Swimming Lessons in France Park
It is June 18th, 2012, and I am 35 years old today.
The day finds me at France Park in Logansport, Indiana with my two main accomplishments in life. We are swimming together in the lake or pond... it’s somewhere in between those two sizes. Actually, it’s an old stone quarry that was flooded when heavy equipment unearthed a natural spring. There is a beach on one side of the pond/lake where people sun bathe. That is my happy location as I write this.
I stick my feet out and touch sand. It’s a dark brown, coarse and rocky, and it tickles your feet when you walk on it like those strange Adidas sandals with the funky foot beds. There are fish in the water and fresh water snails that leave behind their shells when they die, so that little girls like mine can treasure hunt on the bottom of the lake.
All around the opposite edges of the water, rock walls jut up, creating a bowl effect. Trees grow precariously out of the sides and tops of the cliffs, defying gravity, it seems. The sky is clear blue and cotton-ball clouds laze across it. The round horizon makes everything look spherical, like we’re in one of those souvenir snow globes you might buy at the gas station. The sun is powerfully bright and warm, sending its light bouncing off every surface. It highlights the tree leaves and intensifies their green. A beautiful day.
I’m thrown into nostalgia every time I visit this place, but even more so today, on my birthday. My husband gave me a beautiful notebook to use when writing ideas strike, so I’m using it to capture my thoughts today.
I spent the last 4 years of my living-at-home-with-my-parents days in Logansport and I used to come here with friends from high school. I close my eyes and I can see the huge, black inner tubes that used to be available for rent here. I can see my friends floating on one, and I make my way to the inner tube, thankful that it’s there. I’m not the greatest swimmer and I’m thankful for something to support me in the water. I try with all my might to get up onto it like they are, hoping they won’t notice how oafish and graceless my movements are. Everything I do feels scrutinized. Everyone I know knows more than I do, has more friends, has thinner thighs and better hair than I do. I feel like I’m drowning in judgement for not being like them. My tape of rules plays in my head:
Don’t stick out, blend in.
Look uninterested.
Don’t care enough to get hurt, but do care some so they know you like them.
I pull myself up on the inner tube, careful how I sit so that the fat on the back of my thighs doesn’t spread out too much and look unacceptably big. I sit for a while, listening to them, trying to find a way to feel like I belong here with them. I get too warm and I plunge back into the water.
Back up again. I open my eyes.
The inner tubes are gone and it’s 21 years later.
Really, that’s how fast it’s gone.
I realize, now, that no one was really looking at my thighs. They were far more occupied with their own. We were all busy trying to hide our ugly... trying not to stick out, but at the same time, desperately wanting to be known... to be recognized as valuable.
Sometimes I don’t know if I’ve really won the battle with that little girl. She showed up today and told me to wear the cover-all, grandma suit I’m sporting. “Your thighs look fat in the one that actually fits,” she said.
Now, this grandma suit is growing as I swim, stretching out to immodest proportions. She was wrong again.
I do try to stifle her. She shuts up if I tell her to, but that requires realizing that she’s the one that’s talking.
I think about that little girl and the dreams she had 21 years ago. She was not very forward thinking. Not very “planning for the future.” Mostly, she spent every waking moment wanting a cute boy to notice her and validate her existence.
I’m reminded of this by a boy I see in the water not very far away from me. He has long hair and a sad excuse for a mustache/beard combo going on. My mother would have described him as a “horse face”. I’m struck with the fact that 21 years ago, I would have spent my entire time here trying to get him to notice me, dreaming up scenarios of him approaching me and asking for my phone number.
I hear him say to a friend, not quietly: “...yeah, I don’t know. Those are awful big t*%s for a dude.” (Sorry, mom, but that's what he said.) They laugh.
I see the object of his statement standing on the beach -- a girl. She’s wearing a gray tank top and green shorts. She has her hair in a buzz cut, like an army-man, like G.I. Jane. She has a sweet smile as she talks to the friends around her, and I’m ashamed that for a moment, I try to divine just by looking at her if she looks like that because of her sexual orientation or because she just likes her hair that way.
