Ship Creek Beach just before we swam! There are very few photos when you’re really living in the moment…

Sometimes, you need to take off your shirt in public if you want to swim with the dolphins.  And you need to be prepared to get cold.  Really, really cold if you want to follow a dream.  This was the unscripted lesson plan on November 18, at Ship Creek Beach, New Zealand.  We pulled off to do a short hike, stretch our legs while heading down south to Queenstown.  This was a diversion, a rest stop, on the way to the destination.

As we were reading the informational placards about dolphins outside the bathroom, a kind woman interrupted to say that there was a pod of Hector’s dolphins over the dunes, swimming just off shore.  Come quick.  So we scratched our systematic roadschooling schema to race toward the beach.  In the crystal-clear turquoise ocean down below were these rare, diminutive dolphins jumping, surfing and surfacing in tandem. We watched them in wonder for ten minutes. “Let’s go in,” my 13 year-old daughter says to me in her puffy jacket.

“Gosh, we should.” I reply standing beside her in my fleece and leggings, as if someone should but not the 47 year-old mother that I have become. Not the woman who sees each and every potential hazard around her.  Not the woman who had a plan to get to the town of Haast by lunchtime.

“We might never get this chance again,” she says.

And in me was this cavalcade of why nots: Sweet Jesus, that will be cold. Doesn’t this ocean flow toward us from Antarctica?! There’s a ton of people here so I will ruin their videos and selfie-stick-photos of dolphins behind their shoulders. What if the surf is too strong? What if I can’t really swim out past that surf break?  But when I look at her, I know what a good mom should do.

I don’t see any offending offshore rocks or signs of a riptide and secure in the knowledge that my daughter is a competitive swimmer, I take off my fleece, T-shirt and shoes and stand next to her in my jog bra and leggings.  “Come on.”

And we do it.  We watch for a break in the waves and wade into the frigid turquoise waters of the Tasman Sea to swim towards this pod of wild dolphins.  As a way of encouragement, a man towards the shore says that we should make clicking noises to attract them once we’re in.  Duly noted. So we time our entry in between wave sets and easily swim past the break.  Once I can finally catch my breath about fifty feet off shore, I start making a frantic clicking noise and look back to my husband on the beach to direct us toward the dolphins.  And Lorna and I swim side-by-side for more than twenty minutes next to these gorgeous creatures with squeals of delight shared between us.  They never surfaced closer than five feet away, but we could feel them and hear them swirling underneath.  Click click sounds at our feet.  It was one of the highlights of my life.

But the lesson here is to swim with dolphins if life gives you the opportunity.  Be willing to bear your 47 year-old torso or your 13 year-old self-consciousness to onlookers.  Be willing to get uncomfortable for a while, to even spend hours reheating yourself for the chance to look a wild dolphin in the eye, to look your daughter in the eye, to fulfill a life dream. Be willing to get publicly pummeled by a wave on entry to look your daughter in the eye after a breaching dolphin dives before you both and know that you’re striving to be the kind of adult that you want your daughter to become.

This is what “roadschooling” is really about: to live a life outside the box, to follow your passion and your dreams.  Maybe it’s ok that we haven’t been making as much time for math lessons, as we’d planned.  Maybe these learning standards that we are living will fuel them to conquer future long division in ways that are unmeasurable.