Parents don't always make good teachers.

Even parents who are otherwise excellent teachers. See also, why dad couldn't teach me to drive to save his life.

I hid at the back of the line when we got to diving in swim classes at the Y and never learned how. And now I have the blindness without glasses issue. So I'm not much of a swimmer. I do love to be in the water though preferably with a noodle!

a prescription mask like the Hugh Grant character in Notting Hill had.

Back in the day when these cool people were alive, my favorite Jacques Cousteau special had John Denver on it, and John was able to get a diving mask with his prescription--very rare back then--and he went absolutely giddy with glee at being able to see all the cool stuff on the reef Cousteau took him diving on.

I do love to be in the water though preferably with a noodle!

I revised the end of that sentence with "noodly appendage."

Honestly, your goggle fog up and all you can see is a blurry black line dividing the lane. All you have to do is keep to one side of it. Half the time, my eyes are closed.

Sara, if you can't do flip turns, what do you do when you do your many laps? Just turn around?

I, too, have issues with swimming, because I want to be able to see, and can't.

I grew up in South Florida, which is: surrounded by ocean, riddled with fresh water canals and has abundant numbers of houses with swimming pools. Plus lots of affordable public pools. So swimming is what we all did for fun, and all my high school friends were competitive swimmers. Some of my best tween year memories are of being at pool parties.

Also, I learned how to scuba dive.

However, in the Bay Area its not as easy to go swimming and Emmett didn't learn until EM moved into an apartment complex with a pool. Which is where Matilda is learning to swim.

I came home from getting groceries to JZ and Matilda huddled in the living room whispering. When I entered the room they shouted out at me: "Azarath, Metreon, Zinthos!" Matilda was wearing a cape.

My parents were completely obsessive about us swimming, and I'm pretty sure it's why a) I don't enjoy it and b) I'm perfectly comfortable in the water.

I was a water baby, and my father was very strict about teaching us all the strokes (well, I never mastered the butterfly, but he tried), and diving, etc. The swimming pool was our child-minder--when my father was (inevitably) playing tennis at the university Senior Common Room, my sister and I lived in the nearby swimming pool. I think poolside was pretty normal for bougie Jamaican kids of the 80s.

I hate laps with an intense passion. My god, we had to do so many of them in our free time.

I was on the swim team when I was 7 and 8. You only swam one length at that age. I moved before I could learn to flip turn. Feh.

Terrified of water over my head. Can't swim. Have noticed people tend to ignore people who are drowning because they are quiet.