A Small Hint of Normal

We recently enrolled our kids in "covid-safe" swimming lessons and I sat behind the glass watching them as the instructor took them out, one at a time, to practice a back float or putting their head under the water. The whole "covid-safe" piece is probably a lot of sanitation theater, but there is a lot of social distancing and mask wearing and instructors with face-shields. If we were to take a kid 13 months ago to a business with these sorts of measures it would have felt draconian and the whole lot of parents would have run screaming. And yet, these measures are now considered normal and standard and it's how we're keeping people safe. 

My kids didn't bat an eye at the face-shield and they didn't attempt to go closer than six feet from one another. We have all adjusted to the new normal rather quickly, haven't we? We human beings have this amazing ability to adapt; there is more resilience built into us, I think, than any of us would have taken credit for on March 13th of 2020. We are capable of so much stretching, of overcoming great obstacles. That is, I believe, one bit of beauty intertwined in the chaos and trauma of the last year.

Tears streamed from my eyes as I watched my kids belly float, kick, and put their faces under water. My daughter looked up at me after she had her turn floating with eyes aglow and a smile ear to ear. She was alight; she was buzzing with the accomplishment and the pure joy of being in the water again, attempting to learn something she had just begun to master when the world shut down.

I looked at the elation written on the faces of my children and it was the first moment in a long, long time that I realized they are going to be okay. Another unsaid and hushed insecurity in the back of my mind is what this year will have done to their development; I wondered, in the quietest hours of the night, how this year has ruined or broken them. 

But they're not broken. They're not ruined. They've navigated a year of absolute weirdness with grace and agility and gentleness. They are versatile. They are strong. This year will define them. But for my kids, in this privileged world, they are going to emerge kinder, more flexible, and with more joy for the activities, travels, and adventures they undertake.

Yesterday, my children were raw joy. It is the first time I felt, in a very long time, that they are okay. It was the first time in a very long time that I realized I, too, am going to be okay. It felt conceivable, even, to dream of some existence in the near future in which I could be so entirely present as to be filled utterly and wholly at something as simple and wondrous as watching my kids learn to swim.