How I re-found my love for swimming as a new parent
Whilst enjoying a nighttime swim beneath the full moon (with DO3) this week, I was reflecting on what my relationship with swimming has come to represent. A few years ago, when I first started swimming outdoors regularly, I wrote an article for a parenting magazine about how re-finding my passion for the water helped heal some invisible post-natal wounds.
I fell back in love with swimming after the birth of my son and now, seven and a half years later, here I am – open water dipper, regular squad swimmer and experienced aquatic teacher. My son and I have gone from those first tranquil baby swimming lessons together to where we are right now, this weekend, planning to hurl ourselves from great heights into cold water at a lake in the cotswolds. Where does the time go?
Anyway, I wanted to reshare this article below to remind myself, and any new swimmers out there, that sometimes, swimming isn’t just about swimming, and sometimes, swimming means just a little bit more.
The above article was first published in Motherzing Magazine in 2023. Minor edits have been made.
Grown in the Water
The water has always been a big part of my life. It was at the heart of so many of my childhood memories – bombing into pools abroad with my brother, lazing at the leisure centre on weekends with my dad, kicking butt at the one sport at school I actually liked. Birthdays, holidays, hobbies – most captured via disposable camera collections awash with turquoise blue. Isn’t water the backdrop to all of life’s best moments?
That’s why, when I got pregnant with my first child, water was a huge part of my prenatal journey. It had been vital to my conception and I had quite literally been given my chance to be a mother thanks to the magical spirit of water. After struggling to conceive for some time, it was the evening following a spiritual ceremony in a sacred outdoor water temple in Indonesia that I conceived.
Finally pregnant, water fitness became my everything. I’d do laps of my gym’s pool every other day, daydreaming of nothing but the forthcoming aquatic moment in which I would meet my child. Like so many other mums-to-be, I planned for a water birth. And like one in four women in the UK today, my son ended up arriving earth-side via c-section – mine came after 22 hours of unsuccessful labour.
How could this great moment of my life not have been like the others, framed by the touch of water? There was so much to process about my pregnancy, my birth and the difficulties of feeding. But one of the hardest parts in that aftermath was having to keep the lower half of my body from submerging in water for at least the first six weeks, whilst my scar healed and the heavy vaginal bleeding stopped.
In those weeks, I watched myself quickly fall out of love with the water. I had tried to welcome my child in it and it had refused. Here I was, scarred, sleep-deprived and unable to even have a bath until my recovery was over. Where was the water when I needed it?
It had let me down.
At eight weeks, my section incision had finally fully healed and I was happy to be underwater again, vehemently reclaiming my solo bath time as a daily self-care ritual. It wasn’t until a friend with a baby the same age sent me a photo of him going for his first ever swim that I suddenly realised I should probably do the same.
That first time in a swimming pool with my baby son was one of the most vivid memories I will ever hold on to. He spent the entire time gazing, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, at the sparkling of the sun as it hit the surface of the pool through the window, at the backwards and forwards whoosh of water-waves, at his mum and dad, holding him safe in their arms as the wonderful relief of water washed up and down all of our bodies.
A few months into our regular baby swimming lessons together, I suddenly acknowledged the transformation that had happened. After everything I had been through, I had finally made peace with the water. And here it was again, showing up as a regular remedy for me in an often difficult postnatal period. As our only regularly scheduled baby class together, our weekly time in the water became everything to me – time away from washing baby clothes and cleaning bottles, time away from my Instagram feed and the picture-perfect parents who seemed to be getting everything right, time away from the challenges of being a new mum in the twenty-first century. There was one place I could go every week and escape it all, one place I could go to watch my son learn, one place I could go to feel myself again.
Three and a half years later, the water has become a huge part of our relationship. In addition to our weekly lessons, we spend our days together exploring new bodies of outdoor water locally, and I spend my evenings swimming with a local group at a stunning lake just a few miles from my house. Besides the cool open water and golden sunset, I talk to other women with children at home and I can see in their eyes that they have their own story to tell. A story about why being in the water – both with and without your child – is something so sacred, so precious.
Amidst all of the midwife appointments, GP check-ups and mummy WhatsApp groups, those baby swimming classes were the most important route marker in my marathon through parenthood. Not only has the water been a thread running through all of the chapters of recovery, motherhood and adaptation, but it has seeped into my son’s childhood in the same way it did mine. He already talks about sea animals and going underwater with an excitement and enthusiasm that I know will stay with him forever. I always thought that being in water was the best place to be and I have definitely passed that sentiment on. Effortlessly, might I add, because the beauty of being in water needed no encouragement from me. He saw the magic in that very first swim.
For me, swimming regularly plays a huge part in my staying strong and sane throughout the ride of everyday life. Those hours spent pacing around bodies of open water and up and down pools each week are a meditation, a break away from roles and responsibilities. They are time to reset and simply be at one with the element of the earth that is, actually, always been there for me.
Now, those initially strong recollections of childbirth are more than diluted. They’ve been washed into the past and replaced by vibrant family snapshots of days snorkelling at sea, paddling in waterfalls, splashing in puddles and whirling down water slides.
My son may not have been born in the water, no, but we have grown in it together. And that is worth so, so much more.
