I Want to Ride My Bicycle

It's been so long since I posted that I forgot how to start a new one.  After clicking "view blog" twice I finally made it back to the editor and figured it out.

The non-facebookers are probably unaware of my recent hijinks.  I've gotten involved in the motivational poster/infographic biz.  And by biz I mean completely without pay.  I'll post something one of these days and try to include some of them.  But this is NOT.  THAT.  POST.

On to the fun.

Yesterday while Leslie grocery shopped I took the kids outside to play.  After climbing all over the "playground" they meandered out front and Emma said she wanted to play with chalk.  So Lily wanted to play with chalk.  This was great because the weather was great.  We doodled on the driveway for a while before Emma asked me to get her new bike down.

Emma got a bike as a prize for being the biggest fundraiser last year for something at school.  She REALLY wanted to win, and honestly we half-assed our participation at best, but the grandparents bought and we bought and the cousins and aunts and uncles bought...and ultimately she won because apparently our version of half-assed is like twice as good as everyone else's version.  To them, it might have seemed as if we used our entire asses. 

Anyway...she won first prize.  So she was super excited because nobody (including her) had really thought she'd win anything, she just wanted to participate so that she qualified to play on some inflatable bounce housey thing at recess one day.

Anyway...the bike.  It's been hanging in our garage ever since then.  The garage...it's not clean.  And there's really no place to put a bike, so it was hanging off the wall.  And this leads me to my secret shame as a parent:

I never taught Emma how to ride her bike.  If there is some sort of fatherhood bike-teaching DNA that I'm supposed to possess it somehow skipped a generation because I actually get nervous when Emma tries to get me to take her someplace level in order to learn how to ride her bike.  What do I tell her?  Balance harder?  

Our cul-de-sac is not huge, and it's not flat, and our biggest struggle CONVENIENTLY learning to ride the bike, is that there's no straight stretch of road that doesn't immediately accelerate the bike at some function of the accelerational force of gravity (think 9.8 meters per second per second), minus wind resistance, minus friction, down the hill until she approaches light speed and is hit by a car.  So that's out.  And it was never convenient, and it was always too hot or too cold or to wet or too dry or I was too busy or whatever, until ultimately she turned 11 and was one of the few kids in her school who had never successfully ridden a bike without training wheels.

And while some father-daughter verson of "Cat's in the Cradle" played ...time is/was running out on the whole "teaching her how to ride the damn bike" thing.  This bike had no training wheels, but at this point she wouldn't have allowed training wheels on the bike anyway...because now she's 11 and it's embarrassing to be 11 and have training wheels on your bike because your dad was too lazy to get motivated and teach you (my past teaching attempts involved phrases like..."okay, now pedal and don't fall").

So yesterday she took the bike down to the cul-de-sac.  It was perfect because the neighbors were gone, and it's embarrassing to be an 11 year old attempting and failing to ride a bike while a 6 year old neighbor kid rides circles around you and asks why you aren't keeping up.  She pushed off and just glided with her feet barely above the pavement.

I watched this with interest.  "Em, you're essentially riding your bike right now.  The only difference is you're not pedaling."

Lily too took an interest.  She decided she wanted HER bike.  After some tire pumping I got her bike out...and it was too small.  But we had Emma's old bike, so I pumped up the tires on THAT bike (can you tell how big a priority bike riding is?) installed the training wheels, grabbed a helmet and took it down to the street to see...Emma...riding her bike. 


I was so proud.  I was SO excited for her.  Really, I'm not kidding that it had been one of my most guilty feelings as her dad, not getting her on a bike enough...and here she was riding it.  It was a little stop and go at first, but she got the hang of it.  I shot a video and fired it off to Leslie who got a little emotional (not that I was immune from it).

And then Lily pushed herself around a little before I started helping her and by god my kids were bike riding.  It seems so silly, but I know most of the people reading will get it.  MY KIDS WERE OUT RIDING BIKES.  I thought about posting something to Facebook later..."Just out in the cul-de-sac while the kids ride bikes."  You know...just something casual...and then saying, "YEAH BITCHES!!!  Drops mic and walks off stage."  It really was an awesome and triumphant feeling.  Not for me...cause I didn't do shit except watch my kids play together.  Let me say it again...WATCH MY KIDS PLAY TOGETHER...GOD that feels good.  Watch my kids play together.  I feel like Dory when she starts gushing about her ability to remember the address on the back of the diver's mask in Nemo..."I don't get tired of saying it, I'll tell you again, 42 Wallaby Way Sydney."

