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6 INLANDER AUGUST 26, 2021
DOWNTOWN SPOKANE AT MAIN & POST
Does Your Mother Know?
You gotta jump back in the pool.
Often, she doesn’t BY TARA ROBERTS
D
uring the skills test on the first day of swimming lessons, my younger son refuses to backfloat. The instructor tries to ease the back of D’s head into the water and the kid curls up like a leggy armadillo. D is demoted from his class, escorted to the shallow end of the pool, to a pod of kids half a foot shorter than he is. He is a dejected character in a Peanuts comic, head flopping, shoulders bent, eyes downcast. He sobs the whole way home. He is never, ever going back. That evening, my husband and I talk him into agreeing to give lessons one more shot. We
want him to learn to swim. I couldn’t do much more than dog-paddle until my 30s; my husband still sinks like a rock. D, just shy of his 10th birthday, needs this essential life skill. Needs to be better than us. The next morning, I hear D crying in his room.
He is not going. “Let’s just go to the pool and see how it goes,” I say. “Get your swim trunks on. Please.”
