Yesterday I took my son to the swimming pool—his school was closed for teacher training day and this was how he wanted to spend the day. A January-born child, he relishes the water. He is almost exactly twelve and a half years old—all but one week. As we pushed through the doors to the equatorial temperature of the changing rooms, I wondered how much longer he would allow me to accompany him on such trips. Perhaps this was the last time he’d be happy spending time with his mum instead of his friends?

Chlorine stubbed my nose and made my eyes water as I waited for him at the top of the pool steps. Unlike our normal weekend visits, the swim area was almost empty. Instead of wall-to-wall shrieking, bouncing off tiles to make an acoustic ricochet, I heard the water lapping the poolside. Kai appeared and turned to me, eyes sparkling, and grinned before diving into the water.

"Relax" by Jennifer Terry

What I wanted to write about was an imaginary aquatic idyll in which we cavorted like dolphins while he told me precious childhood secrets. But that isn’t how it went. To start with, I was in a foul temper. I had a get-nowhere, achieve-nothing morning that had been distilled into solid misery by bad weather and bad news. Driving to the pool we passed a fallen tree on the other side of the road, and I knew we’d be held up for ages on the way home, waiting for traffic to crawl round it.

But unless you’re a very good swimmer, it is hard to concentrate on much except swimming. So fairly swiftly I was impelled to give up my rotten mood in favor of focusing on not drowning.

Rapids swirled around a central island of fake palms. By the time we’d been swept round six or seven times, carried on warm water past bright lights and glowing tiles, I had a hard time maintaining my grumpiness. Kai did begin to cavort like a dolphin and, rather more sedately, I turned onto my back and let myself float on the current.

When you immerse yourself in water, strange things happen. Gazing at the multi-girdered roof above me, carried on a wave that was as close to amniotic fluid as I will ever know, I heard distant whoops and yells from the other bathers, the sound of water, and myself.

First came the thrashing sound of displacement as water filled my ears. Then the heightened dub dub of my heart, amplified by sensory deprivation. Finally I began to hear other things: the faint groaning of my left shoulder as I feathered my arms (an ancient car crash gave me that creaking joint), the gentle sighing of air inhaled through my nostrils, and the louder soughing as it left the same way. Splashing my fingers produced outside noises of water splattering, and inside noises too as muscles, tendons and ligaments made an internal symphony of my demands, with movement as the conductor. I became enchanted by this universe of insular sound, drifting like seaweed in my own auditory Sargasso Sea, and every time I lifted an ear out of the water I heard Kai talking.

It’s what he does—he chatters constantly and fluently, externalizing his stream of consciousness as though I’d read him James Joyce instead of bedtime stories. I wondered whether adolescence would end that happy babble too, turning him into the kind of monosyllabic teenager I’ve seen on television sitcoms.

Floating there, immersed in a world within a world, I felt a swift and unexpected gratitude. I was thankful for technology. That huge pool was a miracle enough in itself—warm, welcoming, stimulating, and hygienic, but that was only the beginning. Kai and I were both miracles too—the car crash that left me with a creaky shoulder nearly killed me. As an eleven-month-old baby with a fractured skull, I had been lucky to survive; the technology that helped me recover had been even younger than I was.

Kai, an Aquarian child, bore a scar on his stomach from an operation when he was exactly twenty-eight days old that probably saved his life. His surgeon told me that this now-routine procedure was unheard of twenty years ago. New micro-surgical techniques had taken Kai’s condition from "usually fatal" to "almost never fatal" in a generation.

So as I swam beside my child, now almost a young man, who a couple of decades earlier would have been just a sad statistical fatality, I became aware of the power of technology to transform our lives. Every day we are indebted to progress whether by huge interventions like emergency surgery or by tiny ones like the magical way a public swimming pool can turn a grumpy woman into a grateful mermaid.

Author Bio: KAY SEXTON has an overdeveloped work ethic and a fig tree in her garden. She finds it hard to reconcile the two. She is a Jerry Jazz Fiction Award winner, with a column at www.moondance.org and another at www.facsimilation.com. Her short-short story "Domestic Violence" was runner-up in the Guardian fiction contest, "Tats" earned an honorable mention in Desdemona's Erotic Fiction contest, and her work appeared in seven anthologies in 2004. Her website www.charybdis.freeserve.co.uk gives details of her current and forthcoming publications. The fig tree is also flourishing. Contact Kay at: kay@charybdis.freeserve.co.uk