I was guided recently to envisioning parenting, at any stage of life, to falling in a pool of water. When our child is playing by the side of the pool or learning how to swim and we’re standing by watching them, and they slip and fall in, what happens to us? How do we respond? These were the questions posed to me.

(What you need to know about me here is that I don’t swim and like my brother constantly reminds me about his relationship with bodies of water, “I drown well”, I could say the same for myself. I somehow feel my head is heavier than the rest of my body while I’m in a pool, just waiting to anchor me to the bottom.)

This is how I work with these kinds of questions that come up in a given scenario – I think up multiple options and then pick the one that would most suit me in that particular situation, just to be prepared. And this conversation caused me to think of some options that I would seriously need to consider if the mentioned scenario were to ever happen.

And, it was something I needed to think about immediately, with one child starting actual swimming lessons and another with a terrible fear of water (well, she’s scared of all the elements and that’s a completely different topic altogether, for another time).

Here were the options that presented itself to me.

Option # 1) I could help them out and assure them they would never slip and fall in again because I wouldn’t let it happen again even if I had to keep my eye and voice on them for every second that they were out there.

Mind you, this has happened before with my oldest due to her lack of fear and her total and complete love for all water bodies. She was at a friend’s house and she jumped in the adult pool just so. There were adults around, and she did swallow some water but she was fine! This was one of the reasons I wanted her to learn how to swim.

Living on an island like Bahrain, there’s water all around us, and not even like at the pretty beaches in the UAE. Just regular island beaches. And I’m always worrying she might call the waves her friend one day and try to swim away. She’s past that age now but sometimes I still fear. And, ‘Moana’ hasn’t helped. Apart from the water all around us, almost every house and building here has an attached pool as well.

Option # 2) I could help them out and assure them that they will NEVER slip and fall in again because they won’t ever be coming back to the pool. This would definitely count as a lie though especially since anywhere we go, there’s going to be a pool and am I going to keep her away from pool parties once she makes friends? Am I going to be locking the kids up at home any time soon and throwing away the keys, just to keep them safe? I doubt it. If there’s anything our recent pandemic experience has taught me, it is to not take our freedom of being outside for granted.

Option # 3) I could help them out and assure them that there is a chance that they may fall in again but that’s ok because even if they did, I would be right there looking out for them and making sure that they were fine plus I’d tell them to be more careful in the future and to learn what not to do from that experience of falling in – like, how did they fall in in the first place? Maybe not repeat that to avoid it from happening again.

Thinking back to when my oldest child started her swimming lessons, which was only approx. a month or so ago, during her very first lesson, the first 20 minutes in, I watched on as she struggled through it. As I had mentioned earlier, she loves water and she loves the pool. There’s very little in her life that frightens her and when she is scared she usually hides it extremely well. And these first few long minutes, I could just feel the stress emanating from her. I could see the strain on her face and in her movements. I ached for her. I was plagued with ‘what if’ thoughts. What if she never wanted to go back in again? What if she didn’t want to learn anymore after this one lesson? What if I was assisting in creating a childhood trauma against the pool for her? What if I was turning her against one of her most favourite experiences?

I wanted to pull her out, wipe her dry and hold her. I wanted to promise her that I wouldn’t do this to her again, that I wouldn’t put her through a similar struggle. I wanted to tell her that she could just continue to play in the pool and enjoy being a child in there. The mother in me ached for her. But the parent in me, another voice that I needed to hear as well reminded me that I needed to let her do this and tell me how she felt at the end of the lesson. I needed to see her pull herself through, that the physical struggle I was witnessing was a part of her journey as much as this emotional struggle I was experiencing was a part of mine. And she deserved the freedom to feel and decide if she wanted to continue or if she didn’t. Me, deciding that for her would have been stealing her of that right, her birthright to be able to choose.

But it was still a hard battle of thoughts for me – did I force her into these lessons? Did I need to right now? But I also knew that she loved the pool and I was constantly worried that she would jump in whenever the opportunity arose and how important it was to teach her how to do it right, right? As a mom who cannot swim to save my life, I wanted her to be safe, to be able to save herself if I couldn’t do that for her.

Which brings me to option # 4 – swimming lessons! Swimming gear! Making sure they are well equipped with the necessary gear and skill to keep them safe during a fall in the pool would help them even more than anything else I could do.

My oldest, in her swimming lessons, she needs her goggles to protect her eyes from the chlorine in the pool and so that she can see clearly enough when she’s under water, her floaties or her swimming board to help her stay above the water till she can do without them and her cap to keep her hair from getting wet so she doesn’t fall sick after. Aren’t these the same kind of protective gear we need when we’re out in the world?

I do understand how easy it seems to be able to decide which options best suit me and mine – maybe even a combination of a few – in theory. In practise though, it feels like a whole different board game!