by Jen Mierisch

It was the last pool day of the summer.

She stood on the high diving board, twelve feet in the air. She was three and a half feet tall.

Arms crossed in front of her chest, she peered down at the water far below.

Looking over her shoulder, she saw me, standing on the deck below, giving her a huge grin and two thumbs up. Then she looked down at the water.

She turned around and started moving back toward the ladder.

She’d gone through this same routine a few times already that summer. I didn’t mind. I always told her it was okay, she’d jump when she was ready.

But today, something was different.

***

Outside the pool, something was different for me, too. For years I’d gone back and forth on the idea of setting up a public website to showcase some of my writing. I had a blog, years ago, where I wrote about nerdy grammar topics in a lighthearted way. It was totally fun.

So what was holding me back now?

Duh. Fear of failure! I’m not so unique in that regard.

But lately I’d been reading some things that changed my perspective.

Like Thomas Edison’s quote: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” How can 12 words hold so much brilliance?

Then there’s Sara Blakely, who founded the company Spanx and became a billionaire. She told Forbes that when she was a kid, her father used to ask her and her brother at the dinner table, “So, what did you fail at today?” He would be disappointed if they didn’t have anything to report. The lesson was that failures were fine, even good, because they represented a risk taken, a comfort zone challenged. Blakely said:

“Believe in your idea, trust your instincts, and don’t be afraid to fail. It took me two years from the time I had the idea for Spanx until the time I had a product in hand ready to sell into stores. I must have heard the word “no” a thousand times. If you believe in your idea 100%, don’t let anyone stop you!”

***

Today was different because she’d told her mom why she was scared to jump off the high dive.

“Maggie told me that hitting the water will crush my feet, because I’m smaller than her,” she said.

“Oh, honey. Your sister made that up!” I said. “It’s not true. Your feet will be fine.”

I’m never quite sure if my children are listening when I tell them something. Then, sometimes, weeks later, they’ll come back and say something or do something that makes me realize that not only were they listening, they’d thought about it, internalized it, formed their own opinion on it, or used it to make sense of something else.

This time, it wasn’t weeks later. It was minutes.

***

“Sorry,” I told the kids who were standing in line, waiting their turn. “It’s her first time on the high dive.”

I expected these kids to be grumbling, complaining, maybe even demanding that the pipsqueak come down and get out of their way. But they didn’t.

“You can do it!” I heard one of them call. Further nuggets of advice were lobbed upward. “Don’t look down!” “Just jump and you’ll be okay!”

She looked down at me again. “Go for it!” I said. In another ten seconds I was going to go up that ladder to get her down.

Then she turned away from me, walked to the end of the board, pinched her nose…

And jumped.

Massive cheers erupted from the waiting kids. I guess they remembered what it was like when they jumped off that high dive for the first time. They were still cheering when she emerged above the water and swam toward the edge where I was waiting, with the biggest, dorkiest grin on my face, to give her high fives.

“So, how was it??” I asked her. I half expected tears, like that time she went on the drop ride at the carnival, the one that lifts you to a height and then plunges you toward the ground.

“Mommy!” she cried, “That was fun!”

***

So I decided to take the plunge too. Because if my kid, who only learned how to swim six months ago, could jump off the high dive, then I sure as hell could start writing again.

Photo by Lavi Perchik on Unsplash