The pool as public luxury - by Miriam Jones
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This is the sensory ritual:
Cold immersion
Slow laps
Faster laps
breath quickening
Hot shower
Warm coffee
Sit in sun/shade/wind
for 10 minutes
if impeccable/lucky timing
Pick up baby from crèche
Feed baby
the warmth of my milk in the warmth of her mouth / startling
against my body’s memory of the cool water
The local pool is a flat blue rectangle like any other, this one nestled between red-brick houses and apartments. Above the surface the lines are clean, the colours are bright, the concrete is polished, but below the surface the edges dissolve and the neat geometry blurs.
It is a place to be alone-together, watching shoals of silver bubbles shaken from strangers’ feet. Each swimmer buoyant in the same container.
Sometimes the water is silky and I feel like a seal. More often I feel like I’m churning butter. I don’t get better at swimming, and I don’t get worse. I don’t do elegant somersaults at the end of each lap. My goggles leak. It’s all part of the ritual.
The arrangement of sun and cloud projected on the bottom of the pool is always shifting. In any given lap, the play of light and shadow can offer up concentric circles, the pattern on a turtle’s back, quivering triangles. In the pool I am alert to beauty. My attention is free.
~ ~ ~
Commonplace insights of parenthood include:
That our bodies and time are always sustained and enabled by others.
That the nuclear family is ill-designed for personal or collective flourishing.
That efforts to meet the basic needs of both children and adults can and should be arranged in ‘more pleasurable, fulfilling, sociable, and efficient ways.’
Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, of the quote above, offer three principles for a world where these insights are taken as foundational. In this imagined world, the drudgery and isolation of reproductive labour is reduced, and its pleasures and fulfillments expanded. The principles are these:
Communal care
Public luxury
Temporal sovereignty
During parental leave, as I swam and showered and sat in the sun, I turned these phrases over like prayer beads. The pool and the crèche became a piece of talismanic infrastructure, illustrative of the tight weave of communal care, public luxury, and temporal sovereignty.
~ ~ ~
Communal care
The pool crèche is a clear expression of communal care. Each week I pass over a new piece of information to the staff: she’s just figured out how to roll; she can sit but she’s still pretty wobbly; she’s got a peanut allergy; she’s really tired today sorry; she’s figuring out how to crawl, any day now; lots of separation anxiety at the moment. The staff – experienced, trained, consistent – hold each piece of information with practised ease and pragmatism.
Public luxury
The pool’s luxury is not so much in its physical appearance – although that is nice; modern and airy with wooden panelling and sweeping curves – but in what it enables for people: time held in water, facilitated by a crèche, by ramps and wheelchairs, by classes and events, by its predictability. All kinds of people want to be here.
This is Hester and Srnicek’s version of luxury: not exclusivity, but services and infrastructure designed with quality, wellbeing, connectedness, and beauty in mind. Services and infrastructure that ease the work of looking after ourselves and others, and which contribute to individual and collective flourishing.
(I went once to a trial class at a local gym that also advertised a crèche. Being a small business, the crèche was one woman in a cavernous room with a large-screen TV, no windows, and a closed door. The woman was lovely but child safety alarm bells went off in my head. I realised that the council crèche’s adherence to early childhood laws and regulations was an element of the pool’s luxury.)
(My conflation of the local pool with public luxury isn’t perfect: each swim costs $8.07 and each crèche hour costs $5.40, if you buy in bulk. There are the usual cheaper prices for students and concession card holders. Reasonably affordable, but not free.)
Temporal sovereignty
Most moments of most days I am in my body in a specific way, bending and twisting and lifting in an ongoing dance with two small children. Even at night I hold my body (and bladder) in strange shapes to accommodate the baby, who shares a bed with me more nights than not.
At the pool, for an hour, my body is my own, the time is my own. The baby is happy or grizzly or sleepy at the crèche, her moods and desires someone else’s responsibility. This hour is an anchor for my week, a regular moment to unfurl, my movements subject only to my whims.
The effect of my pool visit is outsized. After my hour of movement and embodiment – my hour of temporal sovereignty – I am attentive, patient, understanding, attuned.
~ ~ ~
Pools where people have sought pleasure and ritual:
The Great Bath of Mohenjo Daro, Indus Valley, 3rd millennium BCE
The bathhouse in Warsaw’s Jewish Quarter run by my children’s great-great-grandparents
The Russian and Turkish Baths on East Tenth Street as described by Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts: ‘I meditated weekly . . . on the impossibly ancient body of the woman whom I thought of as the ghost of the baths. I meditated on her labia, which dropped far below her pale pubic hair, her butt cheeks dangling off the bone like two deflated balloons . . . I tried to learn everything there was to know about the aging female body by staring at hers.’
~ ~ ~
Times of my life when I have swum at the local pool:
On an ad-hoc basis with friends when I lived in a nearby share house, aged 27-33
When my mum was dying
During pregnancy
Once, after swimming while pregnant, a man said to me: I glanced over in the lane
and couldn’t help but notice you are with child! How wonderful! Have you
considered a water birth?
Post-partum
~ ~ ~
Commuter trains pass by on a small hill behind the pool. Voices rise and dissipate into the open air, over the rhythmic slosh of swimmers’ arms. The aquarobics instructor pumps loud feel-good tunes, delivered in disorienting snatches between strokes. The sound-world is human, with interjections from suburban birds.
When I was deep in shock after the arrival of my first child, I felt like I had rescinded my citizenship to the world of people. My new life was a sleepless anxious haze inside the walls of my apartment, and I was responsible at every moment for an infant I didn’t yet know.
The feeling passed, blessedly quickly, but its memory is lodged somewhere core inside me, alongside the knowledge that others feel this way for months and years on end.
In that sleepless anxious time I kept coming back to what we know about what a baby needs. A baby needs secure attachment to predictable caregivers. A baby needs responses to their bids for connection. A baby needs someone, or many someones, to organise their world for them. I thought, What a baby needs, everyone needs. To be held.
If we are lucky, we can be held by family members, partners, friends. But there are ways to be held on a bigger scale, scooping up more people. Some of those ways are supremely unsexy: buildings, pricing structures, government subsidisation, services, laws and regulations. Some, like water, are beautiful, always. ▼
Image: Silas Baisch - Unsplash
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