Our 5-year-old daughter spent the summer learning to swim - at preschool, at swim classes at the YMCA, in the surprisingly still waters of Nantucket Sound. She can’t float on her own yet, but she feels safe in the water, thanks to a string of flotation devices with cutesy-cute names. There’s the “bubble,’’ the Styrofoam disc that we strap on her back at the Y, and the “noodle,’’ the long foam cylinder she clings to at the preschool pool. In the ocean, she rode small waves with plastic “swimmies’’ on her arms. And in the town pool - where no noodles or bubbles or swimmies are allowed - her parents were always there to hold her up, keep her confident and secure.
In just over a week, she starts kindergarten, and with that milestone comes another reminder that we won’t be needed to keep her afloat forever. The kindergarten mom’s lament is as old as school itself; the Internet is clogged this time of year with bittersweet letters from mothers to their children, acknowledging a moment that’s both specific and universal. Just as every baby is a miracle, every kindergartener is a personification of the passage of time, a living proof that babies grow up to be people with foibles and preferences and tempers and crazy ideas.
Ava used to be a baby, like her brother is today, who greeted strangers with a toothless smile and was thrilled by the mere act of crawling across the floor. We know much more about her now: that she prefers princesses over trains, art projects over baseball games, the color pink above all others, though purple is making an incursion. We know that, like her mother, she likes to sleep late and gets frustrated when she can’t master something right away. And, like her mother used to be, she’s a cautious kid who’s not especially keen on growing up. One day when she was 4, she burst into tears at the thought of turning 5. Last week she told me she wants to keep training wheels on her bike until she’s 9. (I told her we’d table and revisit the idea.) When she says she’s afraid that kindergarten will be “too tricky,’’ I assure her that she’ll do fine - and flash far back to the day, on the cusp of first grade, when I sobbed over the prospect of homework.
I want her to believe that everything will be perfect, but I know that’s not quite true. Kindergarten itself will be cloistered and caring enough, but each year of school will bring new pressures and anxieties, cattiness and cliques and problems that I won’t be able to solve. It will get worse before it gets better; at a party recently, some grown-ups agreed that we wouldn’t go back and live childhood again, because we didn’t want to go to junior high. And while she’ll wind up smarter and stronger at the end, she’ll be less innocent, too. The nice thing about swimming with a bubble, at age 5, is that you have no shame about it. You’re still free to cling to your parents in the water, to express your fear and joy in the barest terms. Once you start caring what other people think, you lose some of that lovely childhood freedom.
That’s what’s saddest and sweetest and strangest about these days, this netherworld between the little kid she was, the big kid that she’ll be, and the tiny, silly hybrid that she wants to be right now. In some ways, 5 is the perfect age: We can disagree about “American Idol’’ contestants and bond over ABBA songs, but she still wants to cuddle in bed with me at night and listen to me read “Green Eggs and Ham.’’
But already, when we go to the pool, she scans the crowd for her friends. The other day, she found a boy from preschool, and as they showed off for each other, splashing, giggling, and jumping off the dock into the shallow water, my mind flashed forward to the days when a poolside flirtation would give me a different sort of anxiety.
That’s a long way off, I hope, but I still know the day will come when she feels far too cool to cuddle in bed with me. By then, she’ll be swimming with no bubbles or noodles at all, just her own true self, floating whichever way she wants to go.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. 
