This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Family Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I grew up in the Midwest in a small suburb of St. Louis. We were totally landlocked and I don’t actually remember even seeing the ocean until a family trip to Disney World when I was a little older. To me, “the beach” referred to a 50-square-foot plot of hard-packed sand dotted with large, pale, sweaty men clutching Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and testing the structural integrity of cheap K-mart lawn chairs while listening to Lynyrd Skynrd mix tapes by the local lake. One can imagine the culture shock when I moved to LA some 15 years ago.
Perhaps my unfamiliarity with the beach and the ocean is why my daughter seems so behind the curve when it comes to all things aquatic. Sure, my wife and I love the beach and every single time we are there we say “we have got to come here more often.” But for whatever reason, perhaps simply possessing the knowledge that it’s so near and available to us whenever we want, we never go. Typically, we manage one visit to the beach per summer, three if we are lucky. I can’t explain what keeps us away from it. It’s beautiful, enjoyable, blissfully warm, full of endless entertainment possibilities and free. One would think that my daughter would be a dolphin by now, plunging into the waves with her Tim Bessell Rhino Chaser and waving goodbye to us the second we arrived at the shore.
She’s not. At all. She is terrified of the water, and that just should not be. We live in Southern California, for god’s sake. I recently began to realize she was behind when I saw the picture a friend of ours shot of her daughter for our homepage. Her daughter, younger than mine by only a little, is having an absolute blast in the water. Its clear to me that she is no stranger to the deep blue sea. It struck me, upon looking at the image, how vastly different her kid and mine were in this respect. We have yet to take a trip to the beach this year, but last year’s trip proved to be disasterous in terms of familiarizing Frankie with the ocean. At the very beginning, immediately after we arrived and placed our towels on the sand, she wanted nothing to do with it at all. The waves were too scary and, even when I held her in my arms, she wouldn’t let me go out farther than ankle deep. By the end of the trip, however, I had been making what I thought was quite a bit of progress with her utilizing a technique I called the “melting X.” This basically involved me drawing a large “X” in the sand with my toe just under the tide line, then racing out with her in between waves, stomping crazily on the X, and running back to safety before the next wave came in to wash it away. Things were going well and she was becoming braver and braver until, of course, she tripped and fell in the sand, allowing a wave to almost touch her before I snatched her up. After this incident, she would go nowhere near the water for the rest of the trip and we didn’t make it back to the beach for the rest of the season.
This post is rambling a bit, and perhaps its because I’m not really sure why I want her to be a little California beach girl and am having difficulty explaining it. I suppose it’s in someway related to my own desire to be more graceful and capable in the water myself. I have tried surfing twice in my life and almost drowned both times. I am fairly certain a third attempt would end my life completely. But she has a chance at it. She’s still tiny and the big, beautiful Pacific Ocean is practically in her back yard. This year, we have agreed to make the commitment to visit the beach as a family as many times as we possibly can; to get more in touch with the water and expose our children to one of the few beautiful and mysterious things our geographic location has to offer.
There are so many people who claim to be “drawn” to the water. People who have some type of bond or relationship with it that I fear I may never have. I’d like to give my daughter and, eventually my son, the opportunity to form that relationship. Perhaps, through them, I can one day appreciate what it means to be able to say “Dude. I totally grew up on the beach.”
-Matt
We still have a few Melissa Odabash swimsuits for baby girls left at RedSparks, our online boutique. Surf’s up!
July 6th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Dude. I totally did NOT grow up on/by/near a beach. But I love it; I love the smell of the ocean, even up to and including the rotting fish and the seaweed smells. Sigh….that is what I miss most about living in Seattle, as I went to high school there and fell in love. I hope for their sakes that they will fall in love, too, because there IS something special about the sea.
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July 6th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
We just returned home from our trip to San Diego. While there we learned that our three year old (also on your homepage) is TERRIFIED of the ocean. He wouldn’t go near it to even dip his toes in. I was so disappointed. I grew up on the beach in SoCal. I used to surf every day. I keep saying that despite the fact that he was born in the desert, native California blood runs in his veins. He should LOVE the ocean DAMMIT!!!
VegasDad´s last blog ..when nature calls
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