New Starts and Pool Sharts
aka What a Diving Enema Taught Me About Jumping Into the Deep End
Author’s Note: By the time you finish this personal essay, you may think I’m obsessed with the ass. And you may be right. Last week, thong-o-tards. This week, enemas. After 15 years of being told to squeeze my butt to create a straight body line, tight twist, or stable cupie; build my glute strength for more power on vault, tumbling, or partner stunts; and cover my ass to limit point deductions or exposure to millions (like on the live Final Four broadcast in 1997), it was hard not to become hyper-fixated. It’s taken me 30 years to undo the pelvic floor dysfunction and body dysmorphia. Thanks to my physical and behavioral therapists—and a few ass-ficionados [insert heart, wink, peach emojis]—I can now walk without bracing my core, wear booty-baring clothes, and tell embarrassing stories about my forever bubble butt. This is one such story.
My mother raised my brother and I to treasure tradition and pursue adventure. When we were young, that revolved around the water. We spent our childhood summers at my Sweetie Gram’s favorite place, a permanent mobile home parked within Evergreen Campsite on Kussel Lake in Wild Rose, WI. She’d named the trailer Big Blue, and that’s the address we gave whenever asked.
After we spent the day playing King of the Raft, scorching our asses on the metal slides, and chasing water snakes at the lake, Mom would give us her watch and tell us to return, “When the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the four.” Mom-speak for: go play until happy hour. And we did, often catching friends and frogs down at the lagoon.
In the summer of ‘89, summers changed. We moved from Milwaukee to Appleton, about 90 miles north. Mom got a morning job with the school district working bus duty for summer school and spent the afternoons shuttling my brother to soccer and me to gymnastics practices. Weekends were for soccer tournaments. No more Big Blue, no more lake.
Instead, my brother and I peddled our bikes—a black Huffy BMX bike for him, a purple Huffy Good Vibrations cruiser for me—to Meade Pool every morning for swim lessons. At the end of every class was open swim and I always headed right for the diving boards.
As a gymnast, diving came naturally to me, and it wasn’t long before one of the teachers took notice and suggested I sign up for a new diving class in the second summer session. When I begged Mom to sign me up, she laughed and said, “Sounds about right. You always wanted to throw yourself into the deep end.”
To this day, she loves to tell stories about me abandoning my Milwaukee swimming class to dive for rings in the deep end and flip off the diving board. That adventure seems to have started a tradition of throwing myself in to the deep end.
Whether it was diving, D1 cheerleading, gymnastics counselor at a sleepaway camp in NY, MBA at Michigan, NYC internship, brand marketing at P&G, writer, surgeries, intensive therapies, or six cross-country moves, I have always chosen the more challenging path.
And Mom’s response was always, “Sounds about right.”
Some people choose to administer an enema. Like many traditions and rituals, we can trace ceremonial use of enemas back to early Mesoamerican civilizations. From 1200-400 BCE, the Olmec used jars to administer enemas that would quickly induce intense trances. Mayans also tripped on hallucinogenics administered via gourds by female attendants of the Xibalban court of God D, as memorialized on sculptures and ceramics from the period.
A quick buzz is also the goal of alcohol enemas, the porous membranes of the colon delivering the drug to the bloodstream fast.
A sexual buzz is enjoyed by klismaphiles—those who partake in sexual enema play. Alfred Kinsey, the famous researcher and founder of the Kinsey Institute of sexual study, found that 11% of female samples in a masturbation study used douches and enemas (among other…tools) to bring themselves to pleasure. Talk about rolling in the deep…
Pleasure was not my goal when I got my first enema.
Meade Pool diving class led to me competing in the end-of-summer City Swimming & Diving meet. I won the 1M springboard competition and, after being nudged by one of the judges—a high school swim coach—I also competed in the 3M springboard event. At the end of the day, I brought two trophies home to Mom who’d missed the event due to work.
