The New Yorker:

It was so reasonable—why couldn’t we want different things? Two could go into the water and one could stay on the shore. But I didn’t want to leave her there.

By Mary Grimm

I went swimming with my two daughters when they were both expecting babies. The three of us had gone away for the weekend, and were staying at a hotel in Port Clinton, Ohio, which was close to where we used to go on vacation when they were little. Val, the older one, had tried for a long time to get pregnant, taking somewhat heroic measures. I’d gone with her to one of her appointments to get hormone shots, which had felt strange; it reminded me of taking her to get shots when she was a kid.

Her younger sister, Sue, had got pregnant quite quickly, two months after Val. For a while, Val was annoyed by this. She didn’t say so outright, but we could tell. It had been so hard for her and so easy for her sister, and that took away some of the joy she’d felt when she and her husband found out that they had been successful.

But, by the time we went swimming, they were happy with each other again. We went to East Harbor, a long sand beach on Lake Erie. The water is always relatively shallow—you have to go some distance out to reach a swimmable depth. From there, you can see the length of the peninsula, divided half a mile away by a break wall. You get a sense of the lake as a great flat plain of water; it seems a little reckless to have set out into it. But, when you reach the point where you can’t touch the bottom with your toes, you feel brave.

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