If you were looking for a heartwarming story, you might want to stop reading now, because the scene currently unfolding at a neighborhood pool party is sure to make you cringe: Thirteen-year-old Katie Moore isn’t going in the pool because she just got her first period, and now she’s way overselling her lie about how her religion doesn’t allow swimming.
Jeez. This is definitely hard to watch. Everyone got the hint when she said her religious beliefs forbid swimming, and she really could’ve just left it at that.
From the moment her friends jumped into the pool, Katie’s been leaning way too hard on her lie about how her family belongs to a little-known sect of Christianity in which swimming is forbidden, both recreationally and for survival. Although everyone at the party was immediately cool to just let her chill out by the side of the pool without any fuss, she proceeded to tell everybody her family’s faith stipulates that her soul will be damned to Hell for an eternity of unbearable torment should she swim.
“My family’s priest will excommunicate me from the church if I even get my feet wet,” Katie said as she ignored her friends’ offer to just get out of the pool and go on the trampoline with her instead. “A few years ago, my uncle went swimming in the hotel pool at our Christmas celebration, and now we’re not even allowed to say his name.”
Sadly, even though all of Katie’s friends are nodding and saying it’s fine if she doesn’t swim with them, she’s continuing to pad out this unnecessary lie with excessive detail, including a made-up biblical story she says her family holds sacred about twin sisters named Victoria and Zemirah who swam in a river instead of preparing supper and, as punishment, were beheaded by their father, who was anointed with scented oils by the king as a reward for slaying the blasphemous swimmers.
Damn, Katie’s really going to some incredible lengths to avoid telling people she just got her period. Someone should probably tell her she can take it easy. Party guests say that when her friend’s mom came outside with a box of popsicles, Katie didn’t even give her a chance to ask why she wasn’t in the pool before launching into a convoluted explanation about how the only day her religion will permit her to swim is on the eve of her wedding, and that when she does finally get in the water, it will be a really beautiful ceremony at a lake, which is something she says she knows because she saw her cousin swim before he got married last summer.
Yikes. You’ve gotta feel for this girl. Her elaborate lie about her anti-swimming religion is becoming more labyrinthine by the moment. It’s definitely not easy to have your first period at a pool party, but this is total overkill. Hopefully Katie finds a way to wrap this up at some point before she digs herself into too big of a hole.
