Swim Genius

Swim Genius
Jaala Spiro


This summer, my daughter has turned into a Swim Genius.

When we went to visit Mike’s family in July, we stayed in a little place on a little lake, and swam in its placid waters several times a day. One day we took the kids to his Uncle Paul’s house where they had set up one of those big pools, three feet deep and several yards from side to side. All of the kids, mostly preschoolers, splashed in exuberantly, and that was the first time I noticed Corrina start to swim. She put her three-year-old face right into the water and did a version of the breast stroke across the pool, steamrolling any cousin, big or small, who got in her way.

We adults stood around the sunny driveway, talking among ourselves as we refereed the goings-on in the pool. Paul’s wife Lori told us the story again of how her little boy, barely three, decided to ride a pint-sized dirt bike.

“Paul said, here’s a bike, honey, but you can’t ride it yet, I have to put the training wheels on,” she said. “Zane says, no, Dad, I can do it. Paul said, okay, you can try, and handed him the bike. He took it out of the garage, got on it and started riding. And that was about it.”

We had heard the story when we came out in May and witnessed the tiny, red-headed boy seamlessly maneuvering around the driveway and carport on his scrap of a bicycle. Even as he waited to get in the pool, he entertained two other kids by doing skids and wheelies that most eight-year-olds would envy.

I couldn’t hear the story often enough; I wanted Lori to say it again and again, as if the telling would reveal the mystery of how that talent grew.

“Lori, he’s a Bike Genius!” I told her. “He’s going to be in the Olympics or something.”

The next afternoon, Corrina started to swim in toward the shore from her shoulder depth in the lake, again the breast stroke, diving under the water and coming up when she ran out of air. She did it over and over again, a holy joy spreading over her face when she surfaced, her blue eyes blinking. The following day, Corrina learned to jump out of an inflatable raft into water over her head when a 10-year old played with us; she repeated this feat, too, over my anxiety. Every day that week, I left the shore early with Aden the Shivering Noodle while she swam resolutely on, Mike standing knee-deep in the water to catch her.

When we came back from our weeklong vacation, she definitely was doing something very close to real swimming. We began taking the kids to the city beaches almost every afternoon. Her M.O. would be to stand in water as deep as we would tolerate, imperiously gesturing us to go away, then to swim back, only touching bottom briefly when she came up for air.

One day, my parents took her to the Spring Green pool and my dad reported that she swam, with breathing, about 12 feet in water over her head. And, true to her nature, did it over and over again until it was time to go.

I had to see it for myself, and lo and behold, she stood on the side of the pool, ordered me away, jumped a mighty belly flop, and swam to my arms, taking several breaths on the way. Each time she paused to lift her little mouth into the air, my heart stopped along with her, but I managed to keep from lunging over to grab her.

The next pool visit she decided to jump in backwards and practiced moving toward us with a simultaneous twist from front to back.

A week later her grandpa came to see us and Corrina worked up to swimming across the short side of the hotel pool all by herself. She paused each time standing on the pool lip, breathing hard, rocking back and forth and laughing nervously, but when she decided, it was all business. Woe betide the nervous mom who tried to inch her way closer, too, because she noticed. She wanted to swim every inch of the pool, and she wasn’t about to take a break in the middle.

I watched her do it, I knew she could do it, and I felt as if some soft laser melted through me, opening my ribcage the way I remembered feeling when Mike and I first fell in love. I felt a light pouring into me and I couldn’t see anything but the light.

I started feeling weak in the knees when sitting at the breakfast table eating cereal. She has talent. Everything in my system seemed to give way around this new idea. My friend Dana put her finger on it when she said, "It's like the story of an Olympic tennis player whose parents own a gas station and never played tennis, but then they do everything to get their kid through all of the training."

I am not sporty and never swam that well. In Girl Scout camp when I was twelve, I got stuck in Intermediate Swim with all the eight-year-olds. So I don't know the culture.

I began sounding out my friends and acquaintances. Our babysitter was a water baby since before she could remember. "I was on the swim team all the way through high school, and then I became a lifeguard," she told us. And this is a woman who speaks French and is getting an advanced degree in Art History with a focus on contemporary African artists. This is good, very good.

I told myself that swimming is a healthy hobby, without all that crazy body-image baggage that dancers and gymnasts carry. The swim team girls in my high school were mostly popular, strong and college-bound. Negotiating my own relationship to "normal," I recoil from the idea of my child as popular, but secretly enjoy the thought that this sport could make it easier to find an identity and some friends.

