The Swimmer?

So, why do I call myself the swimmer here?

First, because I wanted my handle to not include my name.

Second, because so many of my roles right now are in relation to what I am to someone else: daughter, wife, mother, resident of, etc.

I wanted to choose something that refers to a skill and passion that is pure me.

Swimming is quite literally one of those. I swim several times a week (or intend to!). In winter I swim in the pool at the gym, in summer, at our lake beaches. I just recently took it up again (before my 2 year old son was born) from a passion that I had as a teenager, but had left behind in my rush to build my career in NY in my 20's. BTW, swimming pregnant was an unforeseen delight - I could feel my son as a baby moving from side to side in my belly as I stroked, and at each end of the pool, he and I flipped together. Best of all, I felt weightless every time I got in!

Just as importantly, though, for this evolving blog, swimming is a great metaphor for what I've done all my life: plunged into new cities, new cultures, new circles of friends, to breathe in and out, and make my way through a new environment, emerging often much stronger and with a new richness to the oxygen in my blood.

As Claudia said in The Mixed Up Files of Ms. Basil E. Frankweiler, one of my favorite books as a kid, she wanted to come back, not differently (as in by taxi instead of by bus), but different. That's what the best kind of travel does for you. It gets in your skin; changes the way you look at everything you saw so clearly before.

I guess I must like this feeling, of coming back different. I did it when I visited France as a teenager, living with a family for several weeks though I barely spoke french. I did it as a college student stepping from my comfort zone in a large northeastern city into the bucolic but quite stratified world of a large southern university. I did it when living in Strasbourg, France for my junior year of college, and then again while travelling through Yugoslavia, Portugal Alaska, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates in my 20's. I did it when moving to Washington, DC after college. And I did it three more times, moving to New York city when I knew no one, moving to Brooklyn, where I lived for 7 years, and moving to the far off suburbs in Setauket, Long Island. And now moving here, to central Virginia.

Each time, I note, the same coping skills have supported me. I observe a lot. I find a core grroup of interested and interesting folk to help guide me through the new norms and intuit new ways of acting. I do translations of what people say to what they really mean. Language is not the real barrier, I find; culture is. I try to keep my core values clear, but open myself to other contexts that drive to other ways of acting on values. I try not to judge immediately, before I decide what to accept and what to reject.

This new lake life is just another phase of that plunging in, I am sure. It is invigorating to feel the rush of the unfamiliar, and also reassuring to establish daily routines. What's different this time is that I have a partner. My husband of three years and I embarked on this particular pool together. We picked up our life, our incredible amount of stuff, and our year old son last year and declared we were moving for our quality of life. We both do most of our work virtually, so why shouldn't we choose a place we love to live and work?

We chose a place from which I can commute to NY in 3 hours, when necessary, but where housing, insurance, and health care were all half price compared to where we were. And we created a parenting model that I now see as much more unique than it seemed at the time. We both work, from home, and we both parent our son. As nearly equal partners, at least on the childcare front. Our paid work, we do separately, though I help him with his second business, a children's photography business, and he helps me with my consulting work by being my custom database programmer. But when it comes to Jake, we both do baths, we both dress and feed, we both discpline, amuse and get jumped on, we both get thrilled at every new word and new step and we both get very, very tired.

The good news is that my husband and I bring our routines with ourselves and our child wherever we go. We do our laps. We mark time. We laugh, love, cry, fight and stew. We lay awake at night, pondering. We sleep soundly, sewing the actions of our busy days into our dreams.

The challenge for me as a sole swimmer is that we are also doing all the new place coping for the first time together. One could say we found an incredible child-friendly community and we have lots of new friends. One could also say we are new york liberals in a conservative southern culture that can be quite conformist. We try to focus on the former. We observe others and try to take the best of what we see and make it our own. We put up walls against values and behavior we do not approve of or want to bring into our lives, without even trying.

We admire this particular piece of the earth and the incredible natural beauty it brings to us every day. We take notes on the things that don't work so well and intend to incorporate them into the list of don'ts for the next gig. We try to live in the moment as much as possible, to enjoy the bliss of watching a young child grow. Isn't that what we all yearn to do, whatever we do, wherever we go - enjoy the good moments?

So anyway, when I met my husband, even though he grew up on a very large island (Long Island), I was amazed to learn that he had never learned to swim. The first summer in our home there I taught him to float and swim in our pool. I can safely say he is learning and I am relearning how to do a double stroke in a vast new pool.