On a typical Monday, I took my boys to their weekly swim lessons. When we arrive, we do all the routine things—the kids have to take off their school clothes, put on their swimsuits, pile it all into a bag, shove their jackets and shoes into a cubby, and go potty. All of this takes a good 15 minutes, or if we’re running late, it’s more like four minutes with a dash of me yelling, “Focus!!” and another dash of “Stop throwing your underwear over the stall!”
Once the novice swimmers are in their swim gear, we head to the pool. On this particular Monday, however, the moment Toby steps into the water and sits on the step, a manager swiftly comes by our lane and tells all the kids, “We need to evacuate the pool—the water isn’t safe right now.”
It’s in this moment that I realize there’s a lot of commotion. It doesn’t feel like anything life-threatening has occurred, such as someone drowning. I wonder if somebody’s glass bottle broke on the pool deck. Within seconds, I spot a young, ebony-skinned swim instructor with a blue net, scooping little brown bits out of the baby area of the pool. I think to myself that that’ll be a story he tells his friends.
With the order to evacuate and an announcement that the pool is not going to reopen for some time, our swimming lessons have been canceled.
For a fleeting moment, I had the sense of being thoroughly inconvenienced. Didn’t they know that I was a busy working mom, having rushed out of work to get the kids early, pre-planned all the swim necessities, and remembered the snacks and water bottles—only for the lessons to be canceled?!
But no sooner had that thought passed than I looked over and saw my sons. My eldest son was taking it all in, deducing that the word “evacuate” means to get out of the pool. And my younger son was standing there, dripping wet from that brief moment in the pool, still trying to fit his darned goggles on.
Everything up until this moment—every price paid in time and in swimming fees—was a sunk cost (pun intended!). So, instead of settling into my own sense of entitlement, I refocused my attention.
I explained to my kids that there wouldn’t be any swim lessons today and, not surprisingly, was met with their disappointment and confusion. I switched from mode: parent who just chauffeured her kids to swim lessons to mode: sometimes a baby poops in the water, and you have to evacuate.
It was a good lesson for us all. My support for my six-year-old was in answering each of his undulating questions, helping him understand. Altogether, I explained the mechanics of the water vacuum, the chemicals used in the pool, and the precise reasons that made infant feces a danger. For my 4.5-year-old, it was helping him cope with his overwhelming sense of disappointment, acknowledging his sad feelings, and not taking it personally when he redirected his sadness to anger, indignantly announcing that he was never going to swim again.
By the time we got home, we’d all settled back into normal. What started as an inconvenience became a story we could laugh about, and I had the chance to guide my kids through an unexpected challenge. And, to be fair, a couple of scoops of ice cream as recompense didn’t hurt either.
