First Bike Ride

The first time my son ventured onto concrete on his bike – after a long, arduous process of coaxing, cajoling, bribing, yelling – these from the adults – and whining and defiant refusal from him – he started to get it. He wobbled, straightened, wobbled, went so fast I had to let go of his jacket and then he rode right into a telephone pole. But the ride wasn’t over. I made him get back up, we continued to our original destination – the market where he could choose dessert for that night's dinner. More whining, wanting to walk the bike, shaking out his hands from the pain. Big wet brown eyes mixed with rage and fear and powerlessness. He wanted a fried chicken leg and ate it while we were in the store. He chose his favorite, caramel ice cream, to take home (yet, no surprise here, he didn’t want any dessert that night). The ride home was emotionally painful to both of us, I imagine. But I filled it with “life lessons” and reframed riding into a pole into “inviting the pole to join him.” This gave us a little touch of humor – “You’re not supposed to invite a pole to join you when you ride your bike!” Which, when I read this sentence in print sounds ludicrous, but I was desperate to turn the event into something less awful than what it was. By the time we got home, we’d wrapped the whole incident into something we could both live with, despite the dual disappointments we experienced.

What is it about disappointment that makes it such a dangerous feeling? Fear comes to join disappointment quickly, anger subsumes all, but underneath it’s such a raw place, a slippery slope that opens up all the disappointments I’ve strung together like a beaded necklace, a never-ending pulling of polished disappointment stones through the fingers of my memory. Like a rosary, I imagine, although I’ve never held one, and I imagine that rosary beads quell discontent since they are accompanied by prayer. Nothing quells a lifetime of strung-together disappointments. For me, my heart beat is rapid, I am flushed and sweating, and pretty sure that once the feeling is opened up, sleep will be impossible.

My son doesn’t have many disappointment beads to string together. He will accumulate some, no doubt, as we all do. But perhaps he will never string them together. Maybe he’ll have the luxury of disappointment floating away, meaning nothing more than a momentary loss that he can make sense of, and move through it to return to his deep-down understanding of the world – that sometimes you invite a pole to join you at exactly the time you don’t want a pole to join you, and that other times you ride right by the pole. Instead of disappointment confirming that he is powerless in achieving his goals, perhaps he’ll experience it as a temporary setback; powerlessness isn’t global, just momentary.

It’s several years after that first ride, and as we walk or ride past the same pole on the same sidewalk square, he'll sometimes bring up the time he rode in to it. It's been restructured in his memory as something that's part of his own story, a battle story he survived to tell, and therefore the battle was worth it, and the painful bits have clearly faded away. We no longer need the reframe of having invited the pole to join him – he gets that sometimes cruddy stuff happens when you least expect it or want it to, and it’s our job to keep going. To take the disappointments with us, honor them for what they meant - because let’s be clear – most parents want a happy first-bike-ride story, and there’s no way my son wanted his first ride to go like it did – and in this way disappointments will slip through our grasp. The only thing left for us to string together will be the something fine we’ve made out of our disappointment.