The Older Woman I Want to Be

The Older Woman I Want to Be

This morning, I took my two eldest daughters to swim at the YMCA because I did not want to spend the rainy day all cooped up in the house.

My girls squealed and splashed as they entered the water. My six-year-old clung to me like an aquatic spider monkey while my three-year-old commanded, “Wet me go.”

I let her go. The girls cruised around in the water, and my three-year-old was doggy-paddling toward the steps when a tall, senior woman in a floral one-piece cut in front of her and clomped up the steps first.

She shambled over to her walker and then scooted back to the locker room. Though her back was bent, the square set of her jaw and shoulders conveyed her annoyance.

Confused, I glanced across the pool. I had noticed the group of seniors doing water aerobics, but I hadn’t given the class much thought. Apparently, they had given us plenty of thought. The swim coach, in no uncertain terms, told us and the other children and parents to go to the deep end because they were going to the shallow end.

“Three people have left,” she snapped, “because they couldn’t hear.”

The girls and I went to the deep end. We plopped into the water without a ripple, and I told them to use their inside voices, which doesn’t work at home, but it sure worked there.

Treading water with two children clinging to me (talk about an aerobic workout), I couldn’t help comparing the woman who’d almost trampled my three-year-old to the eighty-one-year-old woman who’s temporarily teaching my six-year-old’s K-5 class.

We were standing in front of the school’s microwaves when I said, “You’re brave to take on eleven kindergartners. I sure couldn’t do it!”

She smiled and said, “Whenever I feel down, I get around kids, and they—” and here she did a little shimmy “—make me feel young again.”

I couldn’t tread water forever, and my girls soon had to use the bathroom, so I helped them out of the pool and we left little snail trails as we went into the locker room. A senior woman came out as we entered. She gave us such a bright smile, the chandelier earrings swung from her lobes.

I said, “I like your earrings.”

She touched them. “From Urban Outfitters. I just love that place!”

In the locker room, after we’d showered and I was using the spinner to dry our suits, my six-year-old said, “Oh, I put my shoe on the wrong foot!”

I said, “Sooo . . . put it on the right foot.”

A senior woman, with shoulder-length silver hair, glanced up while getting dressed and caught my eye. We smiled at each other, and I could see, in that glance, that she could remember all the times she had given similar, common sense instructions.

I pray, when I am a senior and my young children are grown, I will be one of the kinder, empathetic women represented in this post. I believe the key to becoming that woman is to strive to become that woman now. 

To search for the good in each season, even though life is not always easy.

To imagine the difficulty of trying to hear a swim coach while children are screaming and splashing on the other side of the pool.

To understand the longer someone has lived, the more they have also probably lost.

“Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it’s often one of the great motivations for the living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury.” ― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

That woman who was upset with us for making noise might’ve just lost someone close to her: a spouse, a sibling . . . a friend.

This week, let’s sympathize with each generation’s challenges, celebrate each other’s growth, and even when we’re disappointed, let’s extend grace and the sense of belonging we’re all silently longing to hear: It’s okay. I’ve been there . . . or I will be there soon.

How can you show empathy in your community?