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Jinger Vuolo, née Duggar, has shared a number of revelations in her memoir People Pleaser: Breaking Free From the Burden of Imaginary Expectations about the way the Duggar family's many rules impacted her life in unexpected ways.
As shown in 19 Kids and Counting, as well as the spinoff, Counting On, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar raised their children as followers of the Baptist Institute in Basic Life Principles. The modesty rules of their church require women and girls to wear dresses or skirts that fall below the knee at all times.
One of the more surprising ways this dress code affected Jinger, now 30 and married to Jeremy Vuolo, is that she never learned to swim. The Counting On alum explained that she was certain she would drown in a voluminous skirt.
"Since I was a little girl, I wanted to know what it felt like to push myself through the water," she confessed in her memoir, per Us Weekly. For Jinger, however, "the laws of physics, gravity and buoyancy don't play well with long skirts."
Although she wasn't forbidden from learning to swim, she explained that when she tried it, it didn't go well. "Another way of saying 'long-skirt swimmer' is 'one who sinks,'" she wrote. "And because long skirts were the only swimming fashion available to me as a kid, and because I had a thing about not wanting to sink, the skill of swimming was not something I picked up during that time."
The mother of two, who has begun to push back against some of the more restrictive rules of her upbringing, explained that this fear persisted even after she decided to stop following the dress code. "I was still so scared, thinking back to the few times I'd tried as a kid, the long skirt encasing my flailing legs." But she went on to write that a friend helped her get past it by giving her swimming lessons.
"We're still at it, my swimming lessons, taking it baby step by baby step (or maybe I should say baby lap by baby lap)," Jinger wrote.
The Vuolos are parents to Felicity, 6, and Evangeline, 4, with a third baby due in March.
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