Why Dads Desperately Need to Teach You How To Ride A Bike

The first time she almost fell set us both back a couple years of potty training. She was 5, but the accusatory glance she threw my way was at least 12, maybe 13, before she announced the experiment was over. 

A year later, she agreed to let me try to teach her again at a local park. She was making progress (a brave yet hesitant pedal here, a wait-WTF-are-you-doing over-correction with the handlebars there) when her bike started to tip in the direction of a perfectly safe, legally parked SUV eight feet away. I caught her easily. But she was done. Two years later she still tells everyone, “We almost hit a car!” 

Every few months, I’d beg for another chance. I tried bribes. Each time, she politely told me to kick rocks. 

Not sure why it’s so important that I teach my daughter how to ride a bike. I felt, in my marrow, that the world required this of me. There are uppercase Dads, and there are lowercase dads. I was convinced that if my child could not ride a bike by age 10, I’d be a lowercase dad for life. 

Truthfully, there are a lot more important skills for surviving the world she’ll grow up in. I could teach her how to design websites, code apps, or defect to Canada. In my generation, riding bikes was what we did. It was our first freedom vehicle, our antidote for boredom, our kid-powered rocket that helped us explore this brave new world. 

Bikes aren’t that anymore. The “world” they truly want to explore is here, on this screen, among these videos and photos and games and baroque ones and zeros. Teaching her to ride a bike is a little bit like my dad teaching me how to make candles out of beef tallow. Thanks, Dad, but in my century we buy them at Target. 

I just figured she’d get a little of that sense of freedom that I felt when I learned. As a child you’re sequestered to the 100-foot radius around your parent. A scooter increases that a bit. But scooters are slower and not designed for long-distance. A bike goes faster and farther, with less effort. Teaching your kid to ride one is telling them, “I trust you, be free-ish.” 

Plus, being able to ride a bike is being able to not participate in the digital world for stretches at a time. That’s important.

I’m no tiger dad. I’ll force my daughter to do certain things—be respectful to others, brush her teeth, do homework, tell me I’m pretty. But I won’t force her to participate in life-enriching activities. I won’t make her piano. I won’t demand she paint or sing. I’ll help her discover them, facilitate a safe and desperately enthusiastic learning environment. But forcing them seems like an arranged marriage. Forcing humans to love something just makes them love the idea of setting fire to that thing. 

I’ve bought her three bicycles now. The first two were ridden a maximum of 20 minutes each. They became expensive housing developments for spiders. The Jeff Bezos of spiders built an impressive web in the middle of the bike’s frame, while less ambitious spiders were relegated to tenements in the spokes and under the seats. Eventually, they were passed on to children who loved their parents more. 

Finally, last week she told me that her last day of summer camp wouldn’t be any fun for her. “Why not?” I asked. “It’s bike day,” she pouted. This was my in, and I struck. She agreed to let me teach her, and I had a feeling this was my last chance.

So I bought her a cheap bike, an orange one that would make a beautiful home for a spider some day soon, and we all headed back to the park full of excitement and fear and my lording sense of past failure. 

[to be continued… which means I’m done writing for the morning… check back later this week and I’ll tell you how my panic attack turned out]

Confessions of an Accidental “Big-Truck Guy”

Today I set Norman free. I adopted him at birth from his parents, Dodge and Dakota. He is 16 years old—the age when trucks are supposed to start driving themselves and become terrified of getting other trucks pregnant. 

I named him Norman because, early on, he made a repetitive shrieking noise that sounded like the shower stabbing scene in Psycho. We got through that together. It was a learning moment, though I resented him a little bit for it. The best nicknames have at least a little shame. 

I remember the day I first saw Norman, beheld his glory. A family friend managed a car dealership and agreed to shepherd me through the process. He’d make sure I bought a sensible car and didn’t get taken advantage of in the financing process. I met him on the lot, pointed at Norman and said, “I’ll take that one.”

“The display truck?” he laughed. “Oh buddy. We tricked it out to it to lure people in. Wayyyyy overpriced. No one buys the display truck.” 

“Great,” I said, “I’ll take it.” 

And so they backed Norman off the display riser and the family friend called my father to apologize and ask if there had been any red flags in my test scores. 

I didn’t want a big truck. I’d rather politely apologize for my small manhood than finance it at 5% over six years. The dealership was full of battleship-sized trucks built for construction professionals. Next to those giants, Norman had looked sensible, smallish, urban. As soon as I got him off the lot among the Priuses and Hondas, I realized this was not the case. For the next 16 years, I would pilot a penis pump on wheels. 

Norman drank a full tank of gas like a tequila popper. Every time I turned on the engine, Saudi Arabians sought shelter from all the money falling from the sky. 

Norman had four-wheel drive. That’s important in San Diego, where all the flat roads are paved with sunlight. All those wheels driving together gave me the same sense of security as a bulletproof vest at a water balloon fight. I reasoned I’d need his off-roading capabilities for my many trips surfing in Baja, Mexico. For all the adventuring and beard-growing he would inspire me to do. 

In 16 years, Norman and I made approximately three trips into Baja. The only time I put his big tires to the test was when I couldn’t make a full U-turn—on account of Norman’s turning radius being about three miles—and casually went up the curb. Off roading is fun you should try it. 

If I invest in Norman, he could run another 100,000 miles. But it’s time to set him free. It’s time to sell him to someone with a ranch, someone with a beard, someone who knows what a transmission is and can rehab him into the dirt-roaming, free-range animal he was always destined to be. 

Goodbye, Norman.