Sixth grade started shortly after, and I left the summer—and diving—behind. Mom continued to push me into new activities at school while I continued to reach higher levels of gymnastics at night. It was volleyball in 6th grade, then cheerleading in 7th & 8th grades. Summers were spent in two-a-day gymnastics practices with no time for the pool other than brief periods of open lake swim at Porter Gymnastics Camp.
As I finished 8th grade and looked ahead to high school sports, I wondered if I should quit gymnastics. I’d topped out at Level 10 and was too old (and not quite good enough) to move onto a regional Elite program. My high school didn’t have a gymnastics team to bridge me to college and the new gym I’d joined was an unknown. But I wasn’t ready to quit sports altogether, especially any sport where I could tumble and perform.
Diving re-entered the chat.
Turns out the judge from the city diving meet happened to be the gym teacher at the elementary school where Mom was an aide. For three years, Mr. Lemons had been trying to convince her to get me into a proper diving program. That summer, rather than send me back to another session at Porter, Mom signed me up for Mr. Lemon’s diving camp at Lawrence University.
For a week, I lived in Lawrence’s famous ‘silo’ dorm, ate pb&j sandwiches and soft serve ice cream at the dining hall, and got into mild trouble with my fellow campers. We learned the five voluntary (or ‘required’) dives: forward, backward, reverse, inward, and twist. We used the trampoline and training belts to practice our approach, flight, and entry form. And we threw ourselves into the deep end of the diving well over and over again trying more difficult ‘optional’ dives to fill an 11-dive roster needed to compete in high school.
For me, it was an intoxicating blend of gymnastic tradition with a new sports adventure in a college environment.
But, despite Mr. Lemon’s pleas to join the high school diving team that fall of my freshman year, I declined.
I’d have to forego football cheerleading, which I wasn’t willing to do. It was the last year of junior high cheer; likely, I thought, to be my main sport in high school; and the driver of my social status.
I also wasn’t quite ready to quit gymnastics. If cheer was my social status ‘gymnast’ was my identity. My dresser was topped with trophies. My bed housed giant teddy bears with heavy necklaces of medals. My closet was lined with warm-up jackets, one for each year of competition. My drawers overflowed with leos and boxers. If I dove, I’d have to compete in weekend invitationals and miss gymnastics meets which were the only payoff of a grueling practice schedule.
It was the ‘92 Barcelona Olympics that sealed my decision. There’s nothing like watching the US get punished by Russia to motivate you to keep competing.
Enemas are known to be used in a punitive way. For erotic humiliation in BDSM. For physical discomfort. For control in prisoner torture.
A very disturbing case of administering punitive enemas is that of Michael Hubert Kenyon—aka the “Illinois Enema Bandit.” Over a decade in the 60s & 70s, he violently assaulted female armed robbery victims. At a University of Illinois-Champaign sorority house, he attacked four women, one of whom was given a forced enema. After Kenyon was caught and sentenced to twelve years in prison, he was paroled in 1981 after serving only six years. And he was never charged for the enema. The ‘Champaign Enema Bandit’ has become the subject of pop culture books and movies. Like a 20th century troubadour singing about a mysterious criminal, Frank Zappa even memorialized Kenyon in song.
When I got my first enema, the only thing coming out of my mouth were wails of pain.
My life underwent a huge upheaval in the summer of ‘93. I finally quit gymnastics, ready to create a life outside the gym where I could spend more time with my boyfriend, get a job, and free up my schedule for more homework, driver’s ed, and all the fun high school had to offer.
But diving again re-entered the chat.
And Mom was again responsible.
I had worked at my dad’s company all summer and spent all my free time with my boyfriend. “Too much time,” according to Mom. She signed me up for my second summer of diving camp to force time apart.
My fellow campers were much better divers that second summer. Former gymnasts. Experienced high school divers. They elevated my game.
Again, at the end of the week, Mr. Lemons urged me to join the high school team. “You’ll be able to continue competing. And you’ll be good,” he said. “Maybe the best in the conference. There’s only one girl from Neenah who you’ll have to worry about.”
