Hey, did I tell you we quit swim lessons? Oh, the drama of the suburban recreation center!
I hate to say we quit because, yeah, quitting doesn't sound as awesome as, you know, KICKING SWIM LESSON'S ASS. But, quit we did. Swim lessons are way tougher than they appear in the rec center catalog.
We have excuses, let me tell you them: Kyle was the youngest in the class by at LEAST six months (some kids were nearly three years old) and he just couldn't grasp half the concepts they wanted him to grasp. For instance, at one point during a meltdown, his teenage teacher said to him, "Kyle! Where do you think Nemo went? Let's go find Nemo, but he doesn't like cranky babies. If you stop crying, Nemo will appear."
Yeah, let me tell you how productive THAT was.
Kyle's never seen Nemo. Kyle's never seen anything on TV that lasts longer than 10 minutes.
Also, his lessons were right around his bedtime. That was my bright idea. To go to 7 p.m. swim lessons. Being a working parent includes work lunches and uninterrupted Pandora time and my own office, but it also means screwing my child out of a well-rested swim lesson.
The guilt! It's palpable!
After the first pretty good day, things got much worse on day two. There was a lot of screaming and a lot of hissed whispers of "stoppppp screammmmming."
For the record, he did not stop screaming.
By the end, he didn't want to be in the water. Making my child hate the water is not what I was hoping to get from these lessons, that's for sure. I can think of a few cheaper ways to give him a phobia.
So, we quit. And the parks and rec manager was lovely about it and gave us a credit and said we could use that credit whenever we wanted, even if that happens to be next summer when Kyle will be able to understand why he can't just play in the water and has to crawl across the wall like a monkey. (AND MAKE MONEY NOISES WHICH HE ALSO DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO DO.)
He does know how to go down the slide and wanted to do that over and over, which his teacher would not even think of letting him do since he was such a horrible pupil and, yeah, you know what we should have done instead of swim lessons? TAKEN KYLE TO THE DAMN POOL.
The worst part was after the class, when all the parents got together with their non-screaming children and exchanged numbers. No one would make eye contact with me. Except for the one dad who stepped on my purse and mumbled an apology.
I cried all the way home. (Granted, we live like four blocks from the pool but STILL. I WAS EMOTIONALLY WOUNDED.) Seriously, I've never felt like a crappier parent. And once, on my watch, Kyle rolled off the couch and smacked his head so hard on the floor we had to go to the ER so he could be cleared of a concussion.
I felt like I had failed him in some way because no one wanted a play date with us. No one even wanted to know our names.
We live in this tiny little town, and there are parents everywhere in our neighborhood, and I want to be friends with all of them. Having neighborhood friends is this weird little dream of mine, and the whole way home I kept thinking, "I'm the mom they're all going to talk about at their next play date. THE ONE I WASN'T INVITED TO."
Oh, and this all went down while I was wearing a bathing suit.
I'm sorry but no one should be that humiliated when they're not wearing pants, am I right?
You know, you live and learn. It sucked, it's over now. I'm not forcing my kid to do things just because I want to say he did them. And I'm sure there are much cooler parents in our neighborhood to hang out with. Parents who know that the best way to deal with a thirty-minute-long toddler meltdown isn't with judgment.
It's with vodka.