Floating

I have a pool in my back yard. I love having a pool in my back yard. I feel very fortunate to have it. It is nothing fancy – not one of those new pools with waterfalls, and stone walls and Vegas-style statues. There is no cabana, no outdoor pizza oven, no movie screen. It is just a pool with a splintery deck and acorn stains on the bottom, but I love it.

As a kid, I dreamed about having my own pool. I was a swim team rat who spent every day of every summer at the neighborhood pool. The seat in my bathing suit would wear out and need to be patched from hours spent perched on the concrete edge waiting for adult swim to end. I was a superstar at sharks and minnows and could swim underwater nearly 50 yards without coming up for a breath. I could dunk any boy who dared to challenge me. I had tan lines from goggles and permanently pruned fingers. I loved the pool.

When I was in high school, we didn’t have enough money to have a pool membership, so I would lay out in the back yard on top of a picnic table with a sprinkler to keep me cool. When I got really desperate, I swam in a questionable lake. In college, at the first sign of spring, I would head to the nearby river and lay out on the rocks. My first apartment had a pool that was only slightly larger than some people’s walk-in closets, but I thought it was fabulous.

When my husband dragged me out to the country to see the house he wanted to buy, I hated it. It was an hour away from our condo and all of our friends. I would have to commute more than an hour into the city. The house itself looked like Mike Brady had built it. The shag carpet was gone, but the groovy Brady vibe was still way too strong for my liking. Then, he showed me the pool. Sold!

The first summer, I was working crazy hours at a new job and travelling a lot. The pool was my escape, my therapy. I could lay on a float, turn off my brain and let the rays soak in. Perfection.

The next summer, I was pregnant and I loved the relief of floating in the cool pool. The house is in the middle of nowhere, so I could tan my enormous belly in private and just float. I could also arrange noodles and floats to create the semblance of lying on my stomach – something I obviously could not do while pregnant and have yet to be able to do since. The pool was my savior from a very hot August with an 8-month pregnant belly. Laying on a float with my feet dangling into the water was pure heaven.

Then, I had a baby and the pool transformed overnight into a big cement sinkhole of stress. We immediately put up a new fence to make sure the kid didn’t crawl out of the kitchen door and end up face down in the pool. This is something that could have easily happened to any of our visiting friends in a drunken stupor, but we also let them wrestle on the floats and do cannonballs onto one another. As a parent, everything obviously changed. I had to be constantly on guard when we were near the water. I learned that there was no relaxing at the pool with a baby, or a toddler, or a young child. Even now that my daughter has been on swim team herself, I have to keep guard.

It took awhile, but I think I’ve finally got the hang of pool life as a parent. The nagging stress is gone, and I have grown to love the pool in a new, very different way. It is fun to watch the kids walk on their hands and do cannonballs (at safe distances from one another) and reach the bottom of the deep end to get diving sticks. I love being surrounded by friends and “entertaining” without having to cook anything or even clean the house. So long as the pool vacuum and chemicals do their job, I am party-ready.

But, the days of sitting poolside with a book are gone. If I do manage to get onto a float, it isn’t long before someone is splashing me or crawling on to my lap or trying to capsize me. I only have one child, who is finally old enough to not want to hang on me all the time, but her friends view any grownup in the pool as their caregiver and/or splash target. And, since most of their parents have a younger child who demands most of their attention, I am more often than not, the lifeguard, diving board contest judge, snack-fetcher and bathroom assistant. Still, I love it.

Last summer, I had the rare chance to enjoy my pool alone. My daughter didn’t want to swim. Friends were all off elsewhere. It was a beautiful, clear and sunny day. I reasoned that just because my daughter didn’t want to swim didn’t mean I should miss the opportunity. I had been on Supermom-duty all week, including a sleepover the night before. We had played Sorry and paraded stuffed animals. I had successfully wrestled three kids into bed before 10:30, and, in the morning, I played Mystery Date with the five-year-old while the older kids played Life. We baked chocolate chip cookies from scratch, fished for minnows in the creek and did other wholesome things. I had earned an hour or so in the pool, right?

So, I got my book and I went out. I read for a bit but quickly decided I should enjoy the water. I got on a float, looked up at the sky and enjoyed the feel of the hot sun on my skin and the cool water on my feet. I watched the water bead up on my legs, noticing how my new cocoa butter was an excellent moisturizer. I was pleased with myself for trying the stuff straight rather than settling for lotion with cocoa butter added. This stuff was much better straight up. I thought I should treat myself to a pedicure because my feet looked awful, but then I felt guilty for thinking of spending $30 on my ugly feet. Stop looking at your feet.

