Fight or Flight....

When I was eleven, my mom decided to spend the summer in bed eating Snickers and reading romance novels.    We lived in a trailer that had snakes under it and my two sisters were very little girls with a mother who had taken flight for the bedroom....and took a total of three months off from...well...being a mother.

The first week of summer break, I saw a flyer for a community swim team and swim lessons.  I stood in front of the flyer for a long time....deciding.  Two summers before I had almost drowned in a friend's pool and I had become terrified of water.  As the hot Florida sun beat down on my head, I argued with myself that if I got in the water again something "bad" might happen, and then again, if I knew how to swim, I would never drown.

My next dilemma was where I would find the $12 to pay the fee to join the community pool.  We had no money...mac & cheese was our main dish, along with all the staple goods that were left on our doorstep by local churches and the Salvation Army.  I took the flyer with me.

The next day I made breakfast for my sisters, as I had on many occasion, and contemplated what I could do to accrue a  massive pile of cash ($12).  As I spooned food into their dishes, I looked out the window and saw a boy pushing a mower past our overgrown lawn.  I decided that if I could do the laundry, clean house and take care of my sisters, I could mow a lawn.  My mother called for breakfast.

I walked up and down the street, knocking on doors, asking every neighbor in the trailer park if they had a lawn mower for sale, until someone said yes.  "If you give me your lawn mower, I will mow your lawn for free all summer," I negotiated.  Deal....."It doesn't work well."   "That's ok...If you help me fix it, I'll clean your house."  Deal.....Home to make lunch for my sisters.

As I walked to the store  to sell all the pop bottles, I had dug out of trash cans, to purchase more Snickers for mom....pulling my dinged up wagon....the clinking glass offered a tinkling, rhythmic soundtrack to the visions I had of myself moving gracefully through crystal clear water, while people cheered and waved at me.

Next, it would be negotiating to pay the pool fees in three weeks, after I had mowed enough lawns, at $3 a piece.  Then I had my choice of swim lessons, which would have me able to doggie paddle by the end of summer or I could join the swim team.  I chose.  "Yes, my mother signed it. She said this was what she wanted me to do." I said meeting his gaze steadfast, hoping he wouldn't see my lie...."But, you can't swim."  "I will soon."  And, so I did.  Clinging to the pool side wall, I swam laps up and down the pool twice a day, crying the whole time...water mixing with water.  Three weeks later I wasn't holding the wall, and I had enough time between two a day practices to race home take care of my sisters and the woman in the bedroom, clean house and mow a lawn.

At the end of Summer, I was the slowest swimmer in all four strokes backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle and  dolphin underwater....I was brown with a sunburned nose, slender, hair blonded by sun and chlorine, mowing ten lawns a week and preparing for sixth grade.  My swim coach put his hand on my shoulder, shaking his head, scratching his beard, "I didn't think you could do it...you drowned every day up and down the pool."  I beamed, unable to answer....I had a crush on him...I still like facial hair.

That walk home I felt ten feet tall......beautiful...fierce...and unafraid.  Even as I stepped over the snake on the steps to our trailer, in my second hand bathing suit and carried in the bag of food that had been left for us, I knew that I was unstoppable.  As I made lunch for the last time that Summer, I could feel that I had done something very important.  I won an important battle.  I was a victor.

You see...sometimes it is quiet...sometimes it looks poor...sometimes you are last...sometimes you feel like you are drowning...sometimes you are crying....but at the end, as others run away, the fight wasn't for anyone else and the greatest victories are the ones that only you see...