This I believe

My Name is Penny Collins and I believe that everyone should learn to swim.
All my life I have loved to be in the pool, in the lake or in the ocean.  From a very young age, I can remember being at my aunt’s house swimming in her pool, never being able to go past the divider. (The spot where the water went over your head.) My Mother made us wear those “arm floaties” until she was sure we could swim.
My mother was raised in West Virginia and the deepest water that she was in as a child was the creek behind their house, so she never learned to swim.  She took my sisters and I to classes and even sat there and watched, but she never got in the pool past her waist; she was afraid of the water.
According to my mother, she was “made of lead” and would sink if she got out too far into the pool. I never believed that until my cousin thought he would be funny and push her into the pool. Mom sank to the bottom and just sat there. I’m not sure if she was stunned or just didn’t know what to do. Nonetheless, we had to jump in and pull her up. Let’s just say I had never heard my mom say some of the words she said that day.
We went to Florida to visit my mother’s sister, and she took us into the ocean for the first time and I fell even more in love with water. Again, Mom never went past her waist. She also yelled a lot for us to come closer to the shore, she knew she couldn’t save us if we got into trouble.
I learned to scuba dive in my 20’s and brought back pictures that you can only take 60 feet below the surface. This put my mom in a panic. Before every trip she would say, “Penny, what if something eats you out there?” My response to her was “well then everyone else will be safe because the shark will be full.” She didn’t much care for that response, so I would call her after my dive so she knew that I was safe. For the record, Crayola has nothing on the colors in the ocean.
When my mom turned 60, my sister had her first child.  That summer, I had my niece in the pool every chance I got. Again, my mother was terrified. Strangely, seeing how Lyndsey wasn’t at all scared of water, convinced my mother to learn to swim.  By the time my second niece, Macy, came along my mother took every opportunity to take her to the pool.
In the long run, it took my mother 60 years to get over her fear of the water and learned to swim. She regretted not learning at a much younger age.  Now that she has caught on, you can’t keep her out of the water.
My name is Penny Collins and I believe that everyone should learn to swim.