How 50 open-water swims helped a caregiver reclaim her life
In August 2021, amid California's Dixie Fire and triple-digit heat, the author — a full-time family caregiver — began seeking out rivers and lakes near every speaking engagement she attended. Wild swimming in natural waters became a therapeutic ritual that helped her escape caregiver burnout. She chronicles how 50 consecutive open-water swims gradually restored her sense of self beyond her caring role.
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The sky was a hazy yellow gray, the AQI was a “very unhealthy” three hundred, and it was one hundred degrees as I loaded my car with an overnight bag and a hopeful last-minute tote holding a swimsuit, towel, and water sandals. It was August 29, 2021, and summer’s heat wasn’t fading. The Dixie Fire still raged on, but on that day, the evacuation order for Jonesville was lifted at last. Our cabin had made it through.
I wasn’t headed there, though; rather, I was leaving my suffocating home for a hotel ballroom in the small Gold Rush-era town of Grass Valley. A caregiver-support nonprofit had invited me to speak, offering an overnight stay in lieu of a speaker’s fee. I had an unusual amount of solo travel that fall, thanks to such invitations. When I was asked to speak, I looked up nearby rivers and lakes in hopes of finding a good dunk nearby.
The irony of giving talks about the biggest strain on my marriage when I wanted to end it was not lost on me. I felt like a secret fraud talking about caring for my husband whenever a Q&A led to the awkward, predictable inquiry, “And how are you and your husband doing now?” I never lied, but I also never said we were on the brink of divorce, afraid of the audience’s judgment. Instead, I yammered about how much the care relationship had changed the marriage. A flush of shame and fear ran through me as I thought ahead to a time when the answer might be “Actually, we’re separated.”
Instead, I felt like I was solely what feminist philosopher Kate Manne calls a “ human giver , a woman who is held to owe many if not most of her distinctively human capacities to a suitable boy or man, ideally, and his children.”
Grass Valley is a few miles from my favorite swimming river, the South Yuba, which boasts a string of emerald-green, pristine pools—the reason I said yes to the overnight there. When I saw the smoke and weather, I considered turning around and driving home after the talk. The ragged last few days of summer always felt busy, and school would start later that week.
After my afternoon talk, however, the smoke was clearing. I sprawled on the hotel bed, enjoyed the lack of demands on me, and slept hard. Pristine blue skies surprised me the next morning, and I headed out early for my sixteenth dunk, aiming for a century-old bridge and a short hike to a waterfall I’d read about in a swimming hole guide. On a flat boulder below the bridge, a rangy naked couple bowed in sun salutations; locals accept the remote parts of the river as clothing optional.
A mile down the trail, a small feeder creek spouted some ten feet over an overhang, with room to stand behind the waterfall. I peeled my backpack off sweaty shoulders and let the thunderous cascade pound my traps and tangle my hair before I jumped in the wider river below. Nobody was around, so I stripped down like the couple on the rock, letting the river rinse my self-consciousness away—though not all of it. I wasn’t up for doing sun salutations.
As I picked my way back upriver, I slithered into every deep green pool and lay in the sun on boulders, their smooth granite heft warming my skin and giving off a mineral scent. Once or twice I caught the faintest whiff of smoke and looked for clouds boiling up, but I saw no fire starts. I lost track of time watching iridescent trout flash by many feet deep. The fish, the waterfall, the sunny day: all reminded me that even in catastrophe we can still find oases of pleasure. Smoke settled as I drove home, where the oppressive sense of climate and family doom closed back in. But I was grateful for my brief luck.
Prioritizing my own work and travel for it felt both uncomfortable and exhilarating. I’d stopped or downshifted my career as a writer so many times: when I quit a dream food-editor job to follow Brad to Sacramento, after the birth of each of our daughters, to cope with grief and the responsibilities of managing the estate following my mother’s suicide, again when Brad fell ill. Each time my career took two steps back for a care responsibility, I struggled to take a step forward. I always felt I was losing ground as a writer, a thinker, a human being.
Instead, I felt like I was solely what feminist philosopher Kate Manne calls a “ human giver , a woman who is held to owe many if not most of her distinctively human capacities to a suitable boy or man, ideally, and his children.”
