In a third-year effort to get my kids to swim, I’ve been frequenting the Y.M.C.A. In the pool was a woman my age with three kids as young as mine. As my kids bobbed around in the water, girls puffed up like little astronauts with built-in floatation devices, I watched as this woman trained her kids to be Olympic champions.
“Swim to the wall, push off, come back to me, and do four summersaults,” she instructed her boy.
He followed her instructions, but with three summersaults instead of four.
“That was awesome!” she praised. “You beat your record!”
Then she turned to one of her girls.
“Do a triple back flip off the edge of the pool, follow with 100-meter butterfly, top off with twelve summersault back pike twirls, a fishtail split and three minutes of synchronized water acrobats with your siblings,” she commanded. (Or something like that. Until I can get my girls to stick their heads in the water, everyone else comes across as an overachieving show-off.)
The girl carried out the operation without a hitch.
I sat on the edge of the pool and watched, thinking about how I, too, should be in the pool, but I hate the shock of getting into a swimming pool in December, even if it is indoor and heated, and besides, lately the chlorine has been doing unspeakable things to my hair. And as I watched that supermom in action, I began to feel like the suckiest mother indeed.
She seemed to be one of those people who are graceful in every aspect of life—the way she moved in the water, how she challenged her kids to reach their potentials without being a Tiger mom, how her kids were the poster children for perfect behavior from the pool all the way to the locker room.
And as I sat there, one eye on this display of familial perfection and the other at my kids, who were now whipping water toys around the pool, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen this woman a million times before. Did I go to school with her? It seemed to me that I remembered her being good at sports. I tried to picture girl super-athletes from THS and projected what they’d look like twenty years older, but still, I couldn’t place her.
On the way home, it struck me that I knew exactly who she was—along with the entire state of Connecticut.
Who will be the first to name the woman in the background of this picture?