Room in the Pool

The best thing about living in Israel is living in Israel. The worst thing is the heat. By May, it is too hot to go to the park, and parenting can become a real creative challenge during those long afternoons. So when Oma, my husband's grandmother, sent birthday money for her great-grandchildren, who both have summer birthdays, we decided to invest in a pool.

Let me explain. In Israel, when you live in small apartments, there are no pools. And even the small plastic blow-up pools are hard to come by and are considered a real luxury. So what we bought was a small paddling pool and put it on the porch, along with a sprinkler to make the pool more interesting. We even pigeon-proofed our porch with chicken wire, and we were set.

I believe there were others in the pool that dayI thought it would be fun for the kids if I came in the pool for the inaugural dip. The experience was akin to what a whale must experience in a bathtub, but it opened up a whole range of possibilities. There was ring around the Mommy, dance around the Mommy, splash the Mommy, and be splashed by the Mommy.

I could go on, but you get the idea. There were plenty of options with me at the center, but there weren't too many that didn't involve me, since there wasn't much room in the pool besides what I took up.

Yet for one magical afternoon, there were no power struggles, no discipline problems, just one very wet mommy enjoying her kids as much as they were enjoying her.

But despite the already crowded nature of the pool, I believe there were others in the pool that day. There was Oma, whose desire to commemorate her great–grandchildren's birthdays was the inspiration for the pool. And there was me as a little girl, splashing in a pool with my own mother. Of course, those pools were the Olympic sized ones, and this was just a tiny one, but memory isn't bound by natural law.

When we were thoroughly wet, and it seemed we couldn't possible get any wetter, I turned on the sprinkler. It was the kind that shoots water up in the air as it rotates. It had been an impulse buy in the hardware store where we went shopping for the pool. Just the site of it brought back memories of running across the lawn, back and forth, as the sprinkler sent up arcs of water into the sky.

Now it spun around inside the pool, creating our own personal water fountain, which my daughter could lift, direct, and aim, a water nymph creating one second sculptures with water. And when the water splashed in her eyes, she wiped them on me. I don't know how it could possibly have helped but it seemed be enough to calm her down to get back into playing. And I was wet anyway, so what did I care?

It was a day when all the rules were lifted for a short time, and the boundary between parent and child was temporarily put aside so we could be playmates, splashing each other in a pool, both sitting on the same level, and equally wet.

Bathtime has always been a special time in our family, but even at bathtime, there are rules that apply. Mommy sits outside the bathtub, and the water must stay inside the tub. But in the pool, it went without saying that all that splashing would overflow the pool walls.

When my daughter's lips began to turn blue, rather than tell her it was time to leave the pool, I told her the story of how as a child, I would insist that I wasn't cold even though my lips had turned blue and my skin was lined with goose-bumps, because I wasn't ready to leave the pool. I told her we would need to get out soon, but for now, we would pretend she wasn't cold, the way I used to pretend I wasn't cold.

The next morning, moments after she had left for school with her father, the door opened, and she came running back in. "I love you Mommy!" she cried as she gave me a quick hug, and ran back out the door, for a day of adventures that I wouldn't be a part of. But as I watched her race out the door, I knew that yesterday I had touched a place in her heart that would stay with her, the way my own parents had touched that place in me so many years before, a place that spoke of a parent as a guide to adventure rather than a stern voice of restriction. A place that offered her a glimpse to the little girl that her mommy once was, and maybe – somewhere - is still.