Safe Clean Water

John and Sadee take the kids for an outing by the water

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Lies I Tell My Kids. This is episode 13, “Safe Clean Water.”

What we can now call our second and third kids, and say it without crumbling, are playing in the sand and periodically picking up one of the toys they’ve brought with them to supplement the fun. Grady is using a grader and excavator to grade what seems to be a full neighbourhood of streets and intersections and small houses, and Lolly has decided to go vertical. Her office tower looks like it could come down any time with just one misplaced pat of the moist sand. But she manages it, somewhere in her mind signs off on the completion document, and sits down to admire her creation and to ponder others. Grady is more meticulous. He has his sandy suburban neighbourhood and he has now set himself to shaping some of the roofs and adding cars to the driveways.

The water, safe and shallow though it is, is a good three metres away from them, but our association with that element still makes us more nervous than fire, air, and earth. We keep an eye out all the time. It’s unconscious and a natural motor movement for me now. I go to the back of the car but I always make sure I have the water in my peripheral vision, or that I am able to look back at it every five seconds or so to see that it is not rising up or seducing them to the mysterious wet underworld. I glance over at Sadee in the middle of some of those five-second intervals and she is sitting, folding things, taking things out of thermal carriers, and a host of other prosaic things, but she is never looking at what she is doing. Her eyes are on Lolly and Grady, and she looks down only when she has grabbed onto something unfamiliar or something too cold or something sharp which has actually cut her and so the tip of a finger goes right into her mouth for healing.

Finally we’re both done with the practicalities and we walk in unison over to where the kids are. Sadee says, “Hey, want to splash around in the clean water for a while?” They hop up instantly from their construction projects, their “Yes!” exuberant, but I could hear the false easiness that Sadee gave to splash around and hear her voice actually waver and break on water. The years from child one to children two and three have not been easy. That’s an understatement.

Lolly and Grady know that there’s no way they can just rush into any body of water without one or both of us being there—we’ve taught them hard but well—and so they stand and wait until we are both near them, the four of us in a rough circle. Underwater there is sand and not slippery walks and there’s even a gradation of depth before you can even get up to your knees. Lolly goes that far and then sits down splashily and starts to play with the toys she brought out there. Grady goes to his waist and then swims around, back and forth, never breaching the perimeter he knows we have set for him. We stand in the water, the cool, cool water, up to our ankles, and watch our kids get engrossed in what they’re doing an ultimately forgetting the strict supervision. Sadee looks over at me and I’m heartened to see that her smile is not taut as it usually is when we’re in water, but broad and her lovely white teeth even show.

“They love it,” she says.

“Yeah, for sure,” I say. “I don’t want to make this all to serious, but I’m glad we got to this point where we can give them this basic pleasure.”

“I know what you mean. Kids splashing in the water. I kind of regret that we deprived them of it for so long, but I’m happy with this, with this here right now.” She smiles again.

I put my arm around her waist and draw her close for a kiss that has to last less than five seconds. We both come away from it calm and peaceful, and I look out to see things carrying on just as they should. Grady has gotten a little tired and is now standing and occasionally putting his head underwater to see if he can find—I don’t know what, a fish, a shell, a rock with a cool shape. Lolly is still focused and intent. She changes her position now and then, discards one toy for another, and also sometimes reaches down into the sand to see if there’s something she can retrieve, something that could be useful for play now, but even better, something that could be a souvenir of the whole day, proudly mounted on one of her bookshelves.

Sadee and I retreat back to the spread-out blankets and make ourselves more comfortable. She sits lotus-style and I lie back and prop myself up on my forearms. We have a view of the kids.

“This is nice, Sadee,” I say. She thinks I am talking about the outing.

“Yeah, nice weather, a breeze, quiet. I love it.”

“No, I mean, well, us. We don’t do this kind of thing any more. We actually don’t do much of anything together any more.”

“John, please don’t start here and ruin everything.”

“I won’t ruin. Let’s just talk calmly.”

“Okay,” she says, still not quite convinced, “say something to me calmly.”

“Let’s go on a date some time.”

“Jesus, John, that kind of bullsh—”

“We both have to be calm,” I say.

She gives me an annoyed look that’s not really real.

“I know,” I say, “ I know it’s something the counsellor suggested, and it’s cliché, but it might be kind of fun. I’ll pay and I don’t expect you to put out afterward.”

She laughs in spite of everything.

“Oh, my, John, how did we get here?”

She doesn’t expect an answer. “So, what do you say, young lady,” I persist.

She gives me a look I have trouble interpreting, but says yes. I clasp her hand, squeeze, and we both return to more vigilant monitoring of our remaining children.