And they played a good portion of the day together...slides, swings, chalk, bike riding...GOD it was awesome.  Emma is like Lily's best therapy in terms of socialization.  She WANTS to play with her.  She WANTS to do what Emma's doing. 

Anyway, on maybe the nicest day of the year so far, my kids played outside together and I just stood there and gushed and enjoyed it.

All for One and One for All

I mentioned to a Facebook support group I'm in that:

Every picture I post of myself with my older daughter makes me feel like I'm not including my younger daughter. It makes me think, "I wonder if people look at this picture and wonder where my younger daughter is, and why she's not there". Every picture I take of me with my younger daughter makes me think, "I wonder if people see this picture and think, he's just taking pictures of his youngest daughter so it doesn't look like he spends all his time with his oldest daughter."

Anyone ever feel that way? Sometimes maybe we need to give OURSELVES a fucking break from scrutiny and judgement.

And I was sort of pressed for time, but it had been eating at me a little and I wanted to just lay it out there for the universe (at least this collapsed and particularly singular universe that is the autism parenting universe) to consider.

And after I left it there I felt like I needed to return to the thought and give it a little more fleshing out.  It's not that I think I'm a bad parent.  It's not that I think I give more of my time or attention to Emma.  It's not that I think the time I spend with Lily is spent in order to somehow prove to other people that I'm not just focused on my other kid.  It's that the thought occurs to me that other people might think that.  

The point I was trying to get across at the time was less even that other people might be judging me, and more that they may not be judging me at all!  And if they are, how would I know?  And if they're not, why am I growing gray hairs worrying about something that clearly is only occurring to me?  This hypothetical judgement is less about what other people might be thinking and more, "I'm thinking it."

I think that at the end of the day I realize that a lot of the "fun" activities I get pictures of myself and Emma doing are things that Lily isn't as interested in, or outright hates.  But the appearance of me sledding with Emma, or eating cotton candy at a Pirate game with Emma, or at a movie with Emma, gives a photographic record of only my time with Emma...not Lily.  And I think that grates a little.  I think it makes me feel like I'm not doing enough to get Lily involved in activities that might be more fun for the whole family.

Tonight I took Emma and Lily out into the snow.  Lily was reluctant.  It would have been easy to say, "Okay, honey, you stay inside."  But I knew there had to be something out there in the white that would appeal, and so fighting inertia and Lily's strange finger force field (the only effect of which is to repel mittens from her hands) we trudged outside into the snow to play.

And Lily hated the sledding, and after confirming a couple times that yes, sledding is not Lily's thing, we made a snowman, and found that kicking and whacking the snow...is Lily's thing.  It's enough of Lily's thing that I had to set the timer on my Iphone (duck quacking) for five more minutes so I could help transition her back inside the house (that she hadn't wanted to leave) with less fight.

It's a weird sort of win-win.  I know that I try really hard to spend time with both my girls, but there is a lazy inertial ease associated with just letting Lily do what Lily loves most all day, which is to watch TV.  And letting her watch TV, while it may be what she prefers, is not actively being involved with her.  And the pictures I take of myself with Lily while she's not actively involved with me kind of are a bit of a lie, proof only that I was in the same room with her, and not that I was involved in doing something with her.

I took her into the snow and I got my family time with both girls.  And I got my picture with both girls.  Part of my pledge to myself and my family is that I'm going to try to help facilitate more of that inclusive family time.  The pictures weren't ever the point.  The point was that the pictures led me to realize I wasn't making enough of an effort.

The Three Musketeers - Photography by the Fourth Musketeer

Sliding Scale

When Emma was six, I stood a short distance away, watching her watch a boy climbing back up the playground slide he'd just slid down.  She made as if to follow him up and I said sharply, "Em!"  She glanced up at me.  I raised my eyebrows and shook my head slightly.  She frowned slightly at the unfairness of it all, but recovered quickly and ran around to the other side of the slide to climb up the ladder instead.