But what about the competition? I picture my sensitive daughter throwing up in the middle school bathroom before swim meets. Could I somehow switch the talent to yoga, or something impossible to compete in? What sort of responsibility do we have to this emerging thing, can we wait until later to see what happens, or do we owe it to our child to help her along now?

The point is this. All these years I have loved these kids. I have bounced them in my arms past utter exhaustion in the middle of the night. I have nursed, and buckled the car seats, and wiped up the puke, and cleaned up the poop, and cooked the squash, the quesadillas, the oatmeal, the pizza. I have stroked the cheeks, gazed into the eyes, had my ears nearly shut from the screaming. I have held their hands as they took those first steps, helped them learn to put on a shirt, been happy when they first said ‘cat,’ but underneath it all, I did not believe that they would ever be real human beings. It seemed too farfetched. Now my child has a talent. It feels like the first thing she has created on her own, as if she came up from some internal depth with a pirate cache of gold. She is standing apart from me, and I feel terrified, urgent as though I must respond to some call. We sign her up for swim lessons, we buy her some goggles.

I tell myself the story again, but it doesn’t answer my own question—the genesis of this ability. I feel like I watched her these four years, wound tight to keep her from outlets, biting kids, chokable objects, watching her develop her talking and coordination and her own opinions on fashion. I watched so closely all this time, and didn’t know she had a secret uncurling in there. When I look at her and see her shining and separate from me, I shiver with pride and fear and see that she has never really been within my grasp. Even when she was, a part of her must have been independent, bright gold inside the group of expanding cells, watching me, loving me. And laughing.

My Mom Went to Birthland, and All I Got Was This Monster Truck T-Shirt

My Mom Went to Birthland, and All I Got Was This Monster Truck T-Shirt
Jaala Spiro

“This is the first day in two weeks he hasn’t been wearing all blue,” my friend told me, watching her son toddle around in a purple patterned outfit pilfered from the girls’ department.

Every mom I know with boys asks the same question: Where are the fun boys’ clothes? It makes me wonder who manufacturers think are buying apparel for the little guys, and if they’re somehow different from the ones buying the legions of adorable girls’ clothes.

When my daughter was born, I swore to myself that she would not wear pink and bows and froufy pantaloons; she’d be her own person. I’d fight against gender stereotyping from day one. Well, she inherited my husband’s blue eyes and fair skin, earning her the nickname “the porcelain baby” so naturally, in service to my own aesthetics, I ended up pulling pastel clothes over her head more days than not. But I made peace with it. Most girls’ clothes feature flowers or butterflies, items from nature with which I have no beef. My daughter, now two, does have a taken-from-the-boys motorcycle sweatshirt, which she points to proudly when she wears it, and plenty of striped blue tops. Since girls get short shrift in the warm clothes department, she’s got a bunch of blue fuzzy pants, and some cutely butch work boots.

But when my little boy arrived, the difficulty of finding outfits for him took me by surprise. I thought dressing a boy would be a snap—solid colors and stripes, right? Animals, circuses, geometric shapes….Well, when you can find the boys' clothes tucked in a corner behind the rainbow of the girls’ section, the menu seems to have all been designed by the same hand. Blue, as my friend said, dominates probably eighty percent of boys’ clothes. The rest spread themselves thinly between khaki, brown, gray and red, with a small sprinkle of green or yellow, maybe orange if it has a Bob the Builder logo.

Do you think boys like trees, babies, plants, animals, or fish? Well, think again. In the world of baby clothes, boys, even at three months, only have one thing on their minds: machines. While my daughter was steered into teddy bears hugging each other or watering a plant, my son was locked into dump trucks from day one. The clothes we received for our baby boy all showed trucks, planes, tractors, trains, cars, taxis and more trucks.

Aside from the endless parade of fire trucks and diggers, a portion of boy’s clothing includes sport and team words, as well as a few select professions. War planes, construction cones, fire paraphernalia, and for variety, shirts emblazoned with the word “Football” or “Baseball” (never canoeing, track or cross-country skiing) are regular players in this lineup. Fatigues? Easy to find. What about friendship, a common theme on my daughter’s little shirts? Every once in a while you hit on a shirt proclaiming “Forest Friends,” and when you do, snatch it up! The career-oriented ones say “Air Force,” and “Fire Chief,” while the sports are (your local team here) in our case, the Milwaukee Bucks. Even with hand-me-downs for my daughter, we’ve only had one outfit that showed a ballet class, the stereotypical girl activity.

