A Simple Swim

I've taken up swimming at the YMCA pool. My midwife says she's never seen a woman have a difficult labor if she swam during her pregnancy and that is good enough for me. Now, mind you, I signed up for a Y pool membership months ago and just started going this week. I don't really have an excuse for the delay other than laziness and a general fear that I would look ridiculous in my giant maternity suit slobbing along while others in the adjacent lanes cut through the water like sharks. The fact that I was starting to get winded walking up the stairs in our house was what finally shamed me into going. And of course there was no reason for anxiety...on that first day, I shared the pool only with an ancient man who made me look like Michael Phelps and a frazzled-looking mother who swam her laps while dragging her little girl along with her (extra resistance, I guess??). I stuck my toe in, and the water wasn't too cold, a little murky and, judging from the smell, immensely chlorinated, but nothing I couldn't handle. I stood there for a second trying to figure out how to gracefully enter the pool, gave up, and just sort of flopped in like a frog. But once I hit that water, I was all sea lion. Water can be a pregnant woman's best friend...all that delicious weightlessness...and as I adjusted my goggles and pushed off from the wall I started my laps with a smile. Just a simple breaststroke to start, bobbing up and down, back and forth, legs scissoring, breath in through my mouth and out through my nose, all repetitive motions that bring everything into clear focus. Life is so simple underwater and so quiet. Your body is in charge and as I watched my arms slice through the water, I thought how strong they are...how much they have held. My little brother above my head in the ocean as the tide was moving in and we were about to go under waiting for help to get to us; my newborn sister, as I looked into her eyes and realized that the world would never end; the dog who slept under my crib and 16 years later died in my lap; my grandfather, when I knew it would be the last time I saw him. These two arms carry me through the water now, but they have also carried flower girl bouquets, and piles of kittens, and sandy children, and head shots, and resume tapes, and a wedding dress, and homemade Halloween costumes, and playbills and Thanksgiving turkeys and a million hopes and dreams and loves and heartaches. And soon they will carry my first baby. And someday my grandchildren. But on this day, they just drag this pregnant body through the water at a YMCA pool and that is enough.