You were five years old when your father and uncle threw you into the weir. The deep rectangular irrigation trough sucked you beneath the water, then tossed you above the surface-you gasped-then down again. Three times under, until someone hauled you out. Your father and your uncle stood there laughing at the weak child who could not learn to swim. I picture you running home, away from them, sobbing. But when I try to imagine your father-Granddaddy-I see instead a face contorted by laughter, or the knit brows of a disappointed competitor.

Then at ten, you were ready to learn. You could swim already, but whenever a stroke required putting your face in the water, you turned it up instead of down. Every Saturday morning you waited for the city bus to take you across town for swimming lessons that you paid for out of saved allowances. A thin girl sitting alone on a bus: maybe she clenches her teeth, but she has somewhere she is going.

Every week at church, the family sat together at Granddaddy's insistence. In the photo albums I found a picture for every week, four children and their mother in Sunday best. No one is smiling, and you are the smallest child, chin down and eyes seriously considering the lens.

Years later you met Dad, his religion a yarmulke in his back pocket, long forgotten. Small revelations to the soft spoken. Kind eyes and sympathetic talks. Family and God intertwined. You had turned down so many others; but something was different this time. And you said, before family and friends, I do.

Pregnant, you thought of God. And with Dad, his quiet sadness, you chose again. Rabbi, you may have said, I want my children to be Jewish. And the rabbi may have then nodded his head, looked at your belly, and joked about not having much time to waste. But one condition, rabbi, you say. I will convert simply, without ceremony. I will study with you, and I will receive your blessing with my husband beside me. But I will not fast or scrub or dunk. And perhaps you thought then of falling through the weir's trough and touched your turgid belly and prayed for the goodness within yourself to protect the new Jewish you and Dad were creating.

Maybe the rabbi nodded. Maybe he shrugged or shook his head. That matters very little, now or then.

Watch me! Watch me! I'd cry when I was a little girl learning how to swim as I performed my newest aquatic trick, turning in spirals under water. I see you, you said. Today I wonder what it means for a growing-up woman to think about her mother, to search back to childhood for the confidante of early dependence: beginning each day by climbing into your lap; afternoons of nothing but following your long legs, which I shyly hid behind. And remembering the gradual withdrawal, all mine, resenting the love pats and inquiring questions, pushing our intimacy into a farther recess of my memory and daily routine.

Last year I asked myself, how had I become Jewish through you? Knowing that a woman's soul must differ somehow from a man's, I turned from Dad to you. I wanted to connect through you to the legacy of Jewish womanhood. I tried to quantify your Jewishness, to measure its depth and breadth. I wanted to know, unequivocally, the mass of my Jewish soul. And I looked to you for proof. I thought of how you hold your hands before the Shabbas candles, palms facing the flames, and my own shame when, in a friend's home, I learned the tradition of passing the hands above the candles three times, then covering the eyes. I blamed you for my embarrassment. I began to challenge your choice, your way of choosing.

But in the midst of this confusion I pictured you, as a child, as an expectant mother, and as a woman capable of marking her own course. Now I understand: the choice was yours entirely. And that is perhaps the most beautiful Jewish lesson a mother can teach.

I had swimming lessons as a very little girl. At the end of class we would play in the water. My favorite game was to swim behind you, reaching for your legs that stretched endlessly and elegantly, hanging on to them like pale buoys. We float forever in my memory.

Rebecca Davis, BK'98, is a Senior Editor of Urim v'Tumim.