I always have been—and always will be—a sucker for a nemesis.
Cheerleading was still very much a high school goal. But even if I missed football cheer for diving, I’d still be able to cheer for basketball which was the more important season anyway. My boyfriend was a basketball player, and the basketball cheer squad was the one that competed in city and state competitions.
I also had two good friends on the swim team who talked about the fun pool practices, the energy of meets, and the camaraderie of the team. It was an intriguing contrast to the strict, individual, anxious world of gymnastics. The team also had a nemesis, the cross-town rival high school who had been, historically, a very good team. My diving scores could help us put up a fight.
I was in.
Mr. Lemons was ecstatic, with two warnings. One: I had to get over a persistent mental block—the reverse dive. Two: he’d recently hired a new diving coach, the mother of one of my classmates, who was known to have high expectations and prickly delivery. “If you can work with her,” he said, “she’ll take you to the next level.”
When I told Mom about joining the team and the new coach, she was not ecstatic. She’d sat next to this woman at my junior high volleyball games. “Stine, the way she criticized her daughter…criticized all of you. I’m not sure…”
My boyfriend broke up with me on Activity Picture Day, forever memorialized in my forced smile in the swimming & diving team photo.
It only made me more determined to throw myself in the deep end of the pool, ready to partner with my new coach and conquer my mental blocks.
Blockages are the most common medical condition to which a medical enema is the solution—figuratively and literally.
We have another ancient culture and well-named character to thank—Nery-Pehuyt, the Egyptian Shepherd of the Anus. He may not have invented the enema; in Egyptian mythology, all credit goes to the god Thoth. But the Shepherd did administer medical enemas to the pharaoh who had his own enema maker—the Keeper of the Royal Rectum.
It was the Greeks who documented the enema playbook, and the French court of Louis XIV who perfected the execution over a century later. They were obsessed, to say the least. Even known to partake at the castle before heading to the Comedy. Gives new meaning to ‘pre-gaming.’
Over their long history of use, enemas have been used medically for everything from colonic irrigation to nutrient infusion. Shooting shit in and forcing shit out. Sounds about right.
But not all evacuated blockages were physical. The Babylonians used enemas to expel the devil.
We could call my new diving coach the Shepherd of my Anus, but I still think of her as devilish.
It wasn’t long before we butted heads. But it came to a head with my mental block around reverses. Nothing in gymnastics had felt as unnatural and I had no gymnastics skill to reference for the reverse dive—throw yourself forward off the board and dive backward. I didn’t understand the physics of it and couldn’t get myself to even try the mechanics. I’d done it on the trampoline at camp, but Mr. Lemons had never forced me to do it off the board.
Coach H wasn’t so generous. “You can skate through head-to-head conference meets without a reverse dive, but you cannot compete on behalf of the school at invitational meets without one,” she said. “And we need you.” At invitationals, three divers constituted a ‘team,’ and we only had three divers. My head case was becoming a pain in the butt.
Coach H had me try the dive without an approach, just standing at the end of the board and throwing myself off. I chickened out.
She urged me to run off the board without the full approach. I tried and just windmilled my arms and bicycled my legs without a hint of back bend.
She stood with me at the end of the board and spotted me into the dive, but like a puppy refusing to go into its crate, I wiggled my way out of it.
“Enough,” she relented, more for her sake than mine. “Let’s work on your double-front somersault.” This is what’s called a ‘blind entry’ dive. A diver does not have the pool in sight before or at entry. So you have a visual for the rest of this anecdote, watch this.
I had practiced this dive on the trampoline in the summer; it was a great method to learn the needed air and body awareness. I had also done double-fronts many times off a mini-trampoline into a foam pit years earlier at gymnastics; sure, one of those times I landed on my neck and sprained it, but that’s a tale for another essay. Despite that disaster, the summer dress rehearsal had me feeling ready to try again. Water, I thought, had to be more forgiving than foam. Right?
