Leaving Home

Teaching a child to ride a bike is complicated. 

The physical part is fairly straightforward.  First you take every precaution to select safe equipment, surface, and surroundings.  In order to convey confidence in the child you must resist the compulsion to accessorize with hockey gear and bubble wrap.

 Discuss the controls before placing the child in the saddle. This is recommended because once the child is on the bike both parties will be unable to focus on instructions.  The child’s excitement and fear of failure and its unknown pain will block the ability to process tutoring.  The trainer’s fear of known pain has the same effect.

 Firmly gripping the underside of the bike seat you launch forward with smile in place and mantra intoned, “you can do it, youcandoit, youcandoit”.  The noise in your head contradicts, “what am I doing, is it too soon, is this just a short cycle to the emergency room?”  The future of freedom and competence and the safety of dependence coexist in that long moment.  But it’s all theory until you let go.

 Some kids are lucky as they ride straight and balanced to an immediate success.  You watch with joy that has a bittersweet finish because you know you will have to make a habit of letting go.  And there will be scrapes and breaks and lessoned learned.  You’ll let go when you drop him off at nursery school, and when she faces up to a bully, and when he interviews for his first job, and when she goes to prom (without you), and when he earns a drivers license, and when you drop her off at college, and when he puts his son in your arms. 

 You’ll let go a thousand times, trusting that it is for their best.  Some of those times you will let go because you cannot bubble wrap the world and they must face the consequences of choice.  Sometimes you’ll be wrong.  Most times you will let go because it is timely and you know in your head that it’s the right thing to do.  You let go knowing that you will both feel every abrasion that freedom, failure, competence, and maturity brings.  But in that moment you will just laugh with joy as you share the exhilaration and watch the future pedal around the cul-de-sac.