“I have your bathing suit” she said to me with a gleeful smile, awaiting my response.

“What?  Your kidding, right?”

“Nope, I’ve got one for you.”

“Mommy, you have a bathing suit?” comes an excited little voice through the car window as she looks on to the conversation between me and Ms. J, a friend we stopped by to say hello to on our way home.

“Ha, no, I don’t have a bathing suit.  I don’t swim,” I say in reply.

“But you’d like your mommy to swim with you, wouldn’t you Abigail?” my friend asks me eldest.  “And besides, we can add some swim laps to our workout routines, to mix up the running.”

And with that, the flashback came.

This friend is my running buddy.  We spend tons of time at her house, hanging with her and her three boys.  My four kiddos love this family and we soak up every moment we are with them.  This is the same family that hosts swim day on Mondays. While I can swim, I prefer not to.

My friend and I are currently training for a 6k Mud Race that will happen in August.  Running is a staple in our training, but she will occasionally do some swim laps instead of or as well as a run.  Clearly she has visions of us both swimming.  I’ll need to set her straight on that.

But as the words came out of her mouth, suggesting we add swimming to our routine, my mind immediately went to the summers growing up.

For most of my childhood we had an inground pool in our back yard.  As a kid I loved the water and spend much of my carefree summer days swimming and playing pool games with my brothers.

But as I got older my enjoyment of the water diminished.  The fuss of getting changed, getting wet, drying off, changing back into clothes – all of that just wasn’t worth the limited enjoyment I got from the act of swimming.

But I have already talked about all of that.

This day I remembered another aspect to me decreased enjoyment of swimming.

FORM.

My dad was a fantastic swimmer!  He’d come home from work in the summer, change into his swim trunks before we even realized he was there and dive into the water.  In fact, the sound of him hitting the water was more of an indication of his arrival than anything else.  And then he’d swim and swim and swim.  Countless laps, back and forth and back again.

Even in the last year of his life, as he was in the very advanced stages of Early Onset Dementia, unable to remember his name or that this person caring for him every day was his wife, or just who exactly I was with these kids, he could still dive into a pool and swim for what seemed like forever.

So it makes perfect sense that he’d help each of his kids improve in their swimming abilities.

I have a distinct memory of him watching my swim form and encouraging me to lift my right arm higher, up and over, out of the water..

He did so without the least bit of impatience.  There was nothing in his tone or demeanor that said anything other than, “I love you and want to help you in this.”

But I couldn’t do what he wanted me to do.  I think he knew that to some degree, however the way PS effected me was always a white elephant, and so never directly addressed.

My range of motion from my right side to my left side is not equal.  The muscular issues on my effected side simply prevented me from extending a stroke in the way he wanted me to and in the way that proper swim form would dictate.  It wasn’t just that it was hard and something I would need to fight through and figure out.  It was not possible.  My arm simply does not rotate in that way.

And that, for me, is frustrating to admit.  I don’t like to think that I am limited in any way.  I want to believe I can do anything and overcome every obstacle – but I know that is not the case.

And so, with a bathing suit waiting for me, I must decide if I will once again jump into the deep and and swim.