The transition from trampoline to pool can be tricky—there’s different reflex from the board, extra distance between the board and water, and the water entry hits different. Literally. The key is to learn when to kick out from the tuck at the right time so you enter the water feet-first, arms down at your sides, at a clean angle with minimal splash.
The technique Coach H planned to use on my first attempt was to shout, “KICK!” at the point when I should release the second tuck.
As the swimmers rhythmically lapped, Coach H and I made our way to the pool deck so I could practice holding a tuck until she yelled, “KICK!”
“Whatcha doing?” my friend, Kari, asked. She’d lopped herself out of the pool and was squatting in the drain to pee.
“Drills,” Coach H answered for me.
Kari raised her eyebrows and slid back into the chop. I wished the divers had chop. At Lawrence, we’d had use of a bubble machine, or pool sprayer, to create a more visible and gentle water surface. No such safety net at the high school.
When it was my turn back at the board, all I had to guide me was Coach H’s voice. I balked for a moment. It wasn’t a block like the reverse dive, simply jitters. Coach H reminded me that it was a familiar skill, just a new environment.
“You’ve got this!” Kari yelled, hanging from a lane line.
I rolled the board wheel to my mark for front dives, paced my approach, dropped my chamois to the deck, and took a deep breath.
One-two-three-four-up-around-up-set-throw-tuck. I saw the facing wall spot once…twice…and then, “KICK!”
I kicked out my legs, pointed my toes, smashed my arms to my sides, and held my breath.
But my feet didn’t hit the water first. My ass did.
I immediately felt the rush of water go into a hole which, to that point, had only been an ‘out’ hole. The burning was instant. The pain came as I frantically surfaced and paddled my way to the sidewall. By the time I launched myself out of the pool, the tears had sprung. I grabbed my ass cheeks and ran around the pool deck whimpering.
Until the water was ready to reverse its way back out.
Unlike the swimmers, us divers had the manners and option (there was only one board, we peed in between turns) to use the bathroom, which is where I ran, one hand still attached to a cheek as I pushed open the first door into the locker room, then the second door into toilet stall. I pulled down my Speedo and gingerly sat on the toilet. At that moment, I understood what it meant to ‘piss out the asshole.’
Another diver was sent to check on me. “You OK?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered honestly. The chlorine water stung as it exited my tender tunnel, but the wave of pain had passed.
“Are you bleeding?” she asked.
I peered into the bowl, wondering what that would mean. “No?”
She sighed, “Phew. You just got a diver’s enema.” As if it were a splinter in my finger and not half the pool up my ass.
When I returned to the pool, the assistant swim coach put her arm around my shoulders, “Welcome to the club, kid. You’re officially a diver.” Seems getting a diver’s enema while trying an adventurous, new skill was a tradition of the sport.
“Try it again,” Coach H ordered from her folding chair. And with the brand of stubborn courage and fear of their coach only kids have, I threw myself right back into the deep end.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last enema I’d ever get. I had to do one as prep before each of my pelvic surgeries.
The water also bit me in the ass again—a waterslide once, tubing another time. Those types of accidental enemas are called ‘jet enemas,’ and they can cause real internal damage. Thankfully, I’ve come out clean as a whistle.
In fact, my diver’s enema is one of the many lessons sports taught me: sometimes you just need to throw yourself in the deep end and hope you don’t get an enema. But, even if you do, you run around clenching your ass cheeks for a while until the pain goes away. It always does.
In this parable, the etymology of the word ‘enema’ is particularly fitting:
Enema entered the English language c. 1675…from Greek, from ἐν (en), "in" + ἱέναι (hienai), "to send, throw".
Sounds about right.
I'm cringing after reading your story. I had no idea of what could happen to divers. And that enemas had a history of being much more than a wellness procedure.
My heart goes out to you with all you've endured at such a young age. It's so important to tell your story so that all know what can happen to young athletes behind the scenes as they are encouraged to push harder and harder with brutal consequences.