Adventures in Recent YMCA-ing

I have a long history with the YMCA.

It started when I was 23 years old and I moved 350 miles away to work and live at the second largest YMCA in America, Frost Valley YMCA. Located in the Catskill mountains, less than 2 hours from New York City, it feels like I met every 6th-8th grader on a school field trip during that time from Long Island to Northern New Jersey.

My title while I was there was called Program Instructor but what I actually did while I was there was lead environmental education hikes and team building activities for school groups during the week and lead activities like candle making and Natural Facials on weekends for Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and Y-Guides (basically YMCA Scouts) and the like. I worked with a small army of employees like me (there were at least 25 of us Program Instructors) as well as other workers who did a number of other things like run the cafeteria and keep the property in shape. I also has the opportunity to lead adventure trips for teenagers during the two summers that I worked there. Once while I worked there, I had the opportunity lead a trip to Prince Edward Island, Canada. All of it was a pretty once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I spent 2.5 years with Frost Valley YMCA and consider those days to be one of the most vibrant times of my life.

After I left this immersive Y (the YMCA was rebranded as The Y in 2010) experience, I worked at a Y Swim-Gym. About six months after leaving Frost Valley, I was hired to by the YMCA of Pittsburgh to work at the membership desk at one of its branches. My job was a lot of checking people in and out and dealing with customers questions and complaints. While not as exciting as my Frost Valley Days, I still look back on those days fondly. I also worked with some good people there.

I will always have a place in my heart for the Y. I don’t always agree with everything that happens at the Y but generally, I am a fan.

This fall Mr. Katie and I made the decision for our family to rejoin the YMCA once again. We’ve been members on-and-off since before the boys came along. Back during the jazz age when we were sans child(ren) (before 2015), we used to go to the Y together to work out and then go to the sauna to sweat it out. Let me tell you, if you added a swim and sauna after your workout, you could really waste a whole day there. It was quite the life! I recommend it 🙂

So you would think that being a member again would be a total slam dunk for me. And it is is! I would say that I am almost getting more out of it than I ever, ever have before. But still, I am having some feelings about it this winter.

I am feeling so many feels about the Y this season. That’s what this post is about.

Children’s television teaches me so many things. . . especially good children’s television, like PBS Kids shows.

I learned on the boys’ favorite TV show Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood that the word for feeling two feelings at once is AMBIVALENT. This perfectly describes what I am feeling about my YMCA right now, total ambivalence about our YMCA adventures this year.

First of all, on one hand, I love my Y so much right now. I am completely sure that appreciate going there more than I did in the pre-COVID days.

You see, we pretty much stopped going at the beginning of March in 2020 when the Y closed for COVID and didn’t rejoin again until November 2021.

The Y was out of our lives for more than a year and a half. I am going to remind you, I am a stay-at-home mom. I am always in need places to take my boys so they are not climbing up the walls. Not having access to the YMCA was a big loss for me during that year and a half. They were open, I believe, somewhere around June of 2020 but due to their reduced operating hours and our life schedule we opted not to rejoin until this past fall.

My whole family is so happy to be able to have this option back in our lives again. Since rejoining, we have been swimming as a family almost every weekend. I signed Mr. Man up for gymnastics in the fall and he has been going to a class once a week since then. We love his gymnastics teacher. I have even had time to work out while he is in class instead of getting up early to run before Mr. Katie goes to work, which is what I did before we joined the Y. Also, both boys have been enjoying playing with the toys in the babysitting room. Up to two hours a day of free babysitting is another added benefit of belonging to the Y.

Another reason that I am loving belonging to the Y right now because the boys are almost two years older, at this point, than when we had to stop going in March of 2020. They are so much more capable than they used to be! Mr. Katie would tell me not to oversell their capability, but when I think back on it, I am so amazed at how much older they feel right now than two years ago.

I can drop them off at the babysitting room while I go to spin class on Wednesdays without having to worry that they were going to call my name over the loud speaker because I needed to change a dirty diaper or of them would not stop crying. I used to get so stressed when they were smaller and I would try to run on the treadmill while they were in babysitting room fearing that I would get called to come and rescue them any second now. There was a point when there was a babysitting attendant who didn’t seem to like Mr. Man and would always tell me that he misbehaved, when I was pretty sure that he was mostly well-behaved.

