Love and the Backdive

When I was a little girl, my dad used to take my brother and I to the city pool. We were both water kids, comfortable swimming, maniacs with cannon balls and diving deep for sunken rings. My brother's courage extended to the diving boards, where he was doing dives and back dives, flips, gainers and half-gainers from as early as I can remember. My courage stopped at the buoy line that separated the main pool from the deep end.

We gave up on me ever doing a flip. I wasn't interested in even trying. But my dad was unwilling to give up on me doing a back dive. I would climb the three steps to the board, slowly walk down the plank to the edge, the raucous crowds of kids, the jostling in line behind me all fading to oblivion. He would stand on the edge of the deep end, just feet from where I stood at the end of the diving board, and call out encouragement to me. I would slowly turn around and carefully scoot back to the edge, to where I could feel the board dip under my weight and spring gently back up.

And there I froze. Time and again. When it was time for me to tilt backward and trust that the world behind me would be just as it was when it was in front of me. Trust that physics would hold true and I'd enter the water head first. Trust that the water would embrace me as gently as it did when I did a forward-facing dive. It wasn't the motion that scared me. It wasn't an inability to perform the move, or a fear of what would happen when I hit the water. It was that period of blind trust. That moment when I had to tip my body backwards past the point of no return, before I could see anything behind me. It was confidence in myself, that I would know what to do when I felt my body falling, when the entrance and the lifeguard stand and the water behind me all suddenly appeared upside down. And all the while my dad just kept telling me to just do it. To not think about it and just look for the lifeguard stand behind me.

Sometimes my fear of that moment, that falling, that blind trust, won out and I would turn around at the last second and dive forward, into the familiar, into the comfortable, into the known. But sometimes I would bend, heart racing, looking first to the sky, then farther back, back, back, until the roof of the building, the bricks, and then finally the lifeguard stand came into view, falling, my heart racing, until I entered the water, my hands above my head slicing the water into a warm, open embrace.

Sometimes I was able to find the courage in myself to know that I just had to leap. Bend. Trust. Trust that I would be able to do what I needed to do after I had passed the point of no return, after I was already falling. I had to learn that fear would always be present. Fear that lives in the mind, that multiplies when you think too much, when you give it free reign. I had to learn that fear will always overwhelm you, suffocate you if you let it.

I had to learn to defy fear.

And I did. I learned. I grew into a spunky, strong, independent, bit-of-a-smartass, don't-tell-me-what-I-can't-do kind of woman. I've become really good at not letting fear dictate my decisions. At leaning back back back and trusting that I can handle what comes when I'm falling.

And now I'm leaning again.

I saw a post once, on a message board dedicated to women who were trying to get pregnant, a post polling everyone about how they knew, how they knew they wanted kids, how they knew when the right time was. I saw a lot of responses about a feeling of lacking, a feeling of incompleteness in the family. I saw a lot of answers about simply always knowing that you wanted to be a mother, about motherhood being an integral aspect of these women's identities.

But that wasn't my answer.

My answer to that question is more simple. Or maybe more complex, depending on how you look at it. My answer was love. To me, the point of living, the be all and end all of our existence here on the planet, is love. To know love. To be loved. To experience love. I always knew I wanted to be a mother so that I could give another soul the gift that was given to me: the chance to experience love. That was my answer back then, and now, today, that is my answer again.

I want to give another soul the gift of love. Love of existence. Love of siblings. And all the millions of other kinds of love that come with every breath we take.

We are choosing love. We are defying fear. We are trusting that we will be able to handle what comes when we're falling, blindly, not knowing what to expect.

The looking up, the looking back, back, back 'til we pass that point of no return, that point of falling, is as terrifying and thrilling to me now as it was to that little girl so many years ago.

Here's to trust. Here's to courage. Here's to love.