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Finding Our Balance: Training Wheels for Parenting
By Tom Montgomery-Fate
Issue 113, July/August 2002

Every spring, a bicycle path near our house slowly converts itself from a frozen dirt trail through a silhouette of trees and dried brambles into a leafy green tunnel. Stinkweed, nettles, and huge stands of rhubarb spring from the warming earth, bursting from dormancy. Blackberry bushes, sumac, bittersweet, and scrub hardwoods fill in the middle tier. Overhead, new leaves define a growing network of maple, oak, and cottonwood branches, which will soon block most of the light.
By the first of June, the wooden frame homes and apartments that line the path disappear behind the swaying walls of green. You can no longer see around or beyond the trail's frequent bends and turns. It is a comforting blindness, one I look forward to. Coasting along the bumpy path on my old Raleigh three-speed through the heart of suburbia with my two daughters riding ahead of me, there is nothing I want to know less than exactly where we are or where we're going. We never go very far. But for the girls, the pathway may as well be a national forest. Tessa, who is seven, learned to ride last year. She races ahead of us and doubles back while I roll slowly along with four-year-old Abby. Abby's rusted hand-me-down bike is a little too big, and the seat a little too high, even in its lowest position. The gritty bearings make pedaling difficult, and the training wheels are rusted a bit out of position. When I first lifted her on to the seat and she tried to pedal, she was frightened. It was too tippy. But she persevered, and finally found her balance.

At supper that night, Tessa recalled her own fear when she first rode a two-wheeler; like Abby, she didn't trust that the training wheels would "catch" her. I remember when we took Tessa's training wheels off. Over and over I sprinted behind her, my hand on the small of her back, as she pedaled and coasted and wobbled and dipped down the path. It was awkward, because I was both slightly pushing her forward and trying to hold her up, wanting to keep her going and keep her from falling. As I panted along behind, I encouraged her and reiterated two instructions: "Keep the handlebars straight" and "Don't shift your butt in the seat."

Tessa's face was screwed so tightly in concentration that I don't know if she heard. She was listening more to her body, to what it knew about balance, to what it feels like to roll upright into the wind on two thin rubber tires in spite of gravity. Seeing her confusion, I stopped talking, other than an occasional "You're doing great!" She didn't say a word the first few attempts, but when she finally fell in the dirt she looked up at me as if I had let her down. I consoled her, inspected her scrapes, and then said exactly what my parents had told me: "Get right back on. You can do it!"

After a half dozen more attempts, she could nearly balance herself. Then she began to say it, the same thing I'd said to my parents: "Let go! Let go!" When I finally did, Tessa veered off the path onto a connected sidewalk, careened off someone's picket fence, bumped through their front yard, dodged a tangled garden hose, slowed her bike, and gently fell into a forsythia bush. I walked over to find her laughing.

Here's one definition of parenting: once you learn how, you always forget, because the how keeps changing. Our "answers" to kids' dilemmas often only work once, with one kid, on one day. And what we remember about those answers is usually inexact, not reproducible, more intuition than logic.

This has become increasingly clear to me since the birth of our son, Ben, a few months ago. With three children, the how-to of parenthood has become an even deeper mystery than it was before. I know it's more art than science, but what does one do when the directions to the birthday party go sailing out the open car window, when scissors are the only solution to a grape bubblegum hairball, when it's five minutes too late to replace the permanent set of markers with the washable ones, when fatigue grows into a roaring tantrum? Sometimes I remember the one thing I know: parenting both devastates and sustains. Coasting is rare. Experience will not keep me from falling. Teetering on the wheels of instinct and reason, I may never find my balance.

More than 30 years ago, I too learned how to ride a bike. I don't recall exactly how old I was or how many hours or days it took me to learn. But I remember that I trusted my parents. I remember feeling their belief in me. "You can do it," they said. More a promise than an expectation, these words were often unspoken. They permeated my childhood-a kind of faith, which I suppose later told them when and how to let go of their four sons.

I still hear those words. They help me steer. They remind me how the arresting beauty of our children's vulnerability reveals our own. We keep running behind them, gently pushing, trying to hold them up-along with ourselves. "You can do it," we say, imagining a lifetime of balancing.

Tom Montgomery-Fate, an English professor at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, lives in suburban Chicago with his wife, Carol, a social worker, and their three children.