Day 20 - 20th Jan

ZONE 2

There's a moment when
you take away the handicap
on your running.
Not all-out sprint yet.
But the little bike is matching your pace.
Zone 2.
I can talk,
but I don't want to.

Your curt and huffed instructions:
"Pedal forward,"
make no sense
but are understood
as gambits
from an older man.
Morsels from a battered old kitchen table.
More than crumbs,
yet not a full meal.

And then Lady Gravity lays her hand
on his wee back,
square between the shoulder blades,

and he is beyond himself now and away.
The energy apportioned to glee, not fear—
but that is near, all the same.

The French call it petit mort.
Always making more or less of a thing—
just a death.
Always paired with a birth.
Strong blue cheese to coat the teeth,
sweet old port to coat the tongue.

This will happen again and again:
The first time the nose of the board
goes down the face of the wave
but does not catch.
Then he will get it.
"That's more like it,"
he will say.

The first time he gets a laugh—
a proper one—
from a girl.
"That's more like it," he'll say.

The first time he leaves our side and feels
flat-out relief, not cut with grief.
"That's more like it,"
he’ll say.

His birthright is my death knell.
The wobbly old stabilisers,
the touch of my fingers on his shoulders to steady,
are usurped by the world itself.

My job is to stand,

huffing and puffing,
and maybe crying,
and pray my morsels suffice.

And away and away,from his old man,he will go.

Will he pick up a call down the track?.

I don’t yet know.

Niall Campbell

———————-

My son has properly learned to ride his bike this week.

I got him a good one that is a bit too big for him, so getting on and off is still a challenge, and we still get the odd drawn-out crash. But the motion and the whole sense of it is his.

It's a Hallmark moment for a reason.

To take your hand away from their back and see them propel themselves forward is lovely.
"I'm doing it, I'm really doing it!"
The pure and unabashed joy and self-pride is really something to behold.

And I think it's okay to not just chalk it off as another thing on the parental to-do list.
It is lovely, and you do feel proud of both of you.

This is one of the most wonderful things about parenting:
to go through the hard yards of introducing whole modules of life—vast swathes of things to them—and being courtside to see their wonder and pure reaction. Things you loved and got a lot out of, and you think they will too.

Ask any professional sports coach.
They generally have a highlight reel of when they were privileged enough to be there when a kid who loved the game they coached from started a passion and proclivity for it that would take them places.

Ash Barty talks about the lauded tale of when she rocked up for her first-ever tennis lesson at her local club.
The first ball her coach fed her sailed past him. Over time, of course, this tale got glorified and became stuff or legend, from just being an impressive winner from a tot, to hitting the back fence with a shudder.

But regardless of the actualities of it, it's very clear the man who knew his onions about tennis knew he had just seen the birth of a special talent. Ash Barty gifted this coach the racket that she won her first Open with. I thought that was a lovely gesture—he sounds in the book like a salt-of-the-earth guy—I’d bet good money that is a prized and sacred possession for him.

As parents—and if we are remotely doing it right—we get these moments in a more commonplace but frequent way.
Not, of course, to bear witness to some savante capacity, but simply to see potential explode.

Every kid is special all the time, of course. But when they are attended to this way, it really is not cosplay to delight in their progression. You don't have to feign your amazement. That bears repeating. It makes is so, so worth it.

But as this poem outlines, today I had the first real pang of where my son is headed:
out of my life.

A goal I have is to elicit a good feeling when the phone buzzes in his pocket in forty years and it is me.
Long before his thoughts about obligation, guilt, or shame—of whatever kicks in—just when the naked and reflexive visceral response my son has to his old man kicks in, I want his heart to swell, not to sink. It's that simple. That is the key metric as to whether I can look over my shoulder and say that I have lived a ‘successful’ life.

So we had a beautiful moment when he hit a downslope and squealed,
and did not look back for me to stop him.

Because also this morning, I snapped at him.
Just because he was taking forever to do his little reward chart to get out of the house. He was testing my fuse and found it short today.

The lowlight reel is also important.
I think the ratio is about five highlights to one lowlight, that's what it takes to balance out your mistakes and bad reactions.

This is the fucked-up asymmetry of parenting. But you unconsciously likely judge your parents according to such lopsided inputs, and we parents will likely be judged in the same way by our adult children. I am doing good, but I need to do better.

This morning the rupture and repair did, however, happen, or we could not have had this moment at the skatepark afterwards

ao today, this poem is a testament to the sadness and bliss that comes with teaching your children new things.

You are nudging them towards the realisation that the ‘big people: in their life are flawed. Able to love them unconditionally, but through a broken prism.

I am learning to be less harsh with myself. And this follows through to him.

Will I have done enough to elicit a positive response when I call,
alone in the day and in my eighties?

I wont know until I hear his voice at the other end.