With my new book and increasing work, I felt like I was coming back to my professional self. Work travel was also a way to squeeze in my 50 Dunks Project; with about a year left, I had thirty-four swims to go, meaning I would need to average one about every ten days. On one road trip to Monterey to give a keynote on caregiving, I snuck into the rough water of Monterey Bay across from the conference hotel; the next day, I detoured to the woods near Santa Cruz on the way home for a fifty-five-degree swim in the San Lorenzo River, in a pool misnamed the Garden of Eden.
I hit traffic, got home late, and felt guilty as I so often did when I traveled, though Brad was mostly tolerant of my absence. He had taken a disability retirement, and he had recovered enough to take care of the girls, who needed less hands-on care by then. Nora was starting her junior year of high school and had her driver’s license, and Lucy was entering seventh grade. Brad did, however, have his own travel and care responsibilities that fall, flying back and forth to Canada to help his parents during his mother’s treatment.
The only writing that sparked my interest were the short, casual blog posts I jotted down about my swims.
It felt like we were easing into separate lives. By then, it seemed like our only remaining point of connection, besides parenting, was writing. Yet I’d long had a buried feeling that what seemed like a bond—intellectual and creative work—was pushing us apart. Brad had always seemed willing to accommodate my work—if it didn’t clash with his. When the girls were younger and I was a full-time freelance writer, if a kid got sick, I was almost always the one to cancel or shift work obligations to be home with them. If I protested, he said he couldn’t cancel class. He could, of course, thanks to the job security of tenure and considerable freedom of academic work. He chose to inconvenience my work rather than his own and refused to acknowledge that that was a choice, even though he got paid whether he held class or not and I did not get paid if I missed an assignment.
I knew, too, that if I missed enough of them to seem unreliable, which I never did, I would stop getting assignments. Although our work contributed almost equally to the household income, I sensed that deep down, maybe even unconsciously, he felt his was the real work, and mine was optional.
When Brad was working, I resented his professional freedom while I struggled to fit in my work around doing the bulk of household labor. Now he was retired, but was still writing, including poetry and a years-long academic project on Hamlet . In one fight I told him that if he were a tenth as curious about me as he was about the subject of his book, our marriage wouldn’t be in trouble.
While he delved into Latin texts, I still did most of what it took to keep the family running and tried to write. I was meeting with more real-world success than I’d ever enjoyed: a new book, articles in such outlets as the New York Times and TIME , well-paid speaking engagements that came with travel to Connecticut and Texas. Ironically, just when things were going well, I felt burned out by my book launch and the long string of personal crises that led to it. I knew I should be writing more about caregiving in support of the book, but could muster little to say. The only writing that sparked my interest were the short, casual blog posts I jotted down about my swims.
A recent crop of divorce memoirs and autofiction looks at the gendered strains involved when two creative people make a life together: Leslie Jamison’s Splinters , Sarah Manguso’s Liars , Miranda July’s All Fours , Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful , and more. Smith’s lyrical vignettes describe leaving for work trips after her poem “Good Bones” went viral. Her surprising success as a poet sparks creative envy from her husband, whom she had met in a writing program. Before they separate, Smith’s husband introduces her at a reading for her second book and says “many kind things.” Smith thinks, “Huh.
What he said about me and my writing in public felt different than his attitude at home.” My own mom did part-time contract work but handled most of the home front, and I nodded at Smith’s frustration at how much her life resembled her own mother’s: “I saw myself and my husband as different—more progressive, more equal in our household, both with graduate degrees, both respected in our fields—but were we? The division of labor in our home told a different story.”
In the same vignette, Smith writes that when she traveled, “I didn’t feel missed as a person. I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house.”
Many Gen-X and younger women have written of similar reckonings, and of their dissatisfaction—which I share— with the limited victories of past decades’ have-it-all, lean-in feminism. The time women spend on the housework “second shift,” as influential sociologist Arlie Hochschild dubbed it, did decline relative to their male partners’ contributions up until the 1980s, but progress on equality in the home has since stopped, resulting in what Paula England called a “stalled and uneven” gender revolution.
