Reinventing the Bicycle Wheel

Something amazing happened while my family and I were vacationing in Palm Desert over President’s Day weekend.  My daughter learned how to ride a bike.  Now I know this doesn’t really qualify as “amazing”; everyone knows how to ride a bike, so no big deal, right?  Well, everyone that is except for, um, me.  Yes, it’s true.  My name is Kim and I don’t know how to ride a bike.  (Now you say, “Hi, Kim.”)

When I admit this little factoid to people, I’m often met with shock: “What?!  You don’t know how to ride a bike?!”; skepticism:  “Come on, you’ve got to be kidding.  Everyone can ride a bike!”; or thinly veiled pity: “You seriously don’t know how to ride a bike?  Don’t you feel like you’re missing out?”  And then there’s the abject horror and disbelief: “How is that possible?!  Where did you grow up?!”  (The implication of course being that I must have grown up somewhere other than, say, on the planet Earth.)  The truth is, for whatever reason, my parents never saw fit to teach my sister or me (yes, there’s actually two of us mutants out there) how to ride a bike, nor did they ever buy us one (although I did own a tricycle and am pretty sure I could still tear it up on one of those).  So I had no experience with bicycles except for this one time in kindergarten, when I was playing over at Gregory Siegel’s house.  Gregory, at the ripe old age of five, was already a proficient bike rider.  So his mom brought out his old bike with training wheels for me to ride and Gregory took out his spiffy new bike (which I’m sure had some specific name you’d recognize, but given that I know nothing about bikes, I have no idea what it was).  Gregory and I rode all over the neighborhood (this, of course, was back in the day when five year olds were routinely let loose on the world at large with no supervision whatsoever), and it was all going swimmingly until we hit Manning Avenue.  Manning Avenue was a notoriously hilly street that was fairly well trafficked and, in hindsight, not a really terrificly safe street for two five-year-old cyclists to frolic upon.  As we careened down the hill, straight towards an intersection, it occurred to me that Gregory never mentioned how I should stop the bike.  Fearing that I was going to go flying uncontrollably into oncoming traffic, I decided to stop myself the only way I knew how: by flipping the bike.  I probably should’ve gone left onto the soft patch of sidewalk grass, but instead I went right—right into a low brick wall.  The result was a badly scraped torso and a certain resolve to never ever get back on the horse, so to speak. 

This oddity—not being able to ride a bike—became deeply ingrained in the fabric of who I am.  So much so, that somewhere along the way, when my relationship with my now husband was becoming more serious, I sat him down and explained that if he really wanted a life with me, he had to understand that there would be no family bike rides in his future.  He laughed and said he could live without them, but probably deep down thought that I would be amenable to learning at some point.  But I knew I wouldn’t ever want to learn; there had been plenty of men before him who, when they discovered that I couldn’t ride a bike, had (annoyingly) insisted they could teach me.  Most notably, once during my freshman year in college, I had gone on a date with an upperclassman I’d met briefly at a party.  By the time he brought me back to my dorm, I knew I wasn’t remotely interested in him and there would be no second date.  But in the interest of prolonging the evening, he kept me talking outside my dorm (clearly in a last ditch effort to get some sort of sexual return on the El Torito meal he’d bought me).  Somehow it came up that I couldn’t ride a bike, and after the requisite initial shock, followed by disbelief, followed by thinly veiled pity, he decided that it was his duty to teach me to ride one right then and there.  And by some unhappy coincidence, there just so happened to be a lone bike leaning up against a nearby tree, that, by some even unhappier coincidence, happened to be the one bike on campus that was not tethered to anything.  I desperately did not want to deal with attempting to ride the bike and knew there was regrettably only one way I could avert his attention from his newfound enthusiasm for teaching me how to ride it.  So yes, I let him kiss me.  It wasn’t one of my prouder moments, but I have to say, I stand by the decision.  It was the right call.

See—and I know this is almost blasphemous to say—I really feel at peace with not being able to ride a bike.  I don’t ever look out the window and think, “It’s such a nice day for a bike ride.  If only…”  Nope, never.  The same way I don’t ever think, “Gee, if only I had a third hand.  Just think of what I could get done…”  (Although now that I do think about it, it would be really cool to have a third hand; I could type and eat at exactly the same time.  Or do my make-up while brushing my hair.  Or read a book while knitting.  Not that I knit, but with a third hand I’d have the time extra time to learn…  Anyway, I digress.)  No, I’m sorry bike-lovin’ folks, but not being able to ride a bike has had absolutely zero negative impact on my existence.  And that is precisely why I was so stunned by the mixture of utter joy and pride I felt as my husband let go of the back of my daughter’s bike and I watched her ride off on her own, and then, not thirty seconds later, I further watched as she rode headlong into a bush (I guess instructions on how to stop are not customarily proffered until after the first fall?), emerge, and while pulling leaves out of her mouth, announce, “I’m fine!” before getting back on her bike and riding off again.  The crash, which was for me a total lifelong deal breaker, necessitating premarital disclosures and slobbery, unwanted kisses, was for my daughter, a total nonevent.

Given my complete apathy towards cycling, I tried to understand why I felt this tremendous surge of vicarious accomplishment watching my daughter ride her bike, fall and then get right back on.  And it made me recall her birth.  I distinctly remember bringing her home from the hospital and in my heightened hormonal, emotional state, confusedly thinking she was me; that her name was actually Kimberly (as I was called in childhood), and that I, adult Kim, was actually raising myself, baby Kimberly.  Okay, I should also disclose that I happened to be hopped up on a helluva lot of Vicodin due to a harrowingly difficult delivery, so that could be partly responsible for my hallucinatory thoughts.  (And if you’re raising your eyebrow at the sheer lunacy of this notion, just imagine how my husband felt when I confessed this concept to him whilst rocking my two-day-old daughter.  If he hadn’t been so afraid to hold the baby, I’m fairly certain he would have quickly removed her from my mentally unstable arms.)  However, in all fairness, I do believe that there is something valid to my trippy, hormone and drug-induced hallucinations.  Our children are extensions of us; that’s undeniable.  But aren’t their existences also opportunities for us to heal ourselves of the pains and failures we experienced in our youths?  By giving our kids the things we never had but longed for, by correcting the mistakes our own parents made, by teaching them the things we never learned and by loving them the way we longed to be loved—aren’t we in effect re-raising ourselves?  Maybe that’s the reason why parenting, which I think we can all agree is really hard (and let’s face it, a whole hell of a lot of trouble), is so unbelievably rewarding.  We get to reinvent the wheel.

So yes, my daughter’s ability to ride her bike is incredibly amazing to me.  In this small little way, at the age of seven, she is already a more perfected version of myself.  And yet, now that I’m on the other side of my Vicodin fog, I can see that she is her own person as well.  While I don’t know what twists and turns her life will take, or in what ways our lives will dovetail and diverge from one another’s, I do know that she can ride a bike.  And that, in being able to ride one, she’ll never have to kiss some guy who bought her a chimichanga just to avoid having to ride one.