cycles

lifting, a photo by rose.d. on Flickr.

When my firstborn child was a tiny new person, I imagined his floppy muscles and whispery skin all grown and powering a car that was driving away from me. Or to me. I anticipated, with every other parent of our culture, the day that my boy would be able to travel independently of me. Worry, pride, but mostly a breathtaking awareness, stuck out in relief by this new achievement, of the little everyday miracle of a human life cycle.

But I forgot to place my own family's anti-car pro-bicycle values in that typical new-mom gooshiness. So that moment I imagined didn't happen when my son was sixteen and driving to meet me someplace over lunch. It happened when he was almost-eleven, and we biked independently from opposite sides of town to meet at his doctor's appointment. Just today. When I saw my baby turn that corner and knew he'd made it there, I was elated and sorry and had all the sort of emotions I thought were still six years away.

My boy is a bicycling boy, and he can get himself around town just fine. I have to adjust my emotional timing to correspond with rites of passage in a bicycling family. Gads, before I know it my littlest guy'll be rigging up his own longtail instead of riding on the grown-ups'.