Six Years for One Bike Ride

It took six years to teach him to ride a bike, five to eleven, and I don’t say that to impress you with our patience, I say it because most people don’t think twice about riding a bike, you just get on and go, but riding a bike asks your body to do about four things at once without ever thinking about any of them, cross body regulation, balance, body awareness, timing, and for Levi every single one of those had to be built by hand, slowly, on purpose, because his body wasn’t going to figure it out on its own the way some kids just do.

We started with a tricycle and he couldn’t get his feet to find the pedals, couldn’t make them move the way his brain was asking them to, so we velcroed his feet to the pedals, actual velcro, and we pushed him from behind so his legs could feel what pedaling was supposed to feel like before he ever had to produce it himself, and we did that for a long time, longer than felt reasonable some days, but you learn not to measure this stuff by what feels reasonable.

Then we got a hand tricycle, a gift, the kind of gift that changes the whole shape of a season, and his feet stayed velcroed but now his hands could turn the pedals too, and that was huge, that was him doing a piece of it himself for the first time, and we spent a year or more just living in that stage, hands doing the work while his feet came along for the ride and learned the motion anyway.

We started this whole process when he was five, and in a hallway at OT, with nobody holding on, he balanced all on his own.

After the hand tricycle came a balance bike and years of us holding him up while he found the feeling of two wheels under him instead of three, then a tricycle he could finally pedal without the velcro at all, then a real bike, still held, still steadied, still years, and I want to be honest that there were seasons in the middle of all this where it felt like we would be holding that bike seat forever, where eleven felt like a finish line that kept moving further away every time we got close.

And then one day, in a hallway at occupational therapy of all places, fluorescent lights and rubber floor and nothing special about the room at all, we let go, and he balanced, and he rode, no hands on the seat, no one running beside him, just him and the bike and six years of work underneath him that nobody watching that hallway would have ever known was there.

I think about that hallway every time I’m setting up a session for a family who’s nervous, who’s already apologizing to me before we’ve even started for what their kid might or might not do, because I already get it, I know what it is to celebrate something that took six years when everyone else’s kid did it in an afternoon, and I know that milestone doesn’t care how long it took to get there, it’s still a milestone, it still gets to be huge.

That’s the whole reason I don’t rush a session or force a moment that isn’t ready yet, because I’ve lived what it is to wait years for something and I know the wait is not the sad part of the story, the wait is just the part before the good part, and both of those parts get to be true at the same time, brutally hard and breathtakingly beautiful, sometimes in the very same hallway.

Some kids need six weeks, some kids need six years, and I’ve learned to stop measuring either one against the other, I just show up ready for whichever hallway your family is in right now.

If your family is somewhere in the middle of your own six years, I’d love to walk alongside you while you get there. Let’s talk about your family’s session, no timeline required.