My three-year-old daughter’s swimming lesson leaves me feeling out of my depth

I’ve often told people I never quite developed a taste for swimming, but this is not quite true. It’s more accurate to say I developed a phobia of it. This began in 2001, when I was 15, paler and gawkier than you can imagine, and found myself in America as part of something called the Ulster Project.

The Ulster Project was, and still is, a highly admirable cross-community exercise that brought together large groups of 15-year-olds from Catholic and Protestant backgrounds in Northern Ireland, and paired them with host teens in a variety of locations across the US. In my case, that meant spending July 2001 in Greenville, North Carolina.

I had never heard of Greenville, a city slightly smaller than Derry in the eastern part of the Tar Heel State. It didn’t have many notable residents at the time, although it is now most famous for being the hometown of the world’s most famous YouTuber, MrBeast. My time there was eye-opening in many ways. The experience for which the initiative was conceived – facilitating the act of fraternising with Protestants – was pleasant, if not exactly novel, since my parents had been involved with cross-community activities my whole life.

But it was the first time I’d spent a substantial amount of time away from my family, or indeed in any place outside Ireland. The flight we took to get there was, in fact, the first time I’d ever been on a plane. Also new was the experience of spending so much time with kids my own age. I grew up so rurally that, outside school hours, there was almost never any situation in which I was around peers who weren’t my siblings. Suddenly, with my blood vessels coursing with teenage hormones, I was around loads of them, at all hours, and half of them were gorgeous, confident Americans, with tans and white teeth and cars they’d received in time for their 16th birthdays.

This might shock you, but we – the mottled youths of early 21st-century Derry – were not quite so beautiful or affluent. It turned out that hosting Northern Irish teens was a passion reserved mainly for Greenville’s upper middle classes, which threw a slight contrast on us, as Derry did not have an upper middle class to speak of. We marvelled at their apple pie good looks, dearth of freckles and distinct abundance of, well, everything. If I had to sum up my initial response to their massive houses and separate bedrooms, it would probably be: “I want what they have.”

Thankfully, what we lacked in good looks and disposable income, we made up for in having heard of things outside America. We may not have looked like those photos of smiling people that come with newly bought picture frames, but we were worldly and rough, and told jokes in accents they could just about decipher within a week or two.

Our activities involved a lot of thrilling ecumenical church services and days out learning about the American civil rights movement, but they also included jaunts to theme parks and leisure centres. It was at the latter that I found myself at a swimming pool, eager to impress my less nerdy companions. I jumped in, not realising I was facing the shallow end, and my short-range impact gashed my shin on its hard surface.

The shock caused me to gasp, I took in water, and the next thing I knew I was lying, soaking wet, on smooth tiles while being slapped about the face by – again, I realise this is very clearly the account of a 15-year-old boy, but I swear it’s true – a lifeguard who looked like Jessica Alba, whacking my cheek with slender fingers while saying “Honey, you shouldn’t be in there if you can’t swim.”

I came to, puking water, greeted by a forest of fellow teens stood over me, looking first worried and then disdainful. Before this point in my life, I’d considered myself a relatively confident swimmer, but I would never swim happily again. Some hormonal fingerprint of horror, shame and mild psychosexual humiliation was forever after embedded in my clay.

To this day, if I tread water, I get lightheaded. More than once over the years, goaded by incredulous friends, I’ve pushed myself to try and watched their horror as I lose consciousness for a second or two. Mostly, I’ve avoided it entirely, which has been relatively easy to do.

Then, I had kids and had to push past this, because they enjoy swimming, and even I am adult enough to admit it’s a skill they must learn. My wife has often suggested I take classes and until now I’ve balked at the idea – some silly sense of its indignity, its shame.

And then I see my daughter thrilling in the freedom of the water and reconsider my resistance. She is ecstatic with confidence as she and all her friends wade fearlessly through neck-deep tides. And, for the first time in my adult life, I think: I want what they have.

Photograph by Getty Images