Hours after I learned I was pregnant I put on a red bikini and pushed my body into the water. It was July, and it was warm. We had the pond to ourselves. I’d wanted to start at the deep end, but my friend hadn’t swum in open water much and so we started by the shallows, where the ground was thick and sludgy between our toes. The fact of my changing state - of the tiny new cluster of cells inside my body - still felt like an alarm, rogue and new and unstoppable. But in the water that reality softened a little; I was one entity in a larger one, supported by something shifting and amorphous.

That wasn’t exactly the start of the swimming but it was undeniably the beginning of something. I spent 40 minutes bobbing around the Ladies’ Pond, the baby a stowaway. Early one Sunday morning, I walked into the still ripples around a deserted cove in Fowey; the chill took an hour to shift. In those first funny weeks, when my body was all at sea, I wanted to be suspended in a being bigger than myself. I went to the council pool on a scorching Sunday afternoon and floated in the chlorine, alongside parents with babies and older children racing one another. Trappings of the life that I couldn’t yet imagine my own becoming.

A plan emerged to swim weekly at the Lido. We started in earliest September, when the water temperature was in its mid-teens and we changed outside. Six months on and we’re still going. We’ve gone in the snow and the rain, we’ve gone against sparkling sunrises. The temperature plummets and we go anyway. As it’s got colder the baby has grown inside me and while I get more cumbersome on land, in water I feel less pregnant than I am. I come with my own small radiator, a buoyancy aid. They are swimming inside of me. We take one another into the water.

The year turned: a lido swim on the last day of 2022, another on the first of 2023. Five degrees and we shared the pond with the birds. A suitable way to start a year of taking plunges.

The only things I’ve craved during pregnancy have been citrus, salt and swimming. In the early days my hunger would be rapacious; I would stash packets of dry roasted peanuts in my pockets and push the hard little nut-halves into my mouth with salty fingers. Later, and still now, I want the tang of grapefruit and blood orange to drip down my gullet. I like the smell the juice leaves on my hands. January arrived and brought with it a kind of claustrophobia: a year ahead holding only huge unknowns. I wanted to book a holiday. I wanted the sea. A few weeks later I got it: Hastings, sun setting like it was Miami. The water didn’t feel cold, but I felt high, high, high. It is the endorphins that get you; the impossible feeling of weightlessness, the saltlick against your skin, the delicious oddity of being alone in the water and looking back to loved ones on land.

I’m not alone in this. Let it be known that you’ve become a swimmer during pregnancy and other mothers will nod knowingly, some reciting week-counts and temperatures like a prayer. Other women have written about it: Alexandra Heminsley, Jessica J Lee and Miranda Ward giving words to the amorphous, ever-changing state of swimming through infertility treatment, loss, and pregnancy. Charlotte Runcie’s Salt on Your Tongue is on my maternity reading list; a book changed in the writing by her first pregnancy, she roves the British coastline collecting folklore and sea shanty as her baby grows. “The call of the sea is the call to the absolute strength of women, telling their stories and making music of beauty and imagination, and eternal mothers and grandmothers making eternal daughters and rocking them in the night as they sing while the tide comes and goes.”

There’s a quiet, private joy in feeling light when so much feels heavy. Deeper, less tangible than that, is the strength of it. I come out of the water pink-skinned and feel like I’ve moved my body in increasingly miraculous ways. I am pushing, I am floating, I can both forget my pregnancy and somehow embody it more fully. Each week I marvel that the £15 swimsuit I picked up in a hurry before a mediterranean holiday, 11 weeks pregnant, still fits, but I don’t marvel at the fact I’m still swimming: my bones know I need it.

To be this near to childbirth is to feel constantly naive. I don’t know what will unfold, I know any plans I make will be exposed as foolish. I faff around with cushion covers while we only have one packet of nappies. We will learn so much, and we will learn it the hard way. A few months ago I Googled how long until I could return to the water after birth, and was disappointed to discover it would be six weeks - minimum. Another naivety, add it to the pile. I wonder how this time will go; the longest stretch without submersion in nearly a year. By the time I get back in, it will be nearly summer and the water will be warm again, the mornings bright again, the poolside busy. I wonder if I will lose it when my own waters break, this desire to be suspended. Or perhaps I will still stride into the water, M and the baby standing on the shore, looking on into the salt spray.