In the recent What’s On Her Mind , sociologist Alison Daminger sums up the shift in hands-on household labor: “we see a period of rapid change coinciding with women’s mass entry into the paid labor force, followed by a long plateau in which gender convergence trickles off or stops altogether.” Her book argues, however, that the gendered revolution in cognitive labor—the infamous mental load—has “barely started.”
Sarah Manguso’s novel Liars offers a thinly fictionalized version of this dynamic, on which she commented sharply in an interview in Alta , responding to a question about Gen-X women growing up believing they were “finally free from the confines of the home” in the wake of Roe v. Wade and second-wave feminism. “‘The women of my generation were sold a bill of goods for a new kind of heterosexual partnership that, for most of us, never really materialized,’ [Manguso] says.”
Why, exactly, was I so eager to marry as a young feminist in the 1990s, when the backlash against women’s rights that runs rampant today was beginning to ferment?
Similarly, the author Ada Calhoun writes: “For my entire adult life, I’d dedicated myself to being kind, patient, and supportive. . . . In love, as in work, I’d taken pride in being low maintenance and low needs. Throughout my 15 years of marriage, I’d handled the lion’s share of logistics and made most of the money. But in my mid-40s, I realized that the reward for being ultra-responsible isn’t a gold star. Rather, it was even more responsibility.”
Calhoun also shared my fear of judgment because of past public writing about marriage: “Getting divorced felt very off-brand. I’d written a whole book . . . about finding ways to stay together.” In Already Toast , I wrote that when caregiving was at its hardest, I often wanted to run away, but I had stayed. Now my book itself held me back from changing my life; the thought of promoting a book about caring for my husband while explaining that he wasn’t my husband anymore felt too embarrassing to contemplate.
Despite those lingering qualms, I was not only increasingly admitting to myself that I wanted to end my marriage but starting to believe a large part of the problem was marriage itself. I was far from alone. According to a 2015 study, women initiate nearly 70 percent of divorces in heterosexual marriages, a number that rises to 90 percent when the women are college educated. It’s not just that women are dissatisfied in relationships with men. As the author of the study, Michael Rosenfeld, said, “‘I assumed, and I think other scholars assumed, that women’s role in breakups was an essential attribute of heterosexual relationships, but it turns out that women’s role in initiating breakups is unique to heterosexual marriage.” He posits that marriage is more oppressive than nonmarital heterosexual relationships: “Marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality.”
I would argue that it hasn’t just been slow. Rather, it’s impossible for marriage to become egalitarian because it is an instrument of patriarchy. I of all people should have known that going in. I wrote my doctoral dissertation about marriage in Victorian Britain, when the legal doctrine of coverture still held (meaning that a married woman’s legal identity was subsumed under that of her husband), when married women could not own property but could be abused and raped by their husbands at will, and when divorce required a literal Act of Parliament.
Why, exactly, was I so eager to marry as a young feminist in the 1990s, when the backlash against women’s rights that runs rampant today was beginning to ferment? Somehow, I didn’t connect that history to my own marriage on the cusp of the new millennium. After all, I kept my name, and if anyone asked, Brad would have said he was a feminist; wouldn’t that be enough?
If I thought about it at all, with the arrogance of youth, I assumed love and our individual choices could conquer a centuries-old patriarchal structure. More jaded now, I see it as Lyz Lenz does in her blistering This American Ex-Wife : “It is possible to have a happy and equal marriage inside an unequal system. But the system itself will always subsume the female partner. I had economic stability, a home, and children, but the cost had been my entire loss of self.”
Similarly, the recent book Mad Wife recounts the pseudonymous author Kate Hamilton’s marriage to and divorce from an emotionally abusive man who sexually coerces her. Hamilton is an English professor and a feminist, and although her marriage was far worse than mine, some of the dynamics and her initial naivete rang familiar: “as a woman in a society that pretends equality, married to a man who professed to believe in a marriage of equals without having any idea what that really meant, being married was like living in a cage that no one else could see,” she writes. “I was taught by our culture’s faux feminism to expect things . . . that I would be routinely denied while being told I was fulfilled.”
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Excerpted from Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims by Kate Washington. Copyright 2026. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press. Featured image by Bentatree, courtesy .
Can regular open-water swimming replace professional therapy for burnout?
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