Three weeks ago, Liz and I had one of those parenting moments that paused us in our tracks and made us question the next right thing to do. Most of the time we go about parenting in the best way we know how, without much second thought to our actions, realizing that sometimes we are going to screw it up, sometimes we will be acceptable/passable, and occasionally, we will crush this parenting game. I would say recently we’ve felt more like we are screwing it up than crushing it. Christian is 5 now and hasn’t quite outgrown his hostage negotiation situations with our family. Gabe has been having night terrors on and off since February and has been sleeping in our bed for 2 months. And McKay, who is mainly our steady eddy LOVES to tease and antagonize his brothers. Most dinners involve burps, farts, and talks of butts, poop, or balls. And recently we haven’t been able to go places without them turning said event: picnic, concert in the park, beach trip into a WWE match.
Back in March we signed McKay up for a Jr. Lifeguard prep class. While Liz and I grew up swimming on swim teams, maybe a very east coast thing, our boys have never really learned to swim strokes. This prep class had 6 sessions of swimming and was a crash course in qualifying for the Jr. Guards (JGs). The swim test for JGs consists of a 100m swim (4 lengths of the pool) at 1:50 or less. McKay’s first prep class he swam a 2:40 or 2:50. His 6th class he swam a 2:05 so we knew he had to use some adrenaline to shave the remaining time. The day of the test we arrived and he was nervous so they offered to have him practice a bit in another pool. He put his forearm on the edge of the pool during practice and got stung by a bee. The odds did not seem in our favor. Liz convinced him to swim despite his weepiness and he qualified at a 1:45! He qualified, but just barely.
I should say, I’ve been the one pushing this Jr. Guard agenda. I wanted him to get this experience & to learn to ocean safety. Once we knew he had qualified Liz started following JGs on Instagram and became full blown obsessed. McKay seemed into it too because a bunch of his friends were also signed up, but I don’t think he fully understood what he was getting himself into. He missed the first 2 days of JGs because of when school let out so his first day was Friday June 17. Liz dropped him off and I picked him up.
At pickup I was super excited to hear how it went. “How’d it go babe?” “Was it so awesome?!” “Did you love it?” Not leading questions at all… He seemed to have had fun but told me that he was scared during the ocean swim, tried to go back at one point, and sucked in a lot of salt water on the way back in. They do these ocean swims every day where they swim out past the sets of waves to a buoy and then back in.
We very much underestimated how he would respond to these swims. After all, he’d been swimming in the Pacific since we moved here when he was 4, he surfs, boogie boards, and dives under waves. But it’s WAY different to swim, knowing your feet can’t touch the bottom for an extended period of time. We were at a lacrosse tournament all weekend on June 18-19 so there wasn’t much time to think about the looming ocean swim at JGs on Monday. But the Sunday scaries set in big time that night. On Monday morning he couldn’t eat breakfast and was mopey. Liz dropped him off and texted me: “I don’t know if he’s going to swim today.” Liz and I knew that refusing to swim meant he couldn’t participate in all of the events and that he wouldn’t graduate.
Liz went to the beach (in her hat, sunglasses, and mustache – ha!) to see if she could watch from the Strand and she saw him go sit with another set of kids instead of going in the water with his group. So we knew he hadn’t gone through with it. She and I talked about what to do and how to handle it at pickup. She joked that she wasn’t as good at these moments as me and that she was worried “Joe Drennan” (her dad) would take over. On one hand we didn’t want him to quit because quitting begets quitting and all that. And on the other hand, we didn’t want him to have regrets and not know what it would feel like to conquer a fear. On another hand (yeah, so 3 hands), we didn’t want to push him if his internal decision-making system was telling him ‘no, don’t do this, it’s dangerous and I don’t want to do it’.
I was at war with myself and Liz with herself …on one side we are athletes who don’t quit (and we don’t raise quitters, we raise winners — haha – Just kidding Megan L). And on the other side, for me at least, is a soft mom who has Glennon Doyle’s voice was in the back of my head. During her book Untamed she talks about how she got pissed at the jewelry store worker who was piercing her daughter’s ears because they told one of her daughters to ‘be brave’ like her sister and just get her ears pierced. She writes “That is not the understanding of brave I want my children to have. I do not want my children to become people who abandon themselves to please the crowd. Brave does not mean feeling afraid and doing it anyway. Brave means living from the inside out. Brave means, in the every uncertain moment, turning inward, feeling for the Knowing, and speaking it out loud.” So I struggled with, is this McKay’s “knowing” and should we trust his gut on this?
