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Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Swimming Hole

Posted September 07, 2007
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We're sitting in a booth at the ice cream shop, and Ben's talking over his Bada Bing cherry-chocolate cup about how he wishes he had a magic pencil, the kind where everything you drew would become real, like Harold with his purple crayon. Ben's face is animated with possibility and greed. "First I'd draw a pencil sharpener!" Smart boy. "Then I'd draw some more pencils, in case the first one ran out." Hoarding. Sure. "I'd draw a baby!" Birdy interjects, and we say, "Of course you would!" before Ben returns to his financial strategizing. "And then I'd draw a big, gigantic toilet made of gold, and I'd also draw the receipt for it, so then we could return it and get 5 million dollars." I laugh. "Wouldn't it be easier just to draw the money?" Ben thinks for a moment. "I don't think so," he says. "I mean, there's no million-dollar bill, so you'd just be, like, drawing money for your whole life." This is probably a good metaphor for how not to live: sketching hundred-dollar bills until you keel over into your money bags.

Later, we're lying in bed in the half dark, and Ben asks me what I'd draw. "Could I pick something like justice?" I ask, moralizingly. "Even though I don't know how to draw it?" "Oh!" Ben says. "I don't know. I mean, would you just draw a sign that said 'Justice' and walk around with it? But if you could pick anything in the world, even something like that, then I would pick no more swim lessons." I'm stunned. "If you could have anything in the world, that's what it would be?" I ask, and Ben's suddenly so choked up that he can only nod against me.

This is his one true wish, it turns out -- the thing you squinch your eyes for when you blow out your candles. I didn't know. I mean, I knew he hated swim lessons, despite the fact that he takes them with the glossy little college swim-team teachers who cart him cheerfully back and forth across the pool while he windmills his arms around and gives me an occasional, comedic thumbs up. He talks openly about hating them, but I thought it was just the usual kind of hating. "Oh everyone hates swim lessons," our friends always say to him, and I love this -- getting this little wink into their long-ago vulnerabilities, imagining our capable, competent friends flailing and shivering in the blue of the pool. I hated swim lessons too. I remember having to carry an egg in a spoon across the shallow end -- only I didn't. I couldn't. I was too afraid and sat on the side by my humiliated self while everyone else splashed around happily and dove after the eggs like they were filled with jelly beans and scattered across an Easter lawn. I associate my blue-lipped, chlorine-scented dread of swim lessons with the old ladies at the Y, the ones who were constantly organizing their puckered limbs into swimsuits and flowered caps, hair everywhere and nowhere all at once, while I sat on the bench, wrapped in a polka-dotted towel and a fluttery panic.

Lying with Ben now, I blame myself, of course. I shouldn't have lost my grip on him and let him bloop under the pond that one time when he was 2; I should have been more relaxed in the Cape Cod surf; I should have gotten a bikini wax. At least he can swim a little bit, even if this swimming looks like an impersonation of two dogs fighting over a biscuit in the water. I figure grace can come later. "So let's say no swim lessons this summer," I say to Ben in the dark, and he sits up to look at me, his eyes wide. "It's your greatest wish in the world, Ben, and we can make it come true. Just promise you'll work on your swimming with me and Dad instead." He promises and relaxes happily against me. I wonder what Michael will think of this idea. I know you're supposed to make your kids do the things that kids are supposed to do. But I think he'll think the same thing as me: that childhood is not merely a murky depth to be endured by holding your breath and floundering as long as you can. If your kids are generally thriving, can't you grant them an occasional reprieve from dread? I really don't know. Maybe, come September, Ben will claim that quitting school and living on Otter Pops is his one true wish, and where will we be then? But maybe there can be a little bit of grace right now.

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Swimming Hole

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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