I'm probably on the overprotective side of the parenting spectrum.  I tend to always be pretty close.  As I've watched my daughters on playgrounds over the years I've gotten to watch lots of other kids on the playground too.  While kids were climbing up the ass-end of the slide she was waiting to go down, I'd holler up to Emma to wait until the kid got to the top, so she didn't knock him off the slide on her way down.  The spiral slides are blind at the top, and not all kids (nor even most) have parents hovering close by to tell them that climbing up the slide is a no-no when others are playing.

In those moments I vaguely wished the other parents hovered a little more, so that I didn't have to be my daughter's buzz-kill every time in order to protect their kids right to disregard the "fit for particular purpose" of good slidesmanship whilst simultaneously saving them the pain of a potential broken collarbone and marathon trip to the Children's Hospital E.R.

Emma's always been athletic if somewhat small for her age.  It probably would have been nothing for her to climb up the down side of a slide from a gross motor skill perspective.  It probably would even have been pretty easy for her to hold on tight as the warning that would almost certainly never have come failed to stop the child of the distracted parent from sliding down as she climbed up. Probably.  But instead of testing those waters, I'd just repeat, "Em!" and shake my head no, and Emma would frown slightly and run around to the ladder to wait her turn, playing, the way most kids do.

Lily just started taking an interest in slides.  That's great for us and her.  She has so little interest in conventional play, and so little use for outside activity ordinarily.  If I was overprotective with Emma, I'm hyper-vigilant with Lily.  Potty accidents, slips and falls notwithstanding, there's no guarantee that Lily won't just kick an unchaperoned child who gets a little too close to her on the playground.  Her gross motor skills aren't what they should be for a kid her age either.  She's a bit wobbly and tentative on the ladder, and in the past she's been reluctant to slide once she reached the top, satisfied simply to sit and look down the slide, waiting for either someone to push her, or to retreat to the familiar safety of the ladder (though she fell off a couple steps a day or so ago) and/or daddy's rescue extraction.  The summary of all this, to quote Alastor Moody, "Constant vigilance!"

I know she plays on the playground and slides at school with slightly less vigilance (I'm not implying they're negligent, just that they can't possibly be hovering to the extent that my wife and I do) after all, it was on the playground where she fell and her glasses cut into her eyebrow, requiring stitches.  There too she was reported to have kicked a couple of her classmates on different occasions where I assume she felt their proximity represented a challenge to her body's sovereignty.  Those updates come to us via the communication log the school provides us.  But just this past week she's really been excited to go in our backyard and slide.

We had the kids outside after supper.

"Are you watching her?" Leslie inquired anxiously, clearly implying that I was not.  I glanced up to see Lily standing atop the slide.  There are rails on its sides, but she was a loooong way up.  At least for her.

"Yes," I replied tersely, "she's fine."  It's good for her, I thought.

Later, when Lily got to the bottom of the slide, she turned around and began to climb back up.  I cocked my head at her and felt a strange stir of excitement.  Far from the "Em!" and accompanying head-shake response her big sister got, I found myself egging Lily on.  

"You can do it, big girl!"  Leslie added her encouragement from behind me as Lily slipped a little and stalled halfway up, but kept climbing until she was once more perched at the top.  I looked over at Leslie, who seemed similarly surprised.  

Old picture, same attitude

She's six (Lily that is), and I was moderately giddy because she'd crawled up the wrong side of a slide.  And in that moment it struck me just how little anyone ever knows about how to parent kids until they're in the middle of doing it, because I know in hindsight I was right to discourage Emma from climbing up slides all those years ago, and I know I was just as right to encourage Lily.  And it wasn't a double standard. . . it was just a different standard.  It was right for Lily for different reasons than it was wrong for Emma.  That's why parenting is the hardest job in the world.  There's no one "right" answer.  Sometimes you never find out whether your answer was "best" or "worst" and there are no higher stakes for which to play.

But I think there in the relative safety of our backyard "playground" it was best.  Lily had experimented a little with the slide, and we wanted to encourage that experimentation.  We wanted to encourage her to discover new ways to play and entertain herself.  We wanted her to challenge her body to try something different and hopefully gain just a little more mastery over her own movement.  We wanted her to play, and obvious safety factors notwithstanding, that's more important for her than a lesson in turn-taking or playground etiquette.