One Perfect Swim
photo by Kelly Mayberry
The good news is the same as the bad news today. You will only get one perfect swim per child. For many reasons, a lot of parents won’t even get that. My Dad doesn’t swim, ergo no perfect swim. Some people work so hard to bring a child into this world and maybe that beautiful child doesn’t live long enough to get to her perfect swim. But me, I have two daughters and I’ll have total, two perfect swims. I had my last one August 9, 2025 at a cabin in Solon Springs, Wisconsin. That was with my younger daughter N, she’s five.
S is eight and my perfect swim with her was when she was five. Three years ago, Lake Lizzy in Minnesota by Pelican Rapids. The perfect swim comes from this alchemy that relies upon bravery, joy and dependency being meted out in exacting, but unmeasurable, proportions. It relies upon your child wanting something more than to cling to you, but wanting to use you as a home base so frequently that you might think it’s just clinging from a distance. It relies upon you wanting your child to swim away from you, but not too far and not too fast. You keep her so close that from a distance you might think it’s just clinging. . .but if you look close it’s a drawing out, it’s a bringing in. Her hand, still a little shivery from the cold water, holding and releasing your forearm while she kicks around, and while she looks at you. You loosen and you let her swim but your hand is at the ready, she will find your hand before she’ll find the absence of your hand if she goes looking. And she laughs and she talks. And then you don’t talk. You just tread. You laugh. You are a union. You are a union that I personally haven’t had as a father on dry land. I need nothing more than to hold her. She needs the same. Hours from now we’ll have a near perfect swim. But I will need something more than to hold her, I will tone down my dependency. She will too, she will bank on her bravery. We will be in a negotiation. It will be joyous. It will not be perfect. The bravery has moved from three parts to four parts, the dependency from two parts to one.
N splashes me always. Two weeks ago we were in the water and she splashed me too. It was at a water park, the water was warm, the splashes were timid. This weekend, we’ll be in Lake Superior and the splashes will be so arctic that I will be holding in a tirade of swears. But in Middle Eau Claire Lake in Solon Springs the splashes were comedic, refreshing and perfect. We play a game where I open my mouth as wide as I can and I start to talk and she splashes the water in my face. We make this strange eye contact. Eye contact like you had with your high school girlfriend for weeks two through three of your seven-week relationship when it was all new, and all familiar. In that water, I question why anyone bothered to invent a camera. The photo is useless. It doesn’t look like the moment unless the sun is drying your hair, unless the algae is low where you are and you are floating a little just for fun. The camera can never. The camera should never. I don’t think the perfectness can be recorded, and part of me is thankful for that. The part of me that is not thankful for that is writing this now, hoping that it can be recorded, if I remember it just right and if I tell the truth when I write.
I only realized there was one perfect swim when I swam with N this summer. When I swam with S three years ago, I figured this was just how swimming would be from here on out. She woke up early and she asked to go swimming. This had happened before but it would always be fits and starts. Maybe the water’s too cold. Maybe we can’t find the needed accessories. But that morning we went out with a floaty, and we stayed there for a long time, maybe thirty minutes. Floating, laughing, eye contact. S kept on wanting to go out a little further. She would ask if my feet could still touch. Her voice, her voice was just so different than it would be today. Her high pitched, on-the-eve-of-kindergarten voice; a joy and a curiosity so unbridled I imagine it would stay that way.
On these perfect swims, I was in a union wider and privater than I have found on solid ground. We were in harmony with everything, we were performing for no one, not even each other. I resented the idea of writing about it the minute the idea to write about it walked into my brain. I resented shaping the way I would tell you about it while it was happening. I softened on that. I started this blog to stop thinking about how I would later tweet or post about my life experiences. This blog worked. I don’t frame my life in tweets anymore. I frame it in these stories, in these images, on these screens. I start to think about one perfect swim and it fits one of my highest goals as a writer; can you read something for the first time that you’ve thought forever?
Why is it one perfect swim? Is it because of the blindingly fast pace of change that kids go through? Is it because of how often the lake is too cold, or the floaty has a hole in it, or because it’s too windy to be serene that weekend? Do I only have two perfect swims to give? I’m sure if we had a third or tenth child, I could dial up another swim for each of those babies. But maybe the cosmic and moral universe that the lake connects you with governs the amount of moments where you get to swim that close to the cosmos. What if you only get one perfect swim per child, because that is the only way it can be perfect? What if you only get one perfect swim per child, because it’s better to have to hunt for it? It’s better to long for it. It’s better to remember than to reenact it.