The One About Biking
I'm going to admit something silly because...well, why not? One of the more interesting things about being human is relating to other humans. I'm sure at least one other human out there is as weird as I am, so I'll break the proverbial ice and just admit my own shortcoming...I never learned how to ride a bike.
Let's rewind to the 80's when I should have learned this basic skill and point the finger at two busy hardworking parents who literally saw me a few hours a day to pat me on the head, feed me and tell me to go to bed. My dad worked 2nd shift most of my life and as a result I saw him for a few minutes in the morning in between the morning rush of getting ready for school and the mild grazing of his lips on my forehead at 11pm at night when he got home. My mom was there for me in the afternoons after school got out but she was the only ticket in town and she was terrified of doing things out of her comfort zone. As an example I became quite a library rat because the library is free and reading is a good excercise for children with few friends, who are slightly introverted, and not terribly excited about team sports. My parents condoned this behavior because reading leads to studying leads to going to University and getting ones self out of a life of physical labor but my mom never actually went into the library and hung out with me. She dropped me at the front, I lingered around for a little, dropped my old books, got some new books and met her out front at our predesignated time.
The things she felt comfortable with we did but her limited English combined with being a tiny Asian lady made her feel scared in situations where she didn't think she could speak up for herself. Combine this with very limited funds for "fun" things and it meant I never got a bike as a present. Even if I did get this bike, where would I be learning to use it? We had a super rough gravel based driveway and my mom was not the kind of person to take me to parks and practice these kind of things with me. She raised me, but she didn't spend a ton of time teaching me. She fed, clothed and disciplined me and yelled at me to do my homework. She didn't help me with this homework but she certainly expected I figure it out. My dad was my weekend parent, so much like a confused child of divorce my weekend parent was fun, he hardly disciplined me and since the weekends were his only daylight hours with us it tended to mean he had to squeeze in all the chores like shopping, oil changes, grass mowing, car washing, house maintenance during the weekend. Where does one spare a few hours to teach one's only child how to ride a bike? Well, I'll tell you...they didn't.
If you ask my dad, he'll give you some B.S. that I was too timid to learn and yes that is true to a degree, but I didn't have a bike so where would I ever learn in a safe non stressful environment? So you expect that I go over to someone else's house, use their bike under their scrutiny (because obviously they don't want me to wreck it) and some how magically go from a shy timid person to an open adventurous kid willing to embarrass myself in front of my friend? Because I'd never even broach the idea of borrowing an acquaintance's bike, this had to be someone I was confident was not going to be a jerk to me later about it. I'd pretty much rather just start digging a hole and burying myself. Especially as I got older the more self conscious I got. It only snowballed because an uncoordinated toddler is cute, a goofy anxious 10 year old... not so much.
Not to make it sound like I was some half starved vagrant they took in. I learned plenty of other things and I wasn't dressed in rags forced to beg on a street corner. I'm 120% grateful for everything that I have in my life, but romanticizing basic freedoms and privileges is not great reading material.
Fastforward to present day and I have kids of my own and they are of the age where they should know how to ride a bike. My elder kid is 7 and he's probably a hair on the old side, but frankly he wasn't mentally motivated to learn it before. All summer long he didn't want to try and when he was forced to try he'd break down in tears and screaming. I'm telling you this not to embarass my kid, but to tell you that sometimes even when you try to do something good for them, they act as though you're pulling their toes off with pliers. If I had received my own bike at his age I would have been insane with gratitude. Now that he and his brother can learn I think seeing little brother really focus on it is a great motivation. Having been accidentally traumatized about learning to ride other people's bikes I didn't have the heart to push either of them. If he wants to do it himself he'll be more engaged, right? Charlie is doing great, with a few spills of course, but he's doing laps and getting very confident. As of this fall both of them are killing it, and are biking away with great abandon.
But me? Well...with my little sweethearts cheering me on I also am mastering the art of riding a bike. Am I good? Of course not. But am I getting up and moving all on my own? Yes. Have I uncovered a love for biking? Not really. It's really uncomfortable on my lady bits and I guess it's probably easier on my joints but we don't have a bike rack so any family rides have to be around our area. I also have to constantly hop off my bike because inevitably one of the boys has fallen, the dog has bolted out and created a multi bike pile up or an actual car needs to drive on the driveway. On the bright side the next time we are abroad we can use those random rental bikes to enjoy the local scenery and I dunno, ride around with baguettes hanging out of the front basket as we look at the Seine. Not that I think a 7 year old is up for that, but let's just live in an unreasonable fantasy world for a moment.