The trees looked beautiful, lush and green. They must be 80 or 100 feet tall, really tall. A few months earlier, we had a large one taken down for fear it would fall on our house and kill us all. There were ants living in it. I saw them. I have seen what ants can do to a tree that looks completely healthy and then just snaps in half in a good storm. The tree guys didn’t want to take it down. Looked like a good tree to them. I knew better. I was the one living under its threatening canopy of doom. My husband finally got sick of me worrying and we found another tree guy to take it down. The neighbor called the day they took it down to say she was sad to see us kill such a nice tree. We have hundreds of nice trees. Literally hundreds. We live in an oak forest. This tree had lived a full life, and now it was its time to go. As I lay there floating, I remembered the neighbor’s call and again felt awful for killing this wonderful old creature (the tree, not the neighbor), but then I pictured the stump. The hollowed out center was evidence of the ants’ destruction and the tree’s killing capacity. I got off my float to look at it again to ease my guilt. Stop thinking about the trees. Enjoy cocoa butter beads, feel the sun, relax.

I got back on the float. I deserved some time to relax, right? Remember, the cookie-baking and the minnow-fishing? I told myself to let myself enjoy the pool for an hour.

What’s an hour? At my old billing rate, an hour was some serious cash. I should really reach out to some of my old work colleagues for more freelance work. I do so much volunteer work though — too much volunteer work, really. Why do I work for free? Well, the work I do now is for my kid’s school, so I should feel good about that. I am helping kids. I am helping over-privileged kids at a private school.

More guilt.

Relax, feel the water. Splash it on to yourself. I should go pee.

I don’t pee in pools. And, I certainly don’t pee in my own pool. I’m pretty sure the little kids who get blamed for peeing in pools are not the ones who actually do pee in pools. They don’t learn that they can get away with it until later. My daughter’s friends never go into the house to pee anymore. Their little brothers and sisters still do. Does that mean the big kids are all peeing in here? What about the parents? Did I add enough chlorine yesterday?

I don’t pee because I get caught for everything, always have. As a kid, I totally believed there was a chemical that changed color when someone peed. I’m pretty sure that if they didn’t have it then, they do now. They showed it in a movie, so someone has to be at least working on it as an invention. I don’t want to be the one to set that off and be left swimming in a cloud of pee-triggered green dye! I also don’t like the idea of peeing through my bathing suit. At the ocean, the dark water provides the privacy needed to pull your bathing suit aside. Everyone pees in the ocean, right? It smelled like pee yesterday. I wonder who that was. I know I added more chlorine after I smelled that. Relax.

I looked at my watch. It had only been 20 minutes. Really, you can’t relax for 20-minutes? Try harder. I got out and read a chapter in my book. I decided to not read any grown-up books that summer. They are so depressing – stories of loss, pain, cruelty of mankind. I pledged to leave that all behind for a summer to read Harry Potter and other things my daughter was reading. I should know what she is reading, right? Some of it is fun, but it isn’t gripping, so I got back into the pool and tried swimming.

The bathing suits I wear now are designed more to hide a pudgy figure than they are for swimming. Attempting to swim butterfly was both exhausting and high risk for suit loss. A year earlier, after a couple of glasses of wine, I tried doing a flip off the diving board for the first time in my life. I was a pool rat as a kid, but flips were way too scary. I was terrified of hitting my head on the board. That kind of fear goes away quickly with the right amount of alcohol. It was awesome doing that first flip just a few months shy of turning forty. I have done it now and again since (without wine) and it is still fun, but this day, I had no audience, so there would be no flips. Just float.

My favorite pool float is kind of like a chair. You sit almost upright with your rear in a mesh hammock surrounded by a tube. There is a backrest and cup holder. I didn’t have a drink. A drink would have been nice. I drink too much.

The sun felt great. I pulled up my top to expose my huge belly. Not as huge as nine years earlier, but still not meant to see the light of day. That is one of the joys of living in the country — no witnesses. The sun felt great.

I should do this more often. I should exercise more often. Tomorrow is my day to start up again. I have the perfect new exercise DVD that gives maximum results. There is no reason not to do it. I feel better when I am working out. Well, not while I am actually working out, but in general, in those spurts of life when I am committed to some routine, I generally feel better. Then why do I stop? I am a slack sack of dough. What am I doing floating here in the pool? I should at least swim some laps. The pool isn’t really big enough for laps. Just start the DVD tomorrow. Now, you should relax.

Forty minutes had passed. Wow, almost an hour of quiet floating with no interruptions. Enjoy it. I still had to pee. I knew that if I went inside, I would run into my husband or child and one of them would need something. Or, I would see the dishes still in the sink from the cookie-baking and take ten minutes to deal with them. Doing dishes would remind me of all the other things I said I would do over the summer and hadn’t started. I need to clean the garage. I need to purge a bunch of toys and go through the basket of school papers and finish the scrapbook from 2005. I love my new Mac because I can make a photo album in 30 minutes. Gone are the days of printing and pasting and all of that, but I still have 2005 to finish – the last year before my delayed switch to digital. Wait for a rainy day. Float. I love my new Mac. I should update my Facebook status to say “Jan is enjoying a rare solitary float.” That would require going inside. Don’t spoil it.

I tried to lay on my stomach. It hurt. I have some back problem that I should really see a doctor about. — that and some pain in my heel. It is probably just old age, or bone spurs or cancer. It is one of those. The Internet is a very helpful diagnostic tool. I should go to a doctor. Right now, I should really get out to pee. Ick – look at those toes! Forget the doctor. Get a pedicure. That would really be relaxing.