Learning to swim

This is a work in progress. I look forward to getting feedback! Too boring, too personal, too meh? Let me know.

January 28, 2026

I kneeled over the smooth concrete near the swimming pool, the hot summer sun blazing down on my back. Maybe the others were cajoling me to join them in the water, maybe not; I don’t remember. What I remember is looking at the asymmetrical holes in the smooth concrete, noticing how they turned a darker shade of gray as they sucked in the water that splashed over from the pool. I traced the holes and poked them with my small fingers, trying to see if my fingers would pick up any of the dampness. They didn’t. I was absorbed, as usual, in whatever I was thinking or doing at the time, cocooned in my own little world. 

I felt my mother’s hands on me, and suddenly I was underwater. I roiled under the pool’s surface, arms and legs flailing, trying to find up, trying to find air. As I struggled, I remember seeing my mother standing at the edge of the pool, watching me, a quizzical expression on her face. My older sister watched with an expression of resignation from a poolside chair. 

After what seemed like several minutes, a hand finally reached in and clutched me out of the water. My sister’s best friend pulled me out. She placed a towel across my shoulders, warmed me with her hands. I hunched over the concrete, shivering in the sun, gasping up water and trying to breathe. I don’t remember how long I was there. I don’t remember much more about that day, or what happened before or after I was in the water. I have a vague recollection of us all piling, silently, into my mother’s lemon colored Plymouth for the drive back home. 

I was about four years old. 

Since then, I have had a fear of deep water. I panic when my feet can’t touch the bottom. I have never learned to swim or to float.

This week, I went to my first swimming class. I am 54 years old. 

I lived in Utah as a child. Now I live in Finland. To get to my swimming class, I ran through the snow, sliding around, running late as usual, so that I arrived sweaty and breathless at the swimming pool. I immediately knew I was in the right place, with the right group. There were people of all shapes and sizes, all colors and ages. I am not even the oldest person in the class, as I was sure I would be. The majority of the people in the class are migrants to Finland, like me. They immediately started chattering away in their second language Finnish or the second English, or whatever language they share with others in the class. 

Some of the people are quite serious, for example the instructors, and I suppose that’s good. There are about 20 of us, and we wear all sorts of swimming costumes and gear, depending on our cultural background. The mood among the students is light and jovial, and we head towards the kids’ pool like a group of unruly children, causing the actual children in the kids’ pool to look at us with confusion before they reluctantly clear out. We collide with each other as we cling to our floating devices, flailing around in the water. One or two of the people are already clearly the swimming stars. After only two classes, they are able to swim laps. I try to stay out of the way of the stars, but it’s difficult with so many people in the pool. 

I thought I wouldn’t be able to swim at all, but I was wrong. Already on the first day, the instructor told me I was kicking well. I couldn’t believe it. Really, I can kick well? On the second day, the other instructor told me I am making progress, but the technique will take some time. Today I managed to swim several meters without touching the bottom with my feet. I am already looking forward to the next swim. 

I am still afraid of deep water, though, and I don’t know if I will manage in this class to face my fears.

I have always known I am not good at sports. I was first aware during a physical exam when I was in pre-school. The details are fuzzy, but I remember that there was a series of activities we had to do, and the teacher checked the items off on a list attached to her clipboard. My mother was there. At some point, the teacher instructed my mother to throw a giant ball toward me, a soft rubber ball almost the same size as me. I could not catch the ball. Instead, I shied away from it. We tried several times. I was not able to catch the ball. 

The teacher and my mother exchanged a look, and I felt a surge of shame run through me. How could I not manage to catch a giant ball? What was wrong with me?

I didn’t do sports at all during my childhood. I was most content when I was looking at bugs in the dirt, drawing pictures, playing with my toys, imagining things, making up stories. I liked being alone with my thoughts, because it was the safest space. When I was alone there were no older brothers to tease, cajole, make fun of me for being clumsy, or tell me I was a baby because I liked to watch Mr. Rogers Neighborhood on television.  

Growing up, other people assumed I was good at sports because I was tall with a lean body type. At school, my teachers tried to get me to do track and basketball because my older brothers were talented athletes in high school. I wasn’t good, though. I didn’t even learn to ride a bike until I was 10, and that’s because I finally got frustrated enough to teach myself. I pedaled up and down our street until I was able to stay upright on the bicycle, and my legs were full of scrapes and bruises from falling down.

I have always felt ashamed that I am not good at sports. I realize now that being bad at sports is like a confession that I spent my time alone as a child. There was a veil of shame about being the worst in PE, the last person selected for a team, not knowing how to float in water, not knowing how to swing a tennis racket or aim a basketball toward a hoop. It felt like releasing a dirty secret, it was like admitting that no one really spent time with me, that there was no one around who loved me enough or was patient enough to teach me and practice with me. It was also an admission that we were poor. Like other families in my hometown who had a stay-at-home mom, a dad who farmed, and many children, there was simply no money for expensive pastimes. My older brothers were good athletes, but it was probably different for them as boys. Some of them later admitted that they had joined sports teams in high school so that they could take a shower before going to school in the morning. We didn’t get a shower in our childhood home until 1980. Until then, it was only one bathroom, with one bathtub. For eight children. 

I thought it would feel heavy and oppressive to be in swimming class. I was not prepared for how joyous and light it feels. I chat away in bad Finnish with the other women in the class. There is a woman from Colombia who is short and friendly and asked me where I am from. Today I laughed and talked with a daycare worker from Turkey. They are there for the same reason as me: they have lived in Finland for so long now, and part of Finnish life is being comfortable in the water. So there we are, chattering away in Finnish, aiming to master a most critical facet of Finnish life: learning to swim. In a way, we are proving our dedication and willingness to be Finnish, to belong.

When I was six years old and started elementary school, I desperately wanted to learn to read. I yearned for the universe that reading and writing would open up. For years already in my short six years of life, I had been creating books on extra scraps of paper, illustrating them with my elaborate drawings and memorizing the stories in my head. I even tried to puzzle my way through how writing must be, using my own name – the only thing I knew how to write – as a basis for the sound and letter relationship. During the first week of first grade, we sat around formica tables on tiny chairs and learned how to read about Patricia and Bill and their cat. I had thought reading would be somehow mystical and elusive, that there would be some secret function to unlock. When I found out how easy it was to sound out the letters, I was shocked, and then I was angry. I was furious at my mother and my older siblings who already knew how to read and could have taught me, long ago. I felt cheated of all those books I had never read, for all those stories I had never written. It was wasted time that I would never get back. From the first grade onward, I read everything I could lay my eyes on. I ordered books from the Weekly Reader. I won the reading contest many times over. By the time I was ready to leave my middle school, the kind librarian was ordering in new books for me, as I had exhausted the previous collection. 

I wonder if that is how I will feel about swimming. Will I find out that there is no magical secret, that it’s just a matter of piecing the right parts together, like learning to read? Or learning to ride a bicycle? After 50 years of waiting, trying to find my courage, will I spend the rest of my life spending every possible moment in the water, just like I read every book in sight, once I realized that I could? I hope so.