When I got Aidan a bike last fall Yang questioned my intelligence. She also questioned whether I should have gotten Aidan a bike. It was a bit too big for him and he after a few valiant attempts he wasn’t able to master it. Then winter came and the bike sat in the hallway month after month, a constant reminder of my judgment.

With spring warming up to summer temperatures it was time to try the bike and Aidan pairing again. Aidan was eager to learn and I was pleased the bike didn’t seem too big for him anymore. At first Aidan found many excuses about why he could not ride the bike, my favorite was that the screw holding in the left hand brake was sticking out too far. I kept reminding him that he could do it and he had to keep working at it. And then I did what all good fathers do, I left him alone to figure it out on his own.

An hour later he was riding. Not super stable but he could make it 20 meters before turning into the curb. The next day after school he immediately went to work again, riding away in the our apartment complex’s courtyard. His reward was a scraped wrist and the ability to ride a bit further.

On mother’s day we took our bikes to breakfast. Yang had Elisa on the back of her bike, I had Lydia on mine, and Aidan took his bike. Even with the wide bike lanes Aidan wasn’t quite ready for the streets of Beijing and caused his father many heart palpitations. He also caused some other uses of the bike lane to swerve, stop, and start.  My main goal was making sure he didn’t swerve into a car and he didn’t bike blindly into intersections.

As we biked home after breakfast, the family unit tight, feeling good about the great mom and the closeness of the family an image came to my head. The image of Jim Carrey sailing away to freedom in the movie “The Truman Show”. Jim Carrey sailed into a wall painted as an ocean to symbolize … what… to symbolize that this is all there is, face it. I unwound that symbolism a bit to realize the bike is a sign of Aidan’s pending independence from us. One that seems hard to fathom now, but will come soon, before we know it. Maybe Yang was right.