The 4am Alarm, the Cold Pool, and the Day I Chose My Daughter's Sleep Over the Register

Before the sun, before the birds

For four years my day started at ten to four in the morning. Not my daughter's day. Mine. I am the one who has to wake up first so that I can wake her, because if I let her own alarm do it she will sleep straight through it, the way healthy fourteen year old bodies are supposed to sleep. I would stand in her doorway in the dark in Pretoria, in winter when the tiles are so cold they hurt through socks, and I would say her name softly twice before I put my hand on her shoulder, because Nandi comes up out of sleep like someone surfacing from deep water, slow and disoriented, and if you startle her she is grumpy the whole way to the pool.

We would drive to training with the heater going and the streets empty except for the bakery trucks and the security patrols. She would eat a banana in the car and not talk. I learned not to make her talk. The talking came later, after the water. In those first minutes she was just a girl I was delivering to a cold pool while the rest of the city slept, and I was the delivery service, and the coffee in my travel mug was the only thing keeping me upright.

What competitive swimming actually asks of a family

People who do not have a swimmer in the house think it is a sport. It is not a sport. It is a second life that runs underneath your normal life and slowly takes it over.

There was morning training four times a week, in the water by half past four, out by half past six. Then home to shower off the chlorine, gulp breakfast, and get to school for the first bell with hair still damp. Then a full school day. Then afternoon training three times a week from four until half past six. Then homework. Then gym work for the older squad two evenings a week. Then galas, which ate entire weekends and often meant driving to Johannesburg or flying to Durban or Gqeberha for a two day meet where she would swim for ninety seconds total across the whole weekend and we would still be gone for three days.

The chlorine got into everything. Her hair went a strange green at the ends. Our car smelled of wet towels permanently. There was a laundry basket that was only swimming things and it was never empty. I stopped being able to plan anything, a lunch, a family visit, a dentist appointment, without first checking the training calendar and the gala calendar, because they came first. They always came first. That is the deal you do not fully understand you are signing when your eight year old wins her first age group medal and looks up at you from the water with a face lit up like a stadium.

The teacher who was not wrong

The problem was that the school day did not care that she had already done a two hour training session before it started.

Her marks began to slip in Grade 8. Not dramatically at first. A test here, a project handed in late there. She was falling asleep in class after lunch, actually asleep, head on the desk, and I could not even be angry because I knew exactly how tired she was. I was tired and I was only the driver.

I got the email in the second term. Her Life Sciences teacher wanted a meeting. I sat in a small classroom on a tiny chair meant for a child and this woman, who I want to say was not a villain, told me that Nandi was bright but that she was somewhere else. That she was not doing the reading. That she had fallen asleep during a practical. That the swimming, she said carefully, seemed to be affecting her ability to keep up, and that at some point choices have to be made about priorities.

I drove home furious. Not at her. At the impossibility of it. Because she was right. My daughter could not do both properly. The timetable was built for a child who slept eight hours and did homework in a calm evening, not for one who had been awake since before four and swum four kilometres before breakfast. Something was going to break, and I had a horrible feeling it was going to be Nandi.

The conversation in the car park

The thing that actually changed my mind happened in a Spar car park in Lynnwood. We had come from a gala where she had swum badly, a full second off her best in the 200 free, and she was sitting in the passenger seat crying in a way I had not seen before. Not disappointed crying. Empty crying.

She said she felt like she was failing at everything at the same time. Failing at swimming because she was too tired from school to race well, and failing at school because she was too tired from swimming to study. She said she did not know which one she was allowed to give up, and she did not want to give up either, and she was so tired, Mamma, she was so tired.

I sat there in that car park with the engine ticking and I understood that the system we were running was going to cost me either my daughter's dream or my daughter's education, and that I had been treating that as a fixed law of the universe. It was not a law. It was just the way we had always done it. And the way we had always done it was breaking my child.

Looking for another way to do school

I started reading that night, in bed, on my phone, while my husband slept. I did not know what I was looking for at first. I just typed in whether it was possible to do school around a training schedule instead of the other way around. That is how I first properly looked into an online school, because a swimming mom I knew from the Durban gala circuit had mentioned that her son, a competitive cyclist, had switched and it had saved his cycling.

I fell down a rabbit hole for about a week. I read about how the lessons could be watched at a time that suited her rather than at a fixed bell. I read about how she could do a hard academic block in the late morning after training and after a proper sleep, instead of trying to absorb photosynthesis while her body was begging to lie down. I talked to two other families who had gone this route. I was cautious, because I am naturally suspicious of anything that sounds too neat, and I made myself read the parts that were hard as well as the parts that sounded lovely.

The decision, made slowly and on purpose

I want to be clear that we did not do this in a panic and we did not do it overnight. We finished the year at the regular school. We talked about it as a family more than once. My husband was worried she would become isolated, that she would miss the ordinary social life of a school, the corridors and the crushes and the nonsense. That was a real worry and I did not dismiss it. In the end her squad was her social life anyway. Her closest friends were the girls she stood shivering next to on the blocks, not the girls in her form class.

We spent a good while comparing different online schools in South Africa before we chose, and comparing what each one offered, because I was not going to hand my child's matric to the first website that looked friendly. I wanted to understand how the exams worked, how she would be supported, whether the qualification at the end would open the same doors. I made phone calls. I asked awkward questions. I am glad I did.

What the mornings look like now

We still get up at ten to four. That has not changed and it never will while she is racing. The water does not move itself.

What changed is everything after the pool. She comes home, she sleeps for an hour and a half, a real recovery sleep that her coach says has taken seconds off her times, and then she does her school day when her brain is actually awake. Her marks came back up. Not overnight, but they came back. She is not falling asleep on a desk being watched by a frustrated teacher. She is not crying in car parks.

I did not choose swimming over school, which is what that teacher thought the choice was. I chose my daughter's sleep over the register, and it turned out I did not have to sacrifice either the dream or the education to do it. When people ask me about it now, at galas, in the stands, over lukewarm coffee, I tell them the truth, that among the online schools we looked at there was one that let my child be a swimmer and a student in the same day without one of them killing the other, and that the first full night I slept without dreading her exhaustion, I cried a bit too. Quietly. In my own bed. Where nobody could see.