parents for any of this. I could not put words on my fright and discomfort with this lake until I was grown-up. How should they have known then?

The fright for deep waters followed me. Every year I was one of the few who didn’t pass the obligatory swimming test in school. Not because I couldn’t swim – because I finally learned that by my mother, in a shallow swimming pool – but because I refused to swim when the water got deep.

When I finally learned to handle 1.8 meter deep water, the deepest area in the pool, the tests moved to another place. A pool with jumping tower and 5 meter deep water. The one time I knew I was going to pass the test I had to do it in a deeeep pool.

When I swam my meters on my back looking up into the ceiling high above me (due to the jumping tower) and could not get out of my mind that I had just as much under me I simply freaked out.

I’ve returned to the scary, black lake to swim as a grown-up, to get rid of some ghosts.

It wasn’t Ocean-deep where I sat that time as a kid. It was probably less than the 1.8 meters I finally managed to handle.

Now, as a parent myself, I think of that kind grown-up who showed such care for me, but succeeded to make me terrified for deep water. How little I as a grown-up really can understand of what is going on in the heads of my kids. And how unlikely it is that I will ever find the magic words to cure what ever frights they will get.

But if they ever get fright for deep waters, I might have a clue.

Fashion model underwater in dolphin tank, Marineland, Florida
Toni Frissell Collection
Similar image published in Vogue, October 1939
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA