The first time my mother and I competed against each other I was 5 years old. She was 37. We swam one lap of our neighbor's pool. She won.
"Ha! Beat you!" she proclaimed.
Mom had been waiting for this day for a long time. Like many women of her generation, Sara Burton Nelson was born with athletic inclinations and a competitive spirit but little opportunity to express either. She learned to swim before kindergarten and staged competitions with friends but was expected to outgrow such childish games. She acquiesced, limiting herself to lap swimming. Even there she would surreptitiously race against the person in the neighboring lane. Her unabashed enthusiasm for victory ("Ha! Beat you!") often gave her away.
That's why I got to be born. Having failed to find suitable rivals, Mom decided to create some. Her first child, my older sister, Carol, had little interest in sports. Mom's second child, Peter, loved soccer, baseball, crew, and tennis but, because of ear problems, wasn't allowed to swim.
Finally, with me, Mom could stop having kids because I loved all sports, including swimming, and was just as eager to race as she was. I remember that first race, when I was 5, with great fondness. We dived into the cold water, and I paddled as fast as I could to the other end of the pool. When I finished, I looked over at Mom and saw her slapping the end of the pool again, for emphasis. "Ha! Beat you!"
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| I learned to see competition not as a selfish desire to defeat others but as a vehicle for loving the people who join me in this impossible quest for perfection. | ||
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I was ecstatic too. After all, my mother--dark, curly hair flattened against her head like a cap, eyes red from chlorine--was grinning at me. I had just swum my fastest lap ever. My mom and I were playing together. No one had told me that losing was a bad thing.
Still, I was no dummy. Winning seemed even more fun. So while Mom was busy working, I joined a local swim team. Each summer, Mom and I raced and she won. Undeterred, I practiced my breathing, my racing dives, my flip turns. Finally, the year I turned 10, I beat my mom. She disputes this now. "I don't know about that," she says, frowning. "I think you were 11."
