I have a fear of water. Not all water, thank God. I mean I don't fear tap water, although I am suspicious enough of it to only drink filtered water. The water I am afraid of is water over my head. I first encountered this kind of fear, not in myself but in my grandmother Vera. My family was getting ready for a fishing trip and I asked her why she never came along. She told me she was afraid of water. I asked her if this meant she was afraid of the bathtub too, but she said no. She was just afraid of water over her head. Perhaps there is a genetic link, some type of recessive water fear gene.
I was not afraid of water as a child. I didn't exactly like it for baths and would often only pretend to get into the tub. I was pretty resourceful in my pretend bathing routine as I would run the tub of water and even slosh it around with my hands to mimic what I thought would be realistic bathing sounds. This worked a couple of times until my mother came in the bathroom just as I was supposedly bathing and found me clothed, dry and dirty. Since then she checked in on me and I had to actually bathe.
I don't know how I could have been afraid of water as a child. We were a fishing family and when the weather allowed we were either in a boat fishing in the bay waters, on a jetty fishing from the rocks or wade fishing from the shore. I loved everything about fishing as a child. I loved the beach and would wade out into the surf without a moments hesitation. The thing was, none of this water time ever had me dealing with water in a swimming fashion. As much as we were in water situations there was never any attempt made to teach me to swim. When we were in deep water in the boat we always wore life jackets. When we fished from the jettys we never went into the water. When we wade fished we walked out to about waist deep water and no further. Even when we were just at the beach for recreation and not fishing we never went into deep water.
There were only a few times in my childhood that we went to swimming pools. In these encounters I learned something rather unsettling about my body. My body liked to sink. When my sister or my cousins would jump into the pool they would sink at first, but the water would sort of spit them back up to the top. They didn't float like corks, but the water seemed to buoy them up. I on the other hand sank like a stone. My sinkable nature was due to the fact I was super skinny and had virtually no fat to help me float. My sister and cousins would practice floating in the pool and the water was all reasonable with them and they floated. I tried to learn to float, but my gangly arms and legs and toothpick thin torso gave the water nothing to work with. It would always identify me as sinking material and down I would go. This was very frustrating for me, but it never made me fearful.
I did not actually start to become afraid of water until I was in my teenage years. It just sort of crept up on me. At first I was just afraid of being in water over my head, such as a swimming pool. No problem because I could just stay in the shallow end. Then the idea of being on a boat began to bother me, but still, no problem because I could always wear a life vest. Then I had a few encounters where we were at a beach and I couldn't tell where the drop-off into deep water began. That was the first time I had a fear I could not resolve. From that moment on I began to avoid 'water encounters'.
I successfully avoided almost all water encounters for many, many years. In fact I got so good at avoiding them I forgot I was afraid of water. So for all practical purposes my water phobia was solved.
Now fast forward to my meeting the man who would become my husband. He was a surfer and had been for many years. He had grown up around swimming pools and could swim like a fish. Here was a water-man. When we first started going out, many of our dates were trips to the beach. I loved the beach and it was fun. I loved watching him surf. Then he wanted to teach me to surf and I rediscovered what I had forgotten. Water phobia.
Now given my fear and my lack of swimming ability it would have been perfectly correct for me to decline the 'learning to surf' offer. But for some reason my water phobia amnesia let me get started with it. After all, at first I was just walking out into at most, hip deep water and I had strapped to my leg a leash attaching me to an enormous floating device, a 10 foot surf board.
What my husband taught me at first was just to walk out, position the board and catch the incoming whitewater and ride on the board on my belly to the beach . Weeee! What fun! So I did that quite a bit. Then he taught me to paddle the board out before turning and catching the whitewater. Okay. This was still fun and I could even get to my feet sometimes so I felt I was progressing, but I was also becoming a little nervous. Gulf waters are notoriously shallow, but I knew that somewhere out there was the dreaded 'water over my head' line and I was starting to get scared. And there was something else. I began to fear what was in the water too.
I guess this was just my minds way of trying to get me out of what it was phobic about but I began to have unreasonable fears about water creatures. Sharks, stingrays, jelly fish, crabs, the list kept growing. In order to deal with some of it I began to wear surf booties so my bare feet were not in contact with anything. The shark thing was harder. Even though I knew there were always sharks in the water and they so seldom attacked people that I had successfully survived a childhood where I was wading in waist deep water for hours at a time with a stringer of fish tied to my body – in other words – shark bait – even this would not be enough to keep my mind from making up spooky shark scenarios. I cannot count the number of times I would be sitting on my surfboard and the leash would touch my leg and my mind would think: SHARK!
I stuck with it though. Through dint of shear repetition I began to develop minimal skills that convinced my husband that I was capable of paddling out and really catching a wave. I tried it and survived, but there were many, many failures. There were also plenty of times my husband had to nursemaid me back to the beach as I would have a miniature panic attack while out in the surf. I am not proud of those moments, but I am proud that I at least tried to conquer that phobia. I was at least partially successful.
My surfing now is much more intermittent and like many skills, you are only as good as you practice, so I am back to the walk out and ride the whitewater in again. But that is okay because in my wildest dreams I never set out to become a surfer. It is just one of the many things that when it came my way I just caught hold of and went for the ride. In this case literally riding on a surf board.
For those that knew me prior to my surfing experience this was not something they ever would have suspected I was capable of. My best friend said that considering my fear of water she could not fathom how I was able to surf. She hypothesized that my fear must compel me to get out of the water by whatever means available and since in the water next to me there is this surfboard, like a wet cat I climb on top and – Tada, I am surfing. I think she nailed that one.
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