float

I bought a bathing suit about a month ago. A black one with what Speedo (it’s not a Speedo) calls a “medalist back.”

Nothing momentous, or at least it shouldn’t be. But it’s a big thing for me.

I already have a black bathing suit. In fact, I already have two.

But.

Neither of them feels comfortable. If I’m honest, this one doesn’t totally feel comfortable either, even if it feels a little less uncomfortable than my other two suits. And if I’m being really honest, it’s not even the suits that feel comfortable or uncomfortable, but me inside the suits.

I used to love swimming. When I was a kid, I’d ride my bike down the big hill and into the river valley to the outdoor pool, lock my bike up to the chain fence, and then throw myself into the water. I felt like I could bob around for hours, my fingers shrivelling into raisins. Sometimes, I’d bounce my way over to the low diving board. And a handful of times, I’d climb up and up and up the stairs onto the high diving board. No bounce here. Just a very tentative walk down the gangplank and then a pause a pause a pause and another pause before jumping off. Then. Deep deep deep until my toes touched bottom before I pushed myself up and out of the water again.

I remember going swimming every day. That’s what it felt like, anyway. And afterwards, I’d take my chlorine-saturated body and clamber back on my bike. I’d push my way up the hill, sliding down into first gear desperate to get to the top. I never did make it all the way up and I’d always have to walk the last third.

My childhood memories of swimming are fragmented: swimming lessons, the noisy shrieks of kids bobbing around or dangling off the edges where it got too deep, my brown skin growing darker by the minute, the lifeguard whistle reminding us all to walk, not run, to the diving boards, the ding ding ding of the ice cream wagon parked right along the chain link fence, the dark damp of the change rooms with three showers that only had one setting: ice cold, the misery of trying to slide jeans over still damp legs. Mostly, my swimming day memories are happy. I delighted in water, and I like to think that it, in turn, delighted in me.

ducklings delighting in water delighting in ducklings.
Kent’s Pond, St. John’s.

 We didn’t get an indoor pool until I was a teenager. And right around then, swimming changed. A bit of it, I’m sure, is because I was a teenager. But the other – and much bigger –  part is that right around the time we got the indoor pool, swimming started to be used as punishment.

jellyfish. Melmerby Beach, NS, 2024.

I discovered the flute when I was twelve and I fell completely and deeply in love. Music became a way for me to understand myself, and to speak without ever saying a word. And music also introduced me to a community: other musicians who understood their worlds through music, too.

I discovered band camp – then called Musicamrose because it took place on the campus of what was then Camrose Lutheran College in a town about an hour south of Edmonton, Alberta – in the summer after grade 8. It was the best week of my life. All music, all the time. And all people like me: teenagers figuring out who they were through and with music.

Band camp was the absolute highlight of my summer, and I wanted nothing more than to return the following year, and maybe this time, to join the two-week senior band program.  

Musicamrose final concert program.

But.

Between grade 9 and grade 10, my parents decreed that I was too fat (spoiler: I wasn’t… and even if I was…). They said I could only go to band camp – the thing I looked forward to most in the world – if I joined the swim team (translation: if I lost weight).

Punishment. And shame.

somewhere in Newfoundland (where the ocean is cold and only the hardiest go out for a swim in anything less than a wetsuit)

I didn’t lose weight.

What I lost instead was something much more vital: I lost the delight I used to take in swimming. It wasn’t about pleasure anymore. Not really. It wasn’t about enjoying the feel of water slipping over my skin, about the joy of trusting that relationship between body and water. It was about measuring up, getting into line … and failing.

What I lost was a positive relationship with my body. My body “wasn’t right” and that’s all that mattered. In this accounting, music was incidental. It didn’t matter.

Swimming was about body shaming, body control, body punishment.

It’s taken me four decades to even begin to move beyond that. Oh, I’ve swum a bit in the intervening decades. But those instances have been few and far between. When I’ve found myself in water, it’s as though I’m split into two: the person in the water who doesn’t really feel or experience the water even though she’s immersed in it, and the person gazing from above, cataloguing, measuring, and finding fault.

kid the elder’s leg, kid the younger’s splash-sprayed back, and in the middle, the elusive author, bobbing uncomfortably in the ocean somewhere near Barcelona, 2019.

[incidentally, from teaching Fat Studies, I have learned that many of my students can point to similar inciting incidents in relation to their understanding and experience of their bodies. Body shame starts early, it’s often imposed by parents, and it takes decades to work through]

This year I resolved to try and begin fresh. To push back at that insistent voice in my head, the one that’s been hammering away at me since I was fourteen. There’s an outdoor pool not even ten minutes’ walk from our house. It’s gorgeous, and better still, it’s free (and if you know me, you know I love a good deal).

I’ve been going early, just after they open. There’s almost nobody there. There’s usually a guy doing butterfly, some others steadily front crawling their way through the early morning, and a few using flutter boards. When it’s rainy, like it was yesterday, the water is warm and cozy, with a slight mist rising from it. And when it’s sunny, I can wake my body with the sun.

I bob. And I swim. And as I swim, I try to focus on the way I move through the water, the way the air warms my skin, and the way I stretch and grow. I’m trying, slowly, to recapture the delight I used to feel when I was a kid.

I still have several friends from my summers at Musicamrose. We’re spread across the country and well beyond. I want to say thank you to all of them for sharing the wonder of music making with me and for being part of my musical community. I am the creative person I am today because of what music has given me – joy, delight, pleasure, wonder, and magic – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.