my five year old teaches me to wave while riding a bike & I am not pretending, the way grownups sometimes do & even though I’m 38 I don’t actually know how to keep my bike steady with one hand & the few times I got up on my bike as a kid, I gripped my handlebars so tight I had the pattern of the rubber in my palms for the rest of the day & my parents didn’t believe me that biking made no sense to my body & they told me I was too afraid & I tried to believe them & I rode where they told me to ride even though I knew it was too close to the edge & I fell down the grassy embankment & everyone was surprised except me & they said that I was looking in the wrong direction while I rode & maybe I was & my whole childhood felt like one endless campaign to get me back on the bike & all I wanted was for someone to whisper to me that biking was not all that important in the grand scheme of things & instead my dad said that I was maybe going to miss out on a lot of stuff, like what if I got a boyfriend someday and he wanted to go for a bike ride together & sometimes I make the joke that that’s the moment that I decided to be gay & sometimes I’m a little bit serious & it wasn’t till I went off that embankment that I understood the risk of believing someone else’s truth about my body & my brother laughed & my mother wanted me to ride home & I caught myself on the grass to keep from tumbling into the creek & my dad went back for my bike later because I refused to touch it & I watched him pull it into the garage from my bedroom window & I hated that pink bike & I wanted to grow up so I could build a life that would not require me to own a bike & I have let my 7-year-old self down in terms of that particular dream & I fell in love with a woman whose parents owned a bike shop & my dad was a little bit right because she did ask me to go for a bike ride & I agreed to ride down a mountain with her & I went over my handlebars twice & still she married me & I learned to ride a bike slowly over a lot of years & still it does not quite make sense to my body & my daughter tells me to wiggle my fingers so I do & it’s not the kind of pretending adults do to make children feel important & I do that sometimes but not today & my hands still clutch the handlebars too tight & I have to remind myself to loosen my grip & when I hear the phrase it’s like riding a bike I think of my body tipping off an edge and the bike crashing down with me & how alone I felt holding onto the clods of grass waiting for someone’s hand & I have no way to explain to my daughter the nesting dolls of parenthood & all of our past selves come rattling along with us & maybe she already knows & maybe that’s why she’s so gentle when she tells me that the next step is to shake my arm & a part of me will always be there clinging to that grass & my daughter and I are coasting down the street & I shake my arm & my daughter lifts her hand up off the handlebars & her bike wobbles & she holds it steady & she looks at me & she does not see all my past selves & the sun is shining through the trees & I can hear the creek in the distance & here is a whole person who maybe wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t steered myself right off the edge & I lift my hand & I am waving.
