On Completing A Childhood Milestone: Bike Riding! (Whew)

One of the things that both my husband and I had been feelting extremely guilty about over the years was the fact that neither of our children knew how to ride bikes.  He is physically unable to teach them and I, it turns out, am a "bad bike riding teacher"...the only thing I was able to create were tears and frustrations.

So as spring came back to Texas this year, so too did the guilts about the bike riding issue.   But with a long weekend coming up, I was going to make it happen come hell or high water...no matter how bad it got, I wanted them to feel the rush of freedom that comes with riding a bike--I had it and loved it and they would too, dammit!

I didn't tell the kids this as I figured it would just create angst and drama throughout the week--I would instead create angst and drama for only one day by unveiling it on Friday morning:  "Tah-dah....we're starting the long weekend with pain and suffering...whoo hooo"!

With plan in hand I drove home on Monday to find my son riding his bike around our neighborhood like a pro!  Happiness warred with confusion...how did this happen?  Little did I know that we had a bike-riding teacher genius in the form of an 8-year old neighbor boy who, it turns out, spent 10 minutes with my son and got him not only up and going, but zooming around with a confidence that was inspiring.  As I watched him race around with a giant grin on his face I did a quick internal check and found (thankfully) no guilt or resentment about the fact that it hadn't been me who created this happiness and happily gave our neighbor a big high-five and oodles of compliments and thanks. 

Inside the house though, I found Mt. Vesuvius in the form of my daughter, raining hellfire down upon the resigned head of my husband.  It turns out that her bike tires were flat, there was no time left in the day to teach her how to ride and, according to her, "you all hate me and it's not fair".   After getting my husband out on a walk and spending some time listening and cuddling, we decided that we would attack it the next day.

And again I came home from work to find my daughter riding around grinning like the proverbial fool...the neighbor boy had struck again!  Happily.  I was voluble in praise for him as were my kids for their friend--he felt happy and confident and as my daughter said, peddling by, 'Mom I feel the free-est I've ever felt!". 

She then tried to high-five her brother and immediately they crashed into each other, falling over, with one grumbling and the other laughing, laughing, laughing.

Which reminded me of a book I had read about a decade ago sitting on a small stool in the children's section of a bookstore:  "The Epiplectic Bicycle" by the wondrously wierd Edward Gorey.  This is the story of brother and sister Embley and Yewbert who, after whacking each other with a croquet mallet, have a fraught adventure on the bike the book is named for. Time, chapters, ideas and phrases are all out of order, which makes for a surreal sense of freedom in this oddly uplifting tale.  I can remember feeling extremely happy for having found and read this book, leaving the book store with a big grin and a light step.  Exactly how my kids looked that evening as they came in for dinner, flushed from their exertions.  And exactly how my husband and I felt seeing our happy children and feeling quite giddy ourselves about their newfound abilities.

The bike, as my daughter intoned, "...is a wonderful thing".