Cold-blooded animals or “icky” bugs appear sometimes, lizards, toads and the like, sticking out their tongues or eyeing a fly on the pocket. Dinosaurs, fierce creatures that will “eat you up” march across the fronts of many an outfit, and then of course, come the hybrids, the dinosaurs playing football or iguanas driving trucks. Plaid shirts are acceptable, as are jeans and overalls, clothes made for work or competition. In the more upscale lines, argyle sweater vests conjure up a picture of my kid in prep school, and while a baby of any gender looks ungodly cute in overalls or a jean jacket, it’s not exactly fashion-forward or exciting. The stripes and solids I’d envisioned are possible to find, but you’ll be digging; if you want to buy a plain-colored shirt, you’d have much better luck in the girls’ section. Just pull off a bow and you’re done.

Of course, the market also teems with merchandised wear; throw a boot in any direction and you’ll likely hit a Buzz Lightyear. One of my other friends observed wryly that we now pay more for the privilege of not immortalizing a brand name or transient cartoon character in our baby albums.

Once I did score a ridiculously appealing skater shirt for Aden, silver sport mesh with a faux-layered navy tee over it, and that afternoon I found myself unconsciously treating my happy little chub as if he might start handing me some attitude. That really started me thinking. If we look at little guys covered in cars or instruments of destruction, they start representing someone who’s interested in speed or demolition. A six-month-old wearing a Fighter Pilot t-shirt unconsciously pushes our “tough” button, so we treat the child as if he should be tough, maybe wonder why he’s crying so much. What is he, a baby?

Let’s be honest; a six-month old doesn’t have a clue about skateboarding, backhoes or the local hockey team; most likely all he really cares about is the cat and his mom’s breasts or his bottle. Maybe that’s part of the fun, that he appears to identify with something he couldn’t possibly understand, so he represents us, rather than himself. The narcissistic element to dressing your kid certainly appeals to me, as well. But do we love cars and dinosaurs that much? Or are we supposed to love the idea that a boy has intrinsic interests and values from day one?

I’m wondering about a chicken-and-egg here. If you see your kid sporting truck designs most days, won’t you think about getting him a truck for his birthday, since he likes them so much? The focus on inanimate objects points a sinister finger to me, that we’re unconsciously training our kids to identify more with objects than people, that in the back of our collective minds is the idea that they might have to kill or hurt someone one day to protect the home fires. I don’t think boys are necessarily built that way, but it makes it a lot easier to accept if you see them wearing affiliations they don’t understand on their sleeves.

What bothers me more than the simple fact of the career-oriented boy wear is the incredibly small range of careers represented, somehow they are all professions that would endanger their lives. I suspect the number of mamas who really want their children to become police or firefighters, jobs where you’d worry about their safety every day, can’t be that high. It seems to me that in embracing these heroic occupations, we’re also starting to prepare to lose our boys. Surely someone could design a kids’ line featuring artists or doctors, vets, chefs, inventors, musicians…even with traditionally male occupations, it wouldn’t be hard to come up with some choices.

Girls aren’t steered toward a profession that I can tell; certainly clothes that proclaim their wearer to be “Police Chief” never show up in the girls’ department. Even traditionally female occupations like teacher, say, don’t make the front of a onesie; It’s all just flowers, flowers, flowers, and an animal or two. This lack of career awareness signals a problem unto itself, sending girls the message to just be nice, care about others and land yourself a man to take care of you. A truck driver, maybe, or a fireman. We’re herded into the assumption that our boy babies have to be Little Men, while our girls are never supposed to grow up to Be anything.

My younger child has always been very sensitive to beauty. It was him, not his sister who I used to take on “rose walks” around the neighborhood in high summer. Peeking out of the backpack, he squealed with joy whenever we approached a fragrant bush, and reached for the blossoms so eagerly he was almost trembling. I don’t expect roses on my boy’s clothes; I have a shred of realism (though the tropical trend means a few Hawaiian shirts are out there). But it bothers me that whenever we look at girls we see softness, beauty, art, friendship, relating to other people, and when we look at boys we see a love of machines. As a peace-loving, yet sarcastic mom, I’ve been tempted to make a “Property of the Defense Dept” t-shirt to go under that Air Force jacket.

Now when it’s time to shop, I go out of my way to protect my sweet baby boy from gender stereotypes. I make his clothes whenever I can (polar fleece is the hurried seamstress’ friend) and stick to solids and stripes as much as possible, handing down a generous portion of my daughter’s wardrobe. His shoes have pink and purple trim—I feel much more comfortable with that than with fighter jets. Ultimately, if my little girl likes flowers or teddy bears, it’s not a deal-breaker for me. But I want my little guy around caring for his loved ones for a long, long time, so let’s hold off on that fire-truck maintenance class, baby.