Some of you who follow me on Instagram saw when I recently shared on Stories a video of my 8-year-old daughter swimming in her first swim meet this year.
She’s been doing summer swim team at our neighborhood pool for three years now. She has a ton of friends who do it too and she loves it. So far this season, we’ve had several weeks of practice, time trials and last week had our first meet at home.
Thinking back on the day of the first practice four weeks ago, all of a sudden she didn’t want to go. This is so unlike her. She worriedly looked at me, “What if I forgot how to swim?” In my mind, that was a preposterous question. It’s like riding a bike. Isn’t it? I thought for sure it was. You don’t forget how to swim, do you? While I thought it was a question with a very clear answer (“You can’t forget how to swim.”), in her mind, that was absolutely a possibility.
She agreed to go anyway, and as I was standing by the pool at that first practice chitchatting with some other moms, I locked eyes with her as she had just touched the wall for the first time and now on the back half of her first 50 meters.
She immediately stopped swimming, started crying while breathing very heavily and making her way toward the ladder in the lane she was in. I instantly knew what this was – a child who saw their parent at the exact time they were doing something really hard, doubting everything they know, they wanted out, and I was the way out.
I thought, “Oh no,” and hastily walked to meet her at the ladder while simultaneously preparing to give her the pep talk of all pep talks. To comfort, yet stand firm; to not let her win me over; to attempt to avoid a complete meltdown; and to ultimately convince her how capable she is.
If you’re a parent, you know this talk. One where you instantly morph into a psychology scholar and compete in a spoken mind dance with an opponent half your size where one person is all logic and the other, all emotion. At any one point, you don’t know who will come out on top.
I knelt to meet her teary eyes, her feet already firmly on the second ladder step up ready to leave the pool behind completely. We’re face to face as I sense she doesn’t want others to see she’s upset. I softly yet firmly tell her how great she’s doing, that it’ll get easier as she keeps practicing, and this is just her first time back in the water. She’s countering with how she’s already so tired, she’s the slowest in her lane and she doesn’t want to do swim anymore. After going back and forth for another minute or so she miraculously agreed to keep swimming and I felt like I had won the mom medal for the day. It was touch and go for a minute, but logic prevailed, and I didn’t even have to bribe her with ice cream.
For the next few practices, she would continue to complain at times saying how she was the slowest in her group, always last compared to her friends and that she didn’t know how to do all the strokes correctly, specifically the butterfly.
Fast forward to last week’s meet and this superstar won her heat IN the butterfly and she was beaming with pride. I was too.
Keep swimming.
BLUESKY: The platform wants to be what Twitter used to be and I really hope it happens. “Bluesky is the place for breaking news and real-time updates. This tool supports streamers, journalists, and anyone sharing live moments as they happen.”
- We’re testing a new feature! [Bluesky]
BLUESKY: Great study. I hope they do this again next year. I’d love to see the data then.
- Bluesky has caught on with many news influencers, but X remains popular [Pew Research Center]
FACEBOOK: This is the first Integrity Reports since doing away with fact checkers.
INSTAGRAM: This feature is good for some things, but not growth.
- 🔴 Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri says Instagram Live isn’t a way for average creators to grow their following bases [@oncescuradu]
INSTAGRAM: The Community Notes program continues to roll out. It’s still in beta, but I got invited to it on Threads.
LINKEDIN: A big piece of this is video.
PINTEREST: Women’s sports for the W.
SUBSTACK: Some good best practices on how to bring followers to any other digital destination, Substack or elsewhere.
TIKTOK: I mentioned how music and TikTok went hand in hand in last week’s newsletter and now this announcement comes around. It offers access to the support team, detailed analytics and other features. Looks cool to me.
TIKTOK: Slide to the left if you want less Dance.
TIKTOK: Happy Pride!
Katie McKiever 
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