Pool-Wall Parenting
Stand strong. Your daughter needs a wall to swim to, and she needs you to be a wall that can withstand her comings and goings.
– Lisa Damour, Untangled
Someone once said that having a child is like having your heart go walking around outside your body. I thought about that a few weekends ago at a swim meet. I had signed up to volunteer as a timer, which meant I got a great, poolside view of all the racing, but also meant I was stuck in place. Meets run with ruthless efficiency, the next swimmer stepping up to the block before the previous swimmers are out of the pool, and timers have to be ready to clock the next heat moments after the previous one is finished.
Our team has a theoretically-commendable policy of asking parents to allow swimmers to be independent and learn through their own experiences: it’s far better to miss a heat, or forget your swim goggles, now rather than later. Which is true. But it’s still a bit nerve-wracking to wonder if your little one is going to remember to write the heats and lanes down with a sharpie on their arm, or whether they’ll have a good enough sense of how fast the events are running to make it to theirs on time. And this sensation is only heightened when you’re stuck timing. I couldn’t do more than occasionally cast my eyes around the deck to find them and try not to worry from afar.
Sometimes they came over: but it was always briefer than I hoped for. “I’m in lane 6!” they’d shout, then go running off with their friends again. I always thought of things I forgot to remind them about, long after they were gone.
Some parts of parenting feel more and more like this, as the kids get older: waiting in place, watching them come and go. My job, basically, is to keep myself from chasing after them. My job is to be available, and unconditionally supportive, without necessarily inserting too much of my own opinions and certainly none of my anxieties. My job is to withstand the coming and going.
Lisa Damour uses a swimming pool analogy to describe some of the dynamics of parenting teenage girls in her book Untangled:
Consider the metaphor in which your teenage daughter is a swimmer, you are the pool in which she swims, and the water is the broader world. Like any good swimmer, your daughter wants to be out playing, diving, or splashing around in the water. And, like any swimmer, she holds on to the edge of the pool to catch her breath after a rough lap or getting dunked too many times. In real life, it looks like this: your daughter has been so busy spending time with her friends, activities or schoolwork that you feel as though you might need to reintroduce yourself the next time you see her. Then something goes wrong in her world and she is suddenly seeking your advice, sharing the details of her latest misfortunes, and perhaps (gasp!) wanting you to hug or cuddle her. In other words, she’d had a hard time in the water and has come to the edge of the pool to recover . . . then she pushes you away. Hard . . . like a swimmer who gets her breath back, your daughter wants to return to the water, and she gets there by pushing off the side of the pool.
If the pool is the world, our kids are meant to get out there on their own, increasingly so as they get older—no one gets good at swimming by hanging on to the wall. But after enough time spent in open water, they need a place to hang on to and rest, a place they can catch their breaths. We are the walls in this analogy: and sometimes the push-off feels abrupt, or unexpected. We want more lingering, more of a ramp-up perhaps, not so many extremes—but that is how it works. A wall is meant to be pushed off from. It’s nothing personal, and in fact it’s quite normal.
It’s good to acknowledge that even being a wall (in this analogy) takes resources. It takes energy to absorb all our children bring to us and hold it inside. It takes emotional reserve to be ready to either embrace or let go, without context or warning. It takes some preparation on our part, and having our own support network in place.
But in the end, this is what my kids need as they start pushing out into the world. And, I remind myself, that is the point. For them to feel comfortable enough to leave me, and safe enough to return.
