Goodbye girl
18 April 2011 02:24 PM Categories: Facing fears
It made me wonder what the big deal was, why I waited so long to just get on a fucking bike. My husband and I went on a bike tour when we were first dating -- though I didn't actually bike more than half an hour or so -- so it's not like I haven't been on a bike in adulthood. But it wasn't comfortable. I was still nervous. I wasn't ready.
This is what I have to admit and hate to admit: bike as symbol. I am so tired of carrying around these symbols, these heavy burdens of a non-childhood. What do children do? They learn how to ride bikes. They have bikes. They take the minor risk that getting up on two wheels entails for a taste of freedom, for the feeling of wind and legs pumping and sweat. I wasn't a child who liked to balance, to fly along on my own (much like my son, but through patient instruction with his dad, he's getting there). I could point to the tense learning sessions with my mother, whose temper was short. She was impatient and gave up as easily on me as I gave up on the bike. But my mother's teaching techniques are not the issue here.
Bike riding attached me to a stage of childhood I wasn't ready to leave. Because I never experienced it.
Sometimes to know that something is true, you have to write it or say it and then let the feelings emerge. I've been thinking about this for a few days now, have talked to my husband about it. On some levels, it feels ridiculous, the idea of not being able to do something as simple as get on a bike with confidence based on now-obscure history. It feels stupid, too, or weak. But I write it and it makes me cry and I know it is true.
An acquaintance recently (and repeatedly) called me "sweet." This is the female equivalent of being a nice guy. It's bland and simple and erases any number of my darker finer qualities. It's the kind of thing you say to someone when they are a little boring and clean. Too clean. Scrubbed clean. When I challenged him, this person pointed to my girlishness, among other things. Girlish is not how I think of myself, but I also see how trapped I am at different ages, how my past has been a roadblock. When it comes to certain experiences, I am totally a girl, from preschooler to teenager. I don't enjoy being a girl, trapped in helplessness, a passenger in my own life.
When I rode that bike this morning, I felt like an adult finally accomplishing a child's task. The bike has become a bike, the ride something that I just do. I'm sure that there will be some challenges as I take on traffic and hills, as my rides get longer, but its symbolism has been almost scrubbed clean.
I wonder as I take on my various fears and face those blocks if this will be the case with everything. Will I suddenly become a confident driver? Will social situations become easier? Will my tolerance for looking like a moron shoot up so that I attempt the things I have not yet perfected, the things I know I'll look stupid doing? I'm not expecting a personality change, but I do hope for a grownup attitude, the freeing of the girl.
She's not really alive, you know. She lives in the 1970s with her long hippie hair and her quick temper and her summer tan. She reads and reads and sits in the air conditioning by herself. She wants to punch you but she's afraid to, and that will be her last action as she is set free, her fists at the ready, ready to take down every person who told her that she wasn't good enough to live, that she was only good for one thing, that what she wanted didn't count, that she should be quiet and take it.
What she wanted was eternal life. She wanted to stay trapped forever until she got it right. Together that's where we are right now, me and the girl. She's sullen. When she gets angry she bites her tongue. She's lonely. I hold out my hand and she doesn't look at me.
Eventually she will take it. "Let me get you out of here," I'll tell her. And she will smile as she reaches for me and disintegrates into light.
Image: Me on the new bike (before the seat adjustment).
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