The Swim Team

This post is not really about swim teams, it’s about David Sedaris’s piece in the New Yorker called “Memory Laps”, which I read and immediately burst into tears. I already wrote about my lackluster career in competitive swimming in my Olympics blog post. This one is about fathers, in particular, his and mine. Unlike Sedaris’s father, who berated him after losing at swim meets, my father never went to my meets. His damage was done at home.

Now that I think about it, he probably never saw me race. Considering all our kids’ soccer meets and chess tournaments Mark and I attended over the years, that constitutes really egregious behavior. Not only didn’t he attend any “events” of mine, I don’t ever remember him stepping foot in any of my schools. My mother was the one who had to go up and bawl out my fifth grade teacher for not letting me retake a standardized test when it was discovered that I’d skipped a line in my answer sheet marking and therefore negated the entire test.

Speaking of test taking, my father claimed that he knew my sisters and my IQ test scores and bragged to his poker playing buddies down at the American Legion about what brainiacs his daughters were. First off, I don’t remember taking any IQ tests, and secondly, the only reason he was bragging was to validate his own intelligence through his offspring. He also went around the house quoting Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza, who to this day I’ve never read because of my aversion to anything he valued.

OK, we’re headed for a discussion of victimhood here. Why did he need to validate his intelligence through his children? Because he was born in poverty in southern Illinois, coal-mining country just like its southern neighbor Kentucky? Because he never got to go to college, like my mother did, which he used against her in any number of ways, like belittling her looks, her character, her interests. Which he then repeated with my sisters and me when we reached puberty. In “Memory Laps” Sedaris says of his father’s constant harassment: “I’d never know if my father did this to hurt me or to spur me on,” and he doesn’t give us enough information for us to figure it out, either. But Sedaris’s focus is on how it made him feel: “My dad was like the Marine Corps, only instead of tearing you to pieces and then putting you back together, he just did the first part and called it a day. Now it seems cruel, abusive even, but this all happened before the invention of self-esteem, which, frankly, I think is a little overrated.”

Where is the line between victim and perpetrator? Why do some people transfer their disappointment in themselves to those around them through berating and never going to swim meets? Why are others able to rise above their disadvantage and in so doing bring everyone they love with them? Or, like David Sedaris, create an alternative universe where tragedy is comedy and the theater of the absurd.

I don’t know the answers to these questions. The nature/nurture dichotomy—which should be a synthesis, I think—is too complicated for me to jump into here. I only know that as a parent I have tried my absolute best to support, nurture, and educate my children despite my own feelings of inadequacy, my disappointments, my failings. My father was unable to do this, something I don’t really dwell on very often or have a need to forgive. I only think about it when I read about David Sedaris’s father, and then I feel an overwhelming sadness for the victims and the perpetrators, whoever they may be.