Also now that I'm older I am much less embarrassed because now I get it; no one cares about you nearly as much as you do. The spot light I felt on me was of my own making. That doesn't make it insignificant. It was astronomically huge to me and if I close my eyes and think back on it I still recall feeling very dumb and anxious and terrified of making mistakes in front of an audience that seemingly expected a miracle to occur and I just kept letting them all down over and over and over again. It was such a comedy of errors. I can't even begin to describe the anxiety sweats I am getting just thinking about it. When you're younger you're so in your head and so intensely aware of yourself. You may not like yourself, but you're on high alert about how you appear, what others think of you, your relationship to others and how cool you are because you're terrified people are giving you bad attention and will relentlessly tease and or bully you over it.
Riding with Charlie and Deuce, although they're obviously young they also don't care. That Mommy happens to suck at bike riding is not a big deal because we all talk about how we all start off terrible at anything until we practice and get better. If anything they're so sweet and supportive I have to tell them to please stop bringing attention to how terrible I am. Just let me do the thing, ok? Deuce in particular is just doing his own thing and he's such a lovely supportive mommy's boy he's just happy I'm doing an activity with him and like listening to him sing his random little songs as we go around and around in laps. I don't mind riding around in circles with him and his brother though by the 40th go around I do feel a little dizzy and bored. Charlie is doing great and has taken off like a little rocket though he's more open to trying some odd little stunts like riding with no hands. The old "look ma, no hands" is a trope for a reason. Kids just love showing off for their parents.
Again, I don't even really like riding a bike but symbolically it's been a brick wall for me and that I've overcome it does feel pretty good. It's not jump up and down do a touchdown dance kind of excitement but it seems like one of those things everyone does and I finally passed the bar and am now part of the normal people club. That I'm in it with my 5 year old certainly knocks my ego down a few pegs but I have very little ego anyway. Trev took the boys around the block but Deuce had a spill so he's been trigger shy to attempt it again. Also we're pretty much in the depths of winter so that they're even still happy to do laps in the driveway on a nice sunny day is good enough for me. In a world where kids don't play outside anymore I'm glad they still find joy in it and I'll be terribly sad when they no longer want to run around chasing one another and playing weird pretend shoot 'em up games.
Let's rewind to the 80's when I should have learned this basic skill and point the finger at two busy hardworking parents who literally saw me a few hours a day to pat me on the head, feed me and tell me to go to bed. My dad worked 2nd shift most of my life and as a result I saw him for a few minutes in the morning in between the morning rush of getting ready for school and the mild grazing of his lips on my forehead at 11pm at night when he got home. My mom was there for me in the afternoons after school got out but she was the only ticket in town and she was terrified of doing things out of her comfort zone. As an example I became quite a library rat because the library is free and reading is a good excercise for children with few friends, who are slightly introverted, and not terribly excited about team sports. My parents condoned this behavior because reading leads to studying leads to going to University and getting ones self out of a life of physical labor but my mom never actually went into the library and hung out with me. She dropped me at the front, I lingered around for a little, dropped my old books, got some new books and met her out front at our predesignated time.
The things she felt comfortable with we did but her limited English combined with being a tiny Asian lady made her feel scared in situations where she didn't think she could speak up for herself. Combine this with very limited funds for "fun" things and it meant I never got a bike as a present. Even if I did get this bike, where would I be learning to use it? We had a super rough gravel based driveway and my mom was not the kind of person to take me to parks and practice these kind of things with me. She raised me, but she didn't spend a ton of time teaching me. She fed, clothed and disciplined me and yelled at me to do my homework. She didn't help me with this homework but she certainly expected I figure it out. My dad was my weekend parent, so much like a confused child of divorce my weekend parent was fun, he hardly disciplined me and since the weekends were his only daylight hours with us it tended to mean he had to squeeze in all the chores like shopping, oil changes, grass mowing, car washing, house maintenance during the weekend. Where does one spare a few hours to teach one's only child how to ride a bike? Well, I'll tell you...they didn't.
