To Swim in a Lake or a Pool: The Central Dilemma of Parenting for me

Last Thursday, the boys and I ventured out to a local county park for a picnic and water play in the recreational lake.  That is when I snapped this shot.  It looks good right? When I am around family and co-workers the general consensus that I get is that people enjoy seeing pictures of the boys playing together in nature.

The boys splashed happily for about five minutes before a ranger came out of nowhere and told us that we couldn’t swim in the lake because fishmen might have left the spot with fishhooks and this lake wasn’t a good place to swim. 

I knew what I was doing. I saw the signage but I also wagered that I would not see a ranger because we were visiting the park on the Thursday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend.  

Memorial Day weekend, for those in the recreation industry, is the unofficial start of the summer season. I figured the park staff might be busy gearing up for the throngs of crowds that might be flocking into parks during this time in our history when people are especially interested in outdoor activities.

Yet, I lost my gamble.  The ranger came out of nowhere and saw us right away.

Oh, well.  That Thursday afternoon, I was surprisingly unembarrassed at being chastised for not following the rules.  This is big for me, the daughter of a former park ranger.   I used to go to bed much earlier than my friends when I would camp with them in my 20’s. Back then, I didn’t want to get in trouble with them when the ranger would inevitably come around and ask them if they could, “Please keep it down, it is after quiet hours and there have been noise complaints.”  

This time around, I could not only see his position, I could stomach his correction too.

Who knows, maybe I am growing up?

Plus, I know personally that having a fishing hook enter your body isn’t a pleasant experience.  As a person who swam into a rusty fish hook in a mountain creek at the age of 23 and ended up going to the emergency room to get a tetanus shot at my mother’s insistence, I know the aggravation fishing hooks can cause.

Also as an environmental science major I probably have written more college papers about farm waste run-off, nutrient pollution and algal blooms in waterways than the majority of the population.

 Also my father was a state park ranger in the summers for most of my life and I have heard many stories about unintentional park accidents that people have.

Also, I work with the public in a public library and often have to inform people of the rules that they don’t want to hear about.

So I just said, “Thank you,” politely like a person who was truly unaware of the dangers of splashing in a county park lake and asked the boys to come out of the water.  

As I have considered this experience this past week, I have a few thoughts.  

First of all, why does fishing take precedence over swimming? There always seem to be signs near creeks and lakes that say “No swimming, fishing only” or something to that effect. Why is fishing always the more important activity?  There are often signs near public waterways that prohibit  swimming and dillinate where fishing is allowed to occur.

 If someone asked me to design more accurate signage, I think my signs would sound more like this:

1. Our insurance company will not keep our business if we allow swimming, so please don’t swim here.
2. Fishing is something that you can do here at this park and  people don’t usually drown while fishing on land, so please feel free to fish here.
3. The water here is gross, don’t submerge your body in it, please don’t swim here.
4. You can fish here, but kindly catch and release.  Trust us, you don’t want to eat fish that come from this lake. Please and thank you.

If I am being truly honest, though,this post isn’t about complaining about park signage or if the ranger is honest or not about reasons that one cannot swim in the park. 

What I was thinking about last Thursday is something that I have been really wrestling with since I became a parent:

How safe of a world am I comfortable living in?

A little background about me, I grew up in rural America.  I never went to preschool. I went to a public school with one really large, long building that schooled all the students in our town from k-12th grade.  

 I swam in pools when I was a child, but I also swam in state park lakes and I played in plenty of creeks.  My mother is from the City of Pittsburgh and my father grew up in the suburbs.  The suburbs he grew up in were more like rural America though and during his childhood his family had a pony, pigs, and other farm type animals at various times. He was often responsible for feeding and watering the animals. He was more like a country kid.

I moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia for the first time when I was 27 years old.  Before I moved there for work, I lived in the city of Pittsburgh as well as rural New York state and small-town Pennsylvania.  When I moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, it was a first time experience for me.

I found the families I worked with at the library where I was a children’s librarian to be friendly and nice.  I found the same thing when I began teaching preschool soccer classes to supplement my librarian income.

The families seemed to really crave programmed activities for their children in a way that I was not used to. My town didn’t have it’s own library, though we visited libraries in surrounding towns.

Families I worked with put their children in programmed activities like: soccer classes, karate, library storytime, preschool, dance class, music lessons, and school tutoring. 

My library supervisor, a kind woman around my parent’s age who did not have her own children, would often comment the fact the parents seemed to need a planned library program every day of summer vacation.  She brought it to my attention and talked about it often.

Maybe this was the seed that got me thinking about how programmed I would want my children’s lives to be even before they were born. 

In any case, as a parent I often struggle with figuring out how to fill my children’s time.  They are still preschoolers.  They do go to preschool a few hours a week.  Occasionally we attend a program that I register for, something like: library storytime or a nature program at the local nature center.

I have the active types of and they generally don’t sit still well enough for us to successfully participate in a library storytime.  Mr. Man, as a big five year old, does well in group but Toddler Nugget, at age 3, just isn’t there yet.

The pandemic was good for us, in a sense, because there were many fewer programs for me to feel guilty about not taking them to.  

The pandemic times were good for us in that there were fewer programs for me to sign them up for, take them to, then feel frustrated when they didn’t sit still and not interrupt as well as other children at the program.

In any case, I relish opportunities for us to feel sort of wild, because I think that is where the boys really flourish.  We all seem to have more fun when there are fewer rules to follow.

I am a former children’s librarian and I don’t take my children to the library very often because it always seems like they are a little too loud, too interested in running, or too interested in taking all the materials off of the shelves.  I have to psych myself up and take the boys to the library on a day when I am feeling brave.

Instead of taking the boys into a structured environment, I prefer us to do something outside where there are fewer rules and less decorum.

That’s why I wanted to take them to swim at the local county park.  It was a hot day, that Thursday.  The temperature was around 85 degrees.  Neither boy had school that day and speech therapy was canceled for Toddler Nugget.

We belong to our local pool but that does open until mid-June.  We used to belong to the local YMCA for usage of their indoor pool, but since the pandemic started members have to sign up and reserve pool time as well as wear a mask and follow a number of other rules.  So we haven’t been members in more than a year.

When Mr. Man was a younger boy, for example when he was a baby and wasn’t capable or doing much, I would ask myself, “Is this my life?  Going to the pool where I am a member? Meeting up with other moms at safe playgrounds? Living the safe life.”

That existence felt safe but also kind of caged. I asked myself, “Is this what I really want? Are things just different than they were when I was a child?” “Is this a suburban vs. rural difference?  Why doesn’t anyone else seem to mind?”

I have written about this before in these posts, and though the pandemic was devastating for many, in me, it really awakened a wildness that I had been pushing down since becoming a parent.

I am enjoying the more active, outdoor driven life-style that my family has been living since the pandemic has changed how we spend our time.

I hope now that things are going back to normal, we continue with this.

I struggle with how to walk the line in that I want my children to develop skills and make friends, all things that are products of programmed weekly activities, but I also want them to retain a sense of wildness, un-cagedness.

I hope we continue to swim in public lakes and sometimes disobey the rules.  Perhaps, when we get our pop-up camper and go camping the ranger will have to come around and remind us that “people are sleeping, you are going to have to keep it down.”

Goodness, I hope so!

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