SELF-ESTEEM: A TALE OF TWO WOMEN

One of the lamentable realities of modern American society is that its structure seems to foster low self-esteem among many women. Although this deplorable situation clearly is changing, it is still a fact of life for countless American women and girls. Even the most talented and accomplished of women are not immune from this modern social malady. Research by psychologist Matina Horner demonstrated that low self-esteem can produce an actual fear of success. Even Gloria Steinem, whose accomplishments as a writer, editor, and feminist leader have been equaled by few, admitted in her book Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, that she suffered from low self-esteem and saw herself as both unaccomplished and physically plain. Swimming is one way many women have found to deal with low self-esteem. The feelings of strength, competence, accomplishment, self-reliance, and physical attractiveness the sport engenders have helped thousands of women overcome the debilitating effects of low self-esteem. Here are the stories of two such women.

Katherine Casey

Katherine Casey is an attractive forty-five-year-old teacher at Lakes High School near Tacoma, Washington. She is an avid Masters swimmer who also manages to find time to coach swimming, diving, track and field, and gymnastics. Now happily remarried, not many years ago she was a battered wife.

“I was married to my first husband fourteen years,” she told me. “One of the reasons I was attracted to him was the fact that he was so athletic. I felt that his participation in athletics would enhance our relationship, since I was also very involved in swimming and coaching. I even coached at the high school he had graduated from. I thought he understood my participation in athletics. That was the way it seemed while we were dating.”

Once they were married, Katherine was shocked to discover that her athletic activities were no longer okay, that her husband had taken a proprietary view of her and the way she spent her time. “It began very subtly,” she recalls. “First with the sense of dissatisfaction with me, refusing to kiss me hello when he came home from work, refusing to participate or go with me to my sporting events, trying to keep me from my friends, refusing to talk to me, yelling at me.” Her husband’s behavior eventually escalated into his hitting things, breaking furniture, denting her car, physically threatening and abusing the children, and finally physically assaulting her.

“I spent years wondering what was wrong with me,” she confided. Only two things kept her going through this rough time: “my teaching assignments and my swimming.” When the battering began, Katherine finally got out of the relationship.

“You know where I went the next weekend? I packed up the kids and went to a swim meet. I was sick and injured, but I had to swim! It was the last thing I was hanging on to.” She remembers that day well; instead of laughing and talking with her swimmer friends, she hid in the corners so no one would see her bruises until she could get makeup back on her face. But Katherine soon came to understand that she had no cause to feel shame because of her husband’s actions. And swimming played a part in her recovery, confirming for her that she was really okay, still the person she had been, that she was worthwhile. “My last shreds of self-esteem needed that support and confirmation,” she recalls.

Katherine is still swimming today. One of her workout partners is Walt Reid, her husband of four years, whom she met at a swim meet. “To this day,” she remarks, “swimming is a source of physical and inner strength for me. I so much depended on it for my self-esteem and sense of power and strength during those bad times that it’s become as necessary a part of my life as eating and sleeping. Putting my head down in the water, stretching out and feeling power return to my muscles strengthens my belief in myself. It clears my brain and empowers me to do whatever I have to. Nobody can take away the good feelings I get each day from swimming.”

Susan Livingston

Looking at her, it is hard to imagine that this tall, athletic, graceful, confident woman once suffered from low self-esteem. At age fifty-five, Susan Livingston could easily pass for an attractive forty-year-old. As one talks with her, this feeling is reinforced. She is gracious, knowledgeable, and assertive. She knows what she wants in life and how to go after it, but always with style and class.

Susan, who has three grown children, operates a successful bed-and-breakfast in scenic Marblehead, Massachusetts. She supplements her income as a seamstress specializing in wedding gowns. But her real passion is swimming. Although you would never know it from talking with her, Susan is one of the top women swimmers her age in America.

In keeping with the dominant values of her time, Susan married right after graduating from Smith College and immediately settled down to being a housewife and raising a family. “I never had to do anything that brought me in touch with the grown-up world,” she recalls, “not even balance the checkbook. My husband took care of everything. My only job was to be the perfect wife and raise our three children.”

When her Ozzie-and-Harriet marriage began breaking up in 1983, Susan was devastated, and totally unequipped to function in a changing world. It was then, quite by happenstance, that she started swimming. A natural, she has been at it ever since. Today, she says, “I couldn’t live without it.”

When Susan was in college, there were no competitive athletic programs for women, but she did join Smith’s synchronized swimming team. Years later she describes herself as “swimming laps with my limp, delicate hands and my head out of the water, as synchro swimmers do, just exercising. I happened to go to a pool when a Masters swimming practice was going on. I just fell into it. Coach Jack Hayden kind of tucked me under his wing, and a month later I was competing.”

Susan has been swimming ever since, and in ten years has racked up over forty New England records in the forty-five to forty-nine, fifty to fifty-four, and fifty-five to fifty-nine age-groups. In 1985 she won a national title in the 200-meter backstroke and in 1991, at the age of fifty-three, recorded lifetime best times in several events. But she doesn’t worry about her times. “I swim for fun, fitness, and friendship, and I love every minute of it: the practice, local meets, traveling all over the country to the nationals each year, making interesting new friends. It’s been a great time.”

With her divorce had come a kind of identity crisis, Susan says. “If you weren’t somebody’s wife, then who were you? Swimming helped me with that. In becoming a swimmer I developed my own identity and a new set of friends who respect me for who I am.”

Susan comes by her talent naturally; she is a fine all-around athlete, and her father was a national collegiate swimming champion at Yale. But she had had no previous experience in competition. Perhaps feelings associated with her divorce had something to do with her drive during the first few years she swam in Masters competition. “Now I have nothing to prove. I’d love to go faster, but I do well enough for me.”

Along with her new sense of who she was came self-esteem. She says, “Through swimming, I learned I could do anything I set my mind to: swim faster, balance a checkbook, manage my own portfolio, repair the roof, haul the garbage to the dump, or start a successful business. Through swimming I’ve finally found myself.”