If you ask my dad, he'll give you some B.S. that I was too timid to learn and yes that is true to a degree, but I didn't have a bike so where would I ever learn in a safe non stressful environment? So you expect that I go over to someone else's house, use their bike under their scrutiny (because obviously they don't want me to wreck it) and some how magically go from a shy timid person to an open adventurous kid willing to embarrass myself in front of my friend? Because I'd never even broach the idea of borrowing an acquaintance's bike, this had to be someone I was confident was not going to be a jerk to me later about it. I'd pretty much rather just start digging a hole and burying myself. Especially as I got older the more self conscious I got. It only snowballed because an uncoordinated toddler is cute, a goofy anxious 10 year old... not so much.
Not to make it sound like I was some half starved vagrant they took in. I learned plenty of other things and I wasn't dressed in rags forced to beg on a street corner. I'm 120% grateful for everything that I have in my life, but romanticizing basic freedoms and privileges is not great reading material.
Fastforward to present day and I have kids of my own and they are of the age where they should know how to ride a bike. My elder kid is 7 and he's probably a hair on the old side, but frankly he wasn't mentally motivated to learn it before. All summer long he didn't want to try and when he was forced to try he'd break down in tears and screaming. I'm telling you this not to embarass my kid, but to tell you that sometimes even when you try to do something good for them, they act as though you're pulling their toes off with pliers. If I had received my own bike at his age I would have been insane with gratitude. Now that he and his brother can learn I think seeing little brother really focus on it is a great motivation. Having been accidentally traumatized about learning to ride other people's bikes I didn't have the heart to push either of them. If he wants to do it himself he'll be more engaged, right? Charlie is doing great, with a few spills of course, but he's doing laps and getting very confident. As of this fall both of them are killing it, and are biking away with great abandon.
But me? Well...with my little sweethearts cheering me on I also am mastering the art of riding a bike. Am I good? Of course not. But am I getting up and moving all on my own? Yes. Have I uncovered a love for biking? Not really. It's really uncomfortable on my lady bits and I guess it's probably easier on my joints but we don't have a bike rack so any family rides have to be around our area. I also have to constantly hop off my bike because inevitably one of the boys has fallen, the dog has bolted out and created a multi bike pile up or an actual car needs to drive on the driveway. On the bright side the next time we are abroad we can use those random rental bikes to enjoy the local scenery and I dunno, ride around with baguettes hanging out of the front basket as we look at the Seine. Not that I think a 7 year old is up for that, but let's just live in an unreasonable fantasy world for a moment.
Also now that I'm older I am much less embarrassed because now I get it; no one cares about you nearly as much as you do. The spot light I felt on me was of my own making. That doesn't make it insignificant. It was astronomically huge to me and if I close my eyes and think back on it I still recall feeling very dumb and anxious and terrified of making mistakes in front of an audience that seemingly expected a miracle to occur and I just kept letting them all down over and over and over again. It was such a comedy of errors. I can't even begin to describe the anxiety sweats I am getting just thinking about it. When you're younger you're so in your head and so intensely aware of yourself. You may not like yourself, but you're on high alert about how you appear, what others think of you, your relationship to others and how cool you are because you're terrified people are giving you bad attention and will relentlessly tease and or bully you over it.
Riding with Charlie and Deuce, although they're obviously young they also don't care. That Mommy happens to suck at bike riding is not a big deal because we all talk about how we all start off terrible at anything until we practice and get better. If anything they're so sweet and supportive I have to tell them to please stop bringing attention to how terrible I am. Just let me do the thing, ok? Deuce in particular is just doing his own thing and he's such a lovely supportive mommy's boy he's just happy I'm doing an activity with him and like listening to him sing his random little songs as we go around and around in laps. I don't mind riding around in circles with him and his brother though by the 40th go around I do feel a little dizzy and bored. Charlie is doing great and has taken off like a little rocket though he's more open to trying some odd little stunts like riding with no hands. The old "look ma, no hands" is a trope for a reason. Kids just love showing off for their parents.
Again, I don't even really like riding a bike but symbolically it's been a brick wall for me and that I've overcome it does feel pretty good. It's not jump up and down do a touchdown dance kind of excitement but it seems like one of those things everyone does and I finally passed the bar and am now part of the normal people club. That I'm in it with my 5 year old certainly knocks my ego down a few pegs but I have very little ego anyway. Trev took the boys around the block but Deuce had a spill so he's been trigger shy to attempt it again. Also we're pretty much in the depths of winter so that they're even still happy to do laps in the driveway on a nice sunny day is good enough for me. In a world where kids don't play outside anymore I'm glad they still find joy in it and I'll be terribly sad when they no longer want to run around chasing one another and playing weird pretend shoot 'em up games.