My children have turned into fish.

Every summer they’ve progressed pretty well in the pool, what with going almost every day, and then the next summer it takes them a long time to get back to where they were the last time. This summer, it only took two weeks for Mabel and about two days for Dash to get there and swiftly surpass it. Today they were both swimming underwater in the deep(ish) end and doing cannonballs.

These are not the sort of children who never cared if they were on top of the water or the water was on top of them. I see some three year olds happily splashing around under the surface, but mine always hated putting their faces in the water, even with goggles. I can relate – I was much the same. Except that, thanks to Irish summers, I didn’t start doing cannonballs till I was about 12. And even then I held my nose, just to be sure.

So I respected my kids’ wishes not to be pushed (literally, metaphorically, whichever). They’ve both had some lessons, but we’d never be the sort of parents to just toss a kid into the water and know they’d be laughing about it a minute later. To them, and to us, it would feel like a betrayal from the very person you expect to keep you safe. They’d more likely be traumatised and refuse to go to the pool for the rest of the summer.

So we held them in the water when they needed us to. We put up with the summers of having one child or another barnacled onto us. And now, finally, I get my payback. I can sit on the edge, or even a little back from the edge, and talk to a friend – because the great thing about our pool in the summer is that there’s always someone there to talk to – and watch them be porpoises and dolphins and beluga whales all by themselves.