Today Nora rode a bike.
It wasn’t without training wheels and it wasn’t even the first time she had done so…but this time I really looked and saw and got it.
In two short months she’ll be five years old. And in that short/long time, she’s figured out how to hold a spoon. Stand upright and move forward. Use a potty. Comb her hair. Clear a table. Talk like a semi-normal person on the phone. And- apparently- work the mechanics of a bike to propel herself down the road.
This is amazing for two reasons.
One- biologically speaking, any child of mine is rolling the dice in terms of physical awareness. I am a reformed klutz. (I maintain really, really well.) I’ve sprained body parts you probably didn’t even know you had, and have frequently had doctors exclaim in amazement that they had only read about stuff like that. I cannot dive. (The breech babies are making a bit more sense now, yes?) And I get injured in the face a ton. So, yeah, whenever one of my kids does something new and physically fantastic, I take no little pride in it. EVOLUTION!
And two- Babies become kids. Kids become adults. And adults just kinda know how to do things. None of this is new or particularly earth-shattering. But when you’re seeing these transitions? When you’re the one remembering how that fetus went from craving raw onions and kicking your spleen at 2am to suddenly using knees and gripped handlebars to methodically pedal a Huffy down the sidewalk? It just strikes you how wild biology really is.
“Here you go. Good luck. Next up comes taxes.”
As a parent, you know this stuff. You know that kids grow and change and learn to do amazing things in the short time between birth and adolescence. But there’s a big ol’ difference between knowing something and suddenly being aware of what you know.
I swear I am not high.
What I am, however, is hyper-aware of all the things I’ve given my kids (like short genes) and all of the things they’ve picked up from me (like short fuses). And all of the stuff in between is what I lie awake at night and fret over: Do we play music for Jasper as much as we did for Nora? Is Zu potty-trained because of or despite our neglect? Has the coffee I’ve mainlined over the past six years affected my kids’ nervous systems? (Say no.) Are all of the things we want to do, fail to do, and do halfway creating functional kids who will someday go out into the world and shave and vote and mulch lawns effectively?
This was my thought process as I saw my firstborn shove and pedal her way down our block. Parenting is the weirdest and hardest and most terrifyingly wonderful science experiment ever.
Now might not be a great time to publicly admit how lousy I am at science.
But improv? Oh, now that one I’ve got down.
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