Swimming Part 2

Clara loves the pretzel slide at the Y. She pointed at it and shouted. She pulled on the front of my bathing suit and grasped the sides of my face with her hands, yelling, "Mommmmyyyy! Mommy!" It was completely undeniable that she wanted to go down the slide.

We have gone down the slide before. The sign above the slide says kids can go down when they turn one. I took her down at eleven and a half months, because it looked like so much fun. That first time, I lost my footing when we came out the end, and we ended up on the bottom of the pool, with me holding Clara like a football. When we broke the surface, I was shaking with adrenaline, but she was merely surprised. All of the other parents stared at us and smiled.

"What the heck?" I remembering sputtering to a Dad nearby. "The suction on the bottom of that thing is unbelievable." My sympathetic nervous system had kicked in. I felt like an Iraqi war veteran.

He merely smiled at me placidly. "Mmmmmm...You have to hold the kid up when you come out the end. Otherwise it'll suck you right under."

When I was younger, and before I had Clara, I did all sorts of crazy things. Rock-climbing hundred-foot basalt cliffs. Reporting stories from extremely dangerous housing projects. Driving motorbikes at high speeds through the desert without a helmet. Now the thought of that kiddie pretzel slide at the Y made my heart pound. I could have dropped her at the bottom!!! Was I a terrible mother, for taking my baby down the slide???!!!!

But Clara wanted to go down. And you have to face your fears, right? So we took our place in line with a bunch of skinny nine and ten-year-olds in baggy swim trunks and bikinis. The boys kept doing all sorts of nefarious things, like pushing each other and, that most heinous of crimes, running on the wet concrete. The lifeguards blew their whistles. Since I was standing amidst them, I jumped. Was I in trouble? Did they know me from last time, when I took my poor baby for a log-roll at the bottom of the slide?

All the way up the stairs, Clara shrieked and giggled at the people going down the slide, while I clutched her wriggling, wet body tightly. We finally got to the top. My face felt numb with fear and one of my arms was twitching.

Clara began to have second thoughts.

Wait, we're going down there? I don't want to go down there, her body language seemed to say.

"I just stood in a line of obnoxious 'tweens for ten minutes, freezing my ass off. We're going down the slide," I said, sitting her on my lap and pushing off. Clara hollered in fear all the way down. Not the piercing shriek of a little girl, but the low, guttural cry of a WWE wrestler. I clenched my teeth and said, "It's okay, honey! Isn't this fun? Yay!!!"

When we came shooting out the bottom, I held her up so high her feet didn't even touch the water.