ah. . . honey in my heart and soul

I had a great swim workout today.  Sat and Sun are my favorite days to swim. The weekend hours for lap swim at my pool are longer than weekdays. The lanes are less crowded. Often, on weekends, one can have a lane to one's self. 

Another thing that happens on weekends, I have observed, is 'lookie loos', students who don't swim regularly.  It appears that, now and again, a small few students will head to a pool on campus. There are several pools. And they probably misunderstood the swim schedule. It reads 'open rec swim'. These swimmers I am writing about seem to think they can play in the pool. Nope. It is lap swim only.

Today, just as I was getting out, three young, probably undergrad, students came out to the pool. Two girls and a boy. The girls wore bikinis. Lap swimmers rarely wear skimpy bikinis. There is no place to sunbath.  There is cement. And once in awhile, someone lays on cement to enjoy the sun bathing, but it is very rare.  Yup, today being a huge holiday, the campus is a bit ghosted and the kids back from Spring Break thinking going swimming sounds like fun. And it does. Just not in a lap pool, eh?  The lifeguards, all undergrads who never have the vibe of lifeguards I have swum before for the past forty years.

The three kids I am writing about seemed to figure out, while I was doing my last lap, that it was not splash in hot bikini time. One of the girls left her trio and went down the pool to start doing laps.

This is a boring post, isn't it?  I am dawdling, avoiding what I really was thinking when I saw the trio of cute kids who seemed to have confused 'open rec swim' with play swim. 

When my daughter first left me, when she was 17 and I dropped her off at the Ivy university I helped me possible and she told me she never wanted to see me again (and she never has, except the one time she, well, she treated me shamefully, screaming at me that I was crazy while I remained calm.  That's another story. In the early years, I believed that as she became an adult, she would come back into my life, that she would realize all that I had given her and want me in her life.  Then, a few years in, esp when I learned her boyfriend at the time invited his grandmother to her college graduation but I had not been invited -- a boyfriend's grandmother ranked above her mother. Ouch, it still hurts when I think of that. Bill Clinton was the speaker. Her then-boyfriend's family got to see her graduate but me, who had managed to send her to private schools, spent more on dance training than private schools, a fortune on Mac makeup and high end beauty care for her while I went to the training beauty school.  She went there a few times when young but it wasn't good enough for her. I ponied up for the upscale shit.  I sold my house to send her to the rock. Her dad refused to participate in the financial aid process. He did give her lots of cash when she got to the ivy but it was my low income that got her all the money the university gave her. And I had purposely avoided income for just a couple years before she headed to college so she'd get lots of university money. And my plan worked. But she only credits herself and, for all I know, her father.

I remember that day. I watched what I could of the ceremony online, keening.  I think that was when I began to consider that she was never coming back. Once she left college, in 2004, I still held out hope that when she got to around age 28, which is the age Steiner indicates humans become fully adult, that she might come back. So I had a waning hope she might return but I also had a wickedly dark depression.

And I could not be around twenty-somethings.

Funny how life works. When I hit the stage, post her graduation from college, of accepting she might not come back into my life, all my new friends were childless by choice, just about all of them. 

But I knew people who were parents and, since most the folks I knew were about my age, many were parents. I could not bear listening to such people spaek of their young adult children

I don't know why she shunnned me and hasn't come back into a relationship with her mother but, man, it's been a very painful 18 years since I dropped her off at that ivy.

I hadn't thought of the way I went out of my way to avoid iteracting with twenty somethings when she was twenty something, not in a long time. I saw the splish splash students, maybe 19 or 20, very young, and I did not feel the stabs of pain I used to feel when she was 19, 20, etc. etc.  This was a real thing.  I would become crippled when around smart twenty somethings, esp smiling twenty somethings.

I had forgotten about that phase. For some reason, perhaps because of her NY change, she is much in my being.  I did not slide into the deep pain thinking of her caused me, say, fifteen years ago. I just remembered that phase when I  saw these kids at the pool.

It was honey in my heart to observe that I did not feel sick self loathing. I don't have bad feelings for her. Oh no. I blame myself. I am so mean to myself. Or I was.  Today, I remembed that deeply painful time in the early eyars of my neverending broken heart but it was gone in a flash. I felt it as I turned at the wall. And it was gone.

The fact that this flicker of a deep, aging wound came and went like sunshine can be dappled in a pool's water was honey in my heart. I felt lighter.  My old pain flickered like undulating sunshine in water and then it undulated away. Honey in my heart.  It aint much but I'll take it.

I love swimming outdoors. And I love my daughter.