Who cares? What does it have to do with me, anyway?
And then, I’m repulsed to think that years ago, this boy in the water was the kind of guy I would have spent the day pining after, hoping he would notice, as though someone with an attitude like that could value or devalue me.
I tell God thanks for not always giving me what I want.
I notice another woman on the other side of the lake. She is sitting on the beach in a beach chair, staring blankly into the air. She’s been sitting there a long time. Periodically, she picks up a spray bottle and saturates her skin with some sort of homemade concoction that I can only assume is intended to make her tanned skin, well, tanner. Her hair is up in a sort of messy bun, sticking this way and that, straight up in some places and straight out in others. She’s probably in her 50’s, a bit overweight, but with foresight enough to wear her grandma suit today and cover it all. She wears a knee brace, and she moves slowly when she moves at all.
She stares and she drags on her cigarette. I wonder what her dreams were when she was younger and what thoughts are occupying her mind. She drags again, slowly, on her cigarette, sucking in the smoke and blowing it back out. I think that maybe that’s how time is passing for her. In and out, here, then gone, and not much was done with it while it was usable.
Suddenly, the nagging mother in me wants to know what I’m doing with the time I’ve been given. It’s a valid question.
The accusations of laziness increase as a girl walks by with the kind of body I’ve always felt I should have but will never attain. She’s equally thin on the top and the bottom, a rear like two hamburger buns -- not the super-sized ones, but the ones you get eight in a package for a dollar. Tiny. They tuck perfectly into her little black bikini.
Sigh.
If only I had kept running.
“Running can’t change your genetics.”
Shut up, Little Girl.
I think about my girls and how they’ll be women soon. I wonder if they’ll have these voices naturally or if I’ll just give them mine. I wonder if I’m capable of helping anyone into womanhood. Now, my insides are churning around with the full acknowledgement of my inadequacies.
I close my eyes and listen. The trees are singing the happy song they always sing when the wind blows through them. It’s such a comforting, hopeful sound for me. I think about how it’s one of the few sounds we hear today that has been around since people were on Earth to hear it. It saves me from the noise inside my head for a moment. The churning stops enough for me to open my eyes again.
A large man is walking by. He is tall and tan and his arms must have been all muscle once. His long, graying goatee, his almost bald head and his love handles suggest he’s getting older, but I think that’s a deception. He looks like he’s young in age but old in body; like life has been hard on him... or maybe he’s been hard on him. He turns around to reveal his back, covered in a huge tattoo of a gothic-style cross. Over the top and under the bottom of the cross are the words, “ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME.”
“I bet he’s an ex-con, or a drug addict or something,” I think. And then the irony of my judgement sinks in. Ugh.
But then, something else begins to sink in: The truth in that statement.
ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME.
I’m reminded of the message of the cross. The judgement belongs to Him. And He declares me innocent because of His sacrifice. I begin to feel some comfort... the only kind that calms the insecure little girl and silences the nagging mother. The kind that reminds me that my feelings of inadequacy are mostly silly, because the truth is, I am known, chosen, adopted, and accepted by the only One whose opinion counts. That truth motivates me, strengthens me, moves me.
My Daddy looks at me with delight.
Even if I sit wrong and my thighs flare out...
Even if I wear myself out running after unfulfilling, incomplete things...
Even if I spend my time unwisely...
He loves me. He loves me enough to comfort me and enable me to change.
So good.
I’ve had fun today, swimming with the girls. I remember my former fear of the water. Whenever I swim, I hear my brother, Scott's, voice pipe in from the past: “Sarah, you have to quit fighting the water. It will hold you. You have to trust the water. Just lay back and float.”
I remember times of striving, of kicking and thrashing, thinking that mad activity was the key to staying afloat in God’s grace and mercy for me. All of it served to show me I’m completely helpless.
I will never perfect in this life, but I’m being changed from glory to glory. I am surrounded, supported, surrendered to grace. His grace will hold me. I just have to trust it.
I’m 35 years old today... and my Daddy is still teaching me how to swim.
