Fraidy Jerusalem and her fellow instructors at Waterjoys teach children and adults to swim with confidence… and love it

I’M

the first of three generations to find joy in the water.

A frequent sufferer of ear infections, my mother’s pediatrician ordered her to keep her head above water. She also helplessly watched two of her friends almost drown. Swimming in camp saw her sitting on the sidelines, longing to join her friends, but paralyzed by her medical issues and deep-seated fear.

But the fear wasn’t hers alone. In the mysterious way we pass our prejudices down to the next generation, my mother knew that her mother disliked water. The depths of my grandmother’s fear stemmed from when two neighborhood boys drowned at the seashore. One was the son of Holocaust survivors, and the devastation never left her. For her, water was liquid fear.

My mother was determined to break the cycle; her children would attend swimming lessons and learn to love the water. With an ever-expanding family, spending tightly budgeted money, pushing through endless hours of traffic, she shuttled us back and forth to conquer the deep.

Session by session, we waded into the world of water.