Liz and I stopped work early that Monday, we packed our beach stuff, and we went into the water with McKay. We brought Gabe, McKay’s ocean buddy for as long as I can remember living here. We ducked under waves. I thought the key was to get back onto the horse, to not let the next time he braved the ocean be at another scary JG swim the next morning. But McKay was not himself, he didn’t go in very far, he said he was cold and wanted to get out. This boy, the one who spent a million hours in the Pacific, wanted to go get his towel and sit on the blanket. I didn’t know what to do.
Liz and I decided we weren’t going to make it a big deal anymore and we were just going to tell him we loved him and that we would love him no matter what he did and we would figure it out together. We told him that the decision had to come from him. Before bed I told him I believed in him, I said: you are the kid that taught himself to skateboard, that learned to surf, that picked up the long pole 1 minute before a lacrosse tournament and gave it a shot, you’ve never met anything you couldn’t do. But the truth is I was scared that we were pushing him to much and not nudging him enough at the same time.
I barely slept that night. I had to leave at 5am the next morning to catch a flight to the East Coast. I went into his room and kissed his head and told him I loved him knowing that he sleeps so soundly that he wouldn’t hear me. I felt even more helpless from the air, but I was in constant text contact with Liz. I texted McKay twice that morning on his Gizmo watch that I loved him so much and that I was proud of him. And I texted him a Michael Jordan quote. He never responded to either.
Liz texted me after she dropped him that he had called her crying saying he wasn’t going to swim and that the instructor was going to need to talk to us. Then he called her back 10 mins later, no longer crying, and said, Mama, I’m going to swim. Then there was nothing, no contact for 2 hours, maybe less, but it felt like 10 hours. She texted again from pickup and said she saw McKay on the beach standing back near one of the instructors and that his body language “didn’t look promising.” Ugh, we wanted this so badly for him, but we can try again next year (if he wants). I also had a lot of mom guilt and remorse thinking I pushed this on him too soon and that if I had waited it wouldn’t have gone this way for him.
I was on my layover in Atlanta, waiting to board again, when my phone rang. It was Liz’s number and I answered apprehensively. “Hey babe”. Then I heard McKay’s sweet little voice on the other line: “Moooommmmmy….I did it!” And then, despite my best efforts, security did not come escort me out of the boarding line. “oh my God, oh my goodness….McKay!!!! I’m so proud of you!” as I cried and fist pumped. He said, ‘I didn’t want to regret not trying Mommy’, so I just did it. McKay, always our old soul.
The truth is, I don’t know what made him swim that day. It could have been our parenting…the way we resisted our natural inclination which would have been to tell him to suck it up and just do it. It could have been that he always knew he could do it and just needed to prove it to himself. It could have been his instructor Mona, who seems firm but supportive, or the other kids encouraging him. We may never know. What I do know is that he showed himself what he was capable of on Tuesday June 21st. And I know how happy he is every day we drop him off and pick him up now. “I saw a ray swimming below me today.” “I came in 15th today in the run”, “we did the horseshoe swim today”, “the cadets said this today mom.” I love picking him up and hearing all about it. Yesterday he swam under the Manhattan Beach Pier and didn’t flinch. Today is his last day and he’s sad for it to end but he’s already talking about how next year he’s going to show Gabe the ropes. I’m so grateful he’s had this experience.
Liz ran across an article the other day about a kid with Down Syndrome who became a LA County Jr Guard and she sent me the quote from the article that couldn’t sum it up any better: “The first JG summer serves as a right of passage, severing the tethers to their parents. The ocean most of their parents are afraid to step foot in becomes first their testing ground, then their playground.” (Kevin Cody, Easy Reader, July 2015). I think McKay will remember this forever. I certainly think Liz and I will. In a time where I feel like we are failing more than we are winning, I’m taking this parenting win to the bank. I hope that when McKay is faced with a scary uncertain situation, he reaches deep down into himself and he knows what he’s capable of, and trusts his “knowing”.