Throw Her In The Deep End
Kick honey, kick.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
There’s a reason for the stories I tell. Otherwise I’m just bitching into the internet and shockingly I don’t enjoy that. I try to put more intention behind my writing because that makes it better for us both, in my experience. So if I tell you about a shitty thing from the past, I’ll also tell us both how to win in battle against shitty things from the past. I have more fight in me than I did as a kid, and more willingness to be bigger than things determined to make me small.
I don’t remember my exact age, but I remember I could see without glasses. So it was most likely between the ages of three and five. After six, water activities became a blur—literally—until I was 12 and got my first contacts from a shopping mall Lens Crafters. They were green. Anyway I think I was four when I learned how to swim.
Back when I had religion, I remember learning that it was considered a Mitzvah to teach your kids to swim. I liked that, assuming it meant that Jewish parents were being guilted by God to teach their kids how to have fun. I considered it our reward for being forced to “sit down, and shah!” during two hours of Shabbat services on Friday night and four more hours on Saturday morning. Now of course I know this was simply put in place to prevent drowning, because we’re pessimistic in every way we can muster, but still, it’s a nice idea. I wish it had come with a caveat though: make sure whoever’s teaching your kids to swim is not an evil cunt.