In the past, more than once, it got to the point where I stopped trying to even utilize the babysitting benefit of our Y membership. I would go in the evenings instead, after the boy(s) were in bed.

I cannot express how much I want to pinch myself after I pick the boys up from babysitting because I feel so lucky that it all worked out. It used to almost never work out the way that I planned and now it almost always works out. The boys seem happy and non-traumatized now when I pick them up an hour later.

I am also loving the fact that my “pool stress” of taking two small children swimming in the winter is less than it was in the pre-COVID days. It still isn’t zero stress, but it is less stress. When we last belonged to the Y, we were going to the indoor pool pretty frequently. I would estimate we were going 2-3 times a week. Back in those days, I was still bringing a stroller into the changing room with me so that Preschool Nugget wouldn’t climb all over the wet floor after I dressed him. Mr. Man would sometimes try to climb into other friend’s dressing stalls after I dressed him if we went to the Y with friends. Also both boys would need a snack, in the dressing room, to stay cooperative as soon as we were done swimming. Indoor swimming a great way to make children tired in the winter, but it was so much work when they are small.

The Y has sort of simplified things for me these days in that they don’t have any daytime swimming time slots open on weekdays that fit our schedule, so I don’t need to worry about getting home in time to meet Mr. Man’s bus or to pick Preschool Nugget up from preschool.

This was a cause of frustration for me at first, but now I see the silver lining. We have a weird schedule anyway right now because Mr. Man is in afternoon kindergarten and Preschool Nugget’s preschool is in the mornings so I am always working within the confines of short blocks of time. If the Y pool was open during the day, I probably would try to make it work and it would, in the end, cause me stress.

That is where the feelings of ambivalence start. At the branch where I am a member the Y is providing members with fewer amenities than it did before the pandemic. The branch I visit closes one hour earlier on weekdays than they did before the pandemic. They offer fewer classes than in March of 2020. There are fewer babysitting hours. There are very few weekday blocks of time for swimming for children outside of swim lessons, though they do have lap swimming and water walking for adults.

The membership at our local Y costs more than it did in March of 2020. The monthly fee is slightly more expensive and the price model for children’s classes has migrated from a eight week, session price, to a monthly price.

At the same time though, I am so grateful to have the Y in our lives once again. I appreciate the spinning class that I take on Wednesday mornings, which is the only class that really fits easily into my schedule. I appreciate the time I have to myself on Mondays for one hour, while Mr. Man is in gymnastics and Preschool Nugget is in the babysitting room.

But I am pretty sure that I appreciated the times when I was able to make it through a class, without being summoned on the loudspeaker before COVID too.

I also started to experience a new Y related emotion recently too, I started to feel a little resentful of it. Last year, when we as a family where doing so much hiking and being out in nature on weekends, I felt powerful, like we were doing things for ourselves. I felt wild and self possessed. I didn’t feel like I was dependent on something else to make my fun for me, which is something that I have struggled with as a suburban mom. I felt like last year, I was doing it myself.

This winter though, things are different. Preschool Nugget doesn’t want to wear pants or a coat outside, just shorts (though he will wear knee socks) and a vest or two and it has been so cold on weekends recently. Needless to say, we have been doing a lot of swimming. I really am happy that we have this option, it is just that I miss the adventurous spirit that we harnessed during the pandemic.

I did take a step recently toward the adventure and fresh air that my heart so desires. This week, I made a point to take Mr. Man and Preschool Nugget out after school Monday thru Wednesday even if we didn’t go out for a long period of time. I pinned Preschool Nugget’s blanket around him like he was a Stark wearing a fur in Game of Thrones.

So maybe that is it. I can enjoy the Y but also enjoy the wildness that I was finally able to give myself during the days of COVID shutdowns and limitations. Figuring out how to navigate the niceties of suburban living with the wildness that my heart desires is something that I think I am always going to be trying to figure out.

In case you are wondering, Preschool Nugget is going to start receiving occupational therapy services for his sensory issues. Even so, not wanting to wear pants in the winter isn’t all that unusual for young children. My older sister recently sent me this article from the New York times about children who want to wear shorts in the winter and science.

I hope you are all staying warm this winter.

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Here is another YMCA-centric post. It is a story that I wrote about a swimming experience that I had right after I turned 40. It is called: There’s a First Time for Everything