NightSwim
Last night I came home after a full day of productive work to find my Nasir in the pool, Salim rebounding for Nasir’s missed shots (aimed at the floating hoop), and Dizzy the dog trying to steal the ball at every possession. The spiritual playlist made during California’s mandatory quarantine was pumping through our home, and frankincense was burning to keep the peace in our sanctuary… In short, I entered a place of joy. It was clear in that moment that all I wanted to do — without hesitation — was to strip the day away and jump into it.
I submerged myself into the “bath water” — that’s how we refer to our first family pool, given how warm I keep the temperature. It’s a blessing and a privilege that I happily pay for because it protects one of the beautiful traditions my family built with bricks of consistency and intention and connection and fun and spontaneity and love. Nightswims first began in the summer of 2011 in Martha’s Vineyard — a time when access to any pool for our family of four was a novelty and the safest way to have fun in the water with a fearless three-year-old and a seven-year-old with only one season of swimming camp under his belt.
Salim sparked the tradition one random night in August, after grilled salmon and hotdogs were devoured under the summer stars, by stripping naked and jumping in the pool of the house we would call home for three weeks. I can still hear the boys’ laughter, and the way they stretched out his name — “Daaaaadddddyyyy!”
I can still see their wide smiles that matched their widened eyes as they looked back at their father’s smiling face — the father they didn’t get to see as often as they’d like because he was working non-stop in Atlanta, helping to resurrect The Game. (Or was that the summer he was shooting/prepping for Sparkle?) The point is, I remember the smiles — I saw what joy looked like and heard what it sounded like, all of us together at last. In that moment, I probably stood there frozen because I didn’t want to make any false moves and mess it up.
Then I remember Salim encouraging the boys to strip naked, too, and to jump in the water, warm enough to be their official bath. Nasir didn’t hesitate. He immediately started tugging at his clothes, determined to get out of them as fast as he could. By this time, Yasin had decided he was all in as well, and stripped down to his bare butt, giggled, then screamed as he jumped into the deep end of the pool. A jump we had been waiting to see for some time. It was confident and the initiation of our son becoming a fish.
“It’s a blessing and a privilege that I happily pay for because it protects one of the beautiful traditions my family built with bricks of consistency and intention and connection and fun and spontaneity and love.”
Finally free of the clothes that he never much liked to wear anyway, Nasir then leapt into his father’s waiting arms. They splashed around and laughed some more, while I just held the wet dish towel in my hands and looked on, happy to be a witness, while still in a position to finish cleaning up the kitchen.
Then Daddy led the charge for Mommy to jump in. I don’t know why I even entertained not doing so — maybe it was a quick judgement of wondering whether or not I should be naked in front of my second grader, or if I just wanted to remain the observer, recording this joy with my heart fully open, or I just wanted to finish cleaning the kitchen. But the chant, — “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” — was impossible not to heed, leading me to drop draws right then and there and to plunge straight into that joy. Not just to witness it, or to later hope for it, or re-imagine it — but to live in it.
And that’s what we were doing years later, that night when I returned home to our cherished tradition of nightswims — living. At a time when the news reminds us that Black life is under constant attack, and of the racial disparities accepted as the everyday status quo in all aspects of being Black in America — glaringly revealed in the alarming health gap present in Covid-19’s death rates, and by the rampant acts of police brutality that inspired mass protests in outrage, in spite of a deadly pandemic — we, as a family, have carved out a place for our joy. It is sometimes our most revolutionary response to the constant assault on our psyche and existence. I am thankful to this pillar we built that is deeply anchored into the bedrock of our growing family, for it allows us to return to ourselves in this safe place we call nightswims.
DATE: 08.01.2021
PHOTOS: Mara Brock Akil Archives
