Bicycle Lessons
On Fatherhood & Publishing a Book
I have been thinking about fatherhood. About what makes a father, and who gets to become one. The thought has lingered long enough that I have begun to question what first set me on this path. Is it because I have lost my own father? Or because I have arrived at the age when fatherhood no longer belongs to some distant future but waits just beyond the horizon? Over the past few years, I have watched many of my friends step into fatherhood. They seem determined to resist the familiar script, refusing the inheritance of absence that shaped so many of our lives. They are fighting, in their own ways, not to repeat the failures of their fathers. It has been remarkable to witness. More remarkable still is watching these men fuss over their children with a tenderness we rarely saw growing up.
Perhaps I should qualify that. My own father was present. He was there. And yet, as I think about fatherhood now, I find myself wondering whether presence and fatherhood have ever been quite the same thing. I don’t know what makes a father. I have some theories, most of them assembled from watching men I know become fathers themselves. There is the obvious stuff: provision, protection, instruction, the long accumulation of small responsibilities that eventually become a life. There is the less obvious stuff: knowing when to hold on and when to let go. Knowing how much fear to transmit and how much to keep for yourself. Knowing that a child will eventually become a person you cannot entirely protect from the world, and that your job is not to prevent every fall but, somehow, to prepare them for getting back up.
I have been thinking about this because my first book will be published next March. This is a strange sentence to write. For years, the book existed mostly as a collection of possibilities. Then it became a manuscript, and then a book under contract, and then something with a publication date. Now the US, Canada, and UK editions have a cover. The copy editing is almost finished. There are fewer and fewer decisions left for me to make. Soon there will be a physical object with my name on it that I cannot revise anymore. I have spent enough time writing about the difficulty of bringing the book into the world that I don’t want to do that again. The difficulty has already been documented. What interests me now is what happens when you have made something and can no longer keep it to yourself.
A few years ago, before I had a book, before I knew exactly what kind of writer I wanted to become, I wrote a very small essay called “Bicycle Lessons.” I had almost forgotten about it. In it, I wrote about learning to ride a bicycle as an adult. I began with a comparison to a toddler learning to walk. The child is unsteady, uncertain, almost comically close to catastrophe, except that there is usually a parent nearby, arms spread wide, ready to catch them. The adult learner has no such luxury. You have to trust your instincts, even when you have never trusted them before. You have to trust the wind. You have to trust your body to do what your mind is telling it to do. I wrote that the strange thing about learning to ride a bicycle as an adult was that my legs no longer seemed to understand my brain. Every time I put my feet on the pedals, the handlebars swerved left, and I would be swallowed by a panic so complete that another part of my brain would wonder why I didn’t simply get a car. This was, apparently, my theory of adulthood.
I wrote about Edison, too, because apparently no essay about failing repeatedly can resist the temptation to summon Thomas Edison from the dead. I imagined him in his workshop, surrounded by darkness and candles, waiting for the light that would eventually arrive. I wrote about hope, which I described as deceptive, and about growing up as the process of learning to distrust it. Reading the essay now, I am struck by how much I was trying to say without knowing what I was saying. The bicycle was never really the subject. The subject was fear. The subject was trust. The subject was the peculiar humiliation of being an adult beginner. There is something particularly frightening about learning a simple thing late. Children are permitted their incompetence. We expect them to fall. We celebrate their first steps precisely because the steps are so uncertain. An adult falling from a bicycle is different. The body has already learned too many things about gravity, embarrassment, injury, and dignity. The adult knows what can happen.
Maybe that is one of the differences between childhood and adulthood. A child learns by believing the world will catch them. An adult learns by discovering that sometimes it won’t. At the end of the essay, I wrote about my instructor urging me to let go.
“Trust the bike,” she said. “Remember, you are in control. You ride the bike. It doesn’t ride you.”
After days of falling and failing, I finally completed my first ride. I imagined myself gliding through an alleyway, my body cutting through the wind. I called it my thousandth trial. I compared myself to Edison. This is the story of our lives, I wrote. I don’t remember whether I believed that when I wrote it. I believe it a little more now. Perhaps this is what I have been trying to understand about fatherhood. A father, at least in one sense, is someone who eventually has to teach you how to move without him. There is a moment when the hands that have been holding the bicycle must disappear from the handlebars. The parent remains close enough to intervene, perhaps, but the child cannot know that. From the child’s perspective, there is only the sudden realization that the thing keeping them upright has vanished. Maybe fatherhood is partly the art of preparing someone for your absence. That sounds cruel when I write it down. Maybe because absence is the thing I have been trying to understand since my own father died.
I think about my friends now, their children growing quickly. The little bodies that once needed to be carried everywhere are becoming bodies that run away from them. Soon they will ride bicycles. Soon they will want privacy. Soon they will discover the embarrassment of having parents who are suddenly everywhere. One day, their fathers will stand several feet away while their children attempt something they cannot do for them. There is a tenderness in that distance. Perhaps that is what I am seeing when I watch my friends become fathers. Not simply men taking responsibility for children, but men learning the difficult choreography of attachment and release. And now I am learning something about release too.
My book will come out in March. My father will never hold this book. That fact has been true from the day I signed the contract with the press I chose, though I have only recently allowed myself to think about it. There will be photographs of the book. There will be readings and conversations. There may be strangers who know its sentences better than I do. There may be people who hate it. There may be people who love it. There may be people who read it years from now when I have forgotten what I was thinking when I wrote it. My father will not see any of that. And yet I am beginning to understand that inheritance does not always move in a straight line. Sometimes it moves sideways. Sometimes it skips a generation. Sometimes what we inherit is not an object but a question.
In my years in the Ogun State civil service back in Nigeria, I thought I understood what having an inheritance meant; I thought I understood what it meant to live in my father’s shadows, because he worked there as well – with his big personality and unforgettable charisma. But these days, I am beset with other questions. What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to leave something behind? What does it mean to make something knowing that one day you will have to let it go? I don’t have answers to these questions. I am not yet a father. I am only beginning to understand what it means to be a son after the person who made you one is gone. And I am only now beginning to understand what it means to become the maker of something that will eventually exist without me.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning to the bicycle. The adult body trembling over a machine designed for children. The instructor walking beside me. My hands gripping the handlebars too tightly. The fear of falling. The embarrassment of beginning late. The strange faith required to put one foot on a pedal and then the other. Then the voice beside me saying: Trust the bike. I think about that now and say to myself: Trust the book. Trust the child. Trust the life that continues after you have stopped trying to control it. There is no guarantee that any of this works. The bicycle can still tip. The child can still fall. The book can still disappoint you. Hope can still deceive you. But eventually, you have to move. You put your foot on the pedal. You push.
For a moment, someone is holding on. Then they let go. And you are moving before you realize you are moving, your body cutting through the wind, carrying you somewhere you have not yet learned how to name.