Pool Party

Dad is back at our place for a few days to oversee the renovation of his new apartment at the Place Where He Is Moving To, and we will have lunch there and meet some other residents. Dad is really looking forward to meeting people and getting involved in the groups at the PWHIMT and he talks a lot about how he rarely sees friends anymore in NYC.

Growing up, my parents worked full time and gave parties, dinner parties, and work parties, had friends over for the evening, and had guests stay with us at our house. They seemed very socially active and they had tons of friends that we visited all the time both locally wherever we were living, and far away, in the United States and Europe.

It feels like it was all of a certain era. I’m not saying that Max and I don’t have friends or that we don’t socialize, but that sort of 1970’s round of dinner parties, big parties, organized socializing, just seems so exhausting. How could they work and do all that after work and on weekends? Did smoking cigarettes help? (They both quit in the 80’s).

Our family (Max, Sarah, and me) didn’t socialize as much as the average family not only because we are socially awkward and Sarah had special needs, but because Sarah never went to our neighborhood school, which is ironically right down the street from our house. So we didn’t form those easy attachments with other neighborhood kids’ parents or recognize neighbors who lived off our block. Polly the Beagle filled in a bit for this function because we got to know all the dog owners in the neighborhood (That’s Bogie’s Dad! That’s Sandy’s Mom!) and for a while there was a nice easy social scene at our local park with people congregating at certain times to walk and play with their dogs. But the Park Police starting really cracking down on leash laws and making the dog owners feel unwelcome and it kind of died out.

I always had some vision in my mind of the women in our neighborhood getting together to play — what is that game? – it begins with a J, Junko or something like that. Or meeting for Toddler Play Group or having barbecues and pool time together. Who knows if that was actually happening?

We joined a private pool in the neighborhood when Sarah was about 5 to 8 years old. I could not stand the social vibe of the pool, with the mothers hanging out on their chaises longues gossiping and tanning and paying no attention to their kids, and the kids treating me and Sarah very roughly in the pool where I supported her in my arms and helped her swim. They squirted her with squirt guns, splashed her deliberately, and came up to me and asked insanely rude questions about her. The parents were equally rude and used to harass me about using the handicapped parking spot.

We left that pool and went to a public pool where people paid by the day, and kids and parents swam together mostly as a family, and we didn’t have those issues at all. While we had been members of the private pool, I had thought that the kids were mean and rude, little bullies in the making. I didn’t have a high degree of tolerance for their behavior and on one occasion I grabbed a kid’s squirt gun after he squirted Sarah and lobbed it over the pool fence. Later, after we had been at the public pool for a while, I came to a different interpretation. I think it was hard for those kids to see me swimming with Sarah and holding her in my arms and talking to her and singing to her and us laughing and having a good time. Their parents were ignoring them, or sometimes publicly screaming at them. It must have been difficult for them to see a child who had her mother’s constant attention and maybe they had some jealous feelings. Maybe I should have been more sensitive.