Sometimes Support is a Motorized Bike
Dear Friends,
Last weekend, I bought an e-bike. It was a big purchase, one I’ve been considering for a while.
Up until now, I’ve ridden a Schwinn Breeze coaster bike from 1960. It’s got no gears, no frills, and no effective kickstand, since there’s a giant yellow kid seat attached to the back.
This was all well and good until around January of this year, when my daughter Nora hit a growth spurt. Her preschool is at the top of a big hill, and I found myself struggling to bike up it. I’d huff and puff halfway, then get off and push the bike up the last two blocks. I’d arrive at the drop-off line overheated and out of breath.
It’s fine, I told myself. It’s my exercise for the day!
In spring, my daughter’s legs had grown too long to tuck into the foot straps of the bike seat.
“What do you mean, they don’t fit?” my husband asked one morning as he helped us get ready to leave.
“I guess just leave your legs out?” I told my daughter.
And then fall arrived. Nora spent this summer outgrowing all of her clothes again, and when we went to ascend the final vertical stretch to school, I could not do it.
Time to walk, I thought, but even walking the bike up the hill seemed harder than last year. I arrived at the top completely drenched in sweat, my heart going overtime.
“Why are you breathing like that, Mama?” Nora asked me.
Why are you growing like that?? I kept to myself.
Over the past few weeks since school started back, I’ve been dreading the final hill more and more. Even on cool days, I’d continue to wear my summer clothes, knowing a sweater would be brutal after the hill. I hated feeling sweaty and gross next to all the other parents at preschool drop-off. I dreaded the way the cars zipped around me as I struggled to move at a snail’s pace.
Even though friends applauded me for being tough enough to carry a nearly-40-lb kid on the back of a single speed, the dread and exhaustion began to mingle with self-blame. Is it my fault it’s this hard? Am I too out of shape for this? What’s wrong with me?
So I took Nora to test ride an e-bike.
Though the cargo bike was bigger than my Schwinn, it handled smoothly. Graduating from the kid seat to the bench and orbiter bar didn’t phase Nora a bit. Through the test ride, she kept up a delighted monologue about how much fun she was having and how we should really get this bike, Mama.
I thought about where I could ride that had frustrated me before. The preschool hill, sure, but a better test–the ramp from Jones Point up to the Mount Vernon Trail.
Ahead of us on the ramp was a cyclist struggling to make it up. He weaved back and forth, trying to ride as horizontally as possible. I hit the pedal assist button to level 2, then 3.
And I uttered three words that, as the slowest rider in the world, I rarely, rarely get to say:
On your left.
At the top of the ramp, the world opened before me. I could ride to Mount Vernon if I wanted. We could head to Huntley Meadows and not have to Google-map the terrain first. At the very least, I could zip back up to North Old Town to finish the test ride without breaking a sweat.
I had no idea just how hard I’d been working, struggling, before. I had no idea things didn’t have to be so hard.
How often is it like this when we finally get the support we need? We struggle in our lives–we feel anxious, depressed, stuck. We’re not sleeping well. Our bodies flare up in protest. But we blame ourselves. We ask, what’s wrong with me? Why are things easy for everyone else, and I’m falling apart?
Sometimes support looks like a motorized bicycle. Sometimes support looks like childcare. Or a good friend. Other times it looks like therapy or medication.
I’ve been joking to Greta, my therapist, that the pandemic “broke my brain”--that I made it out, but my mental health didn’t.
“Is your brain broken, or does it just need more support?” she nudges.
I blame American culture in part for why it’s so hard to get the support we need. We’ve been raised on the idea that we should be able to do everything independently. We don’t want to owe anyone. We want to bootstrap our way to success and not have to admit that we ever needed help. Me and mine always take priority over the collective.
There’s pride in doing things yourself, but also the unfortunate reality that when we need support, it feels difficult to access. Our culture of individualism has built systems that are impenetrable and exclusive.
In a tighter financial year, a big e-bike purchase didn’t become appealing until the store offered us a year of zero-interest financing. I got lucky–it was the last day of that offer. It never hurts to ask a therapist if they offer a sliding scale, or a doctor if there’s a generic version of your medication. But do please enlighten me about what can be done about childcare costs. For that, I’m at a loss.
All I’m saying is: maybe we shouldn’t blame ourselves for struggling on our vintage bicycles when the hill is so steep, and the people we’re comparing ourselves to at the top have gotten there in a car.
If we can overcome the barriers to access it, support can be life-changing. I was almost giddy going up the preschool hill on my new bike this week, and I’ve begun thinking of all the places I can go now that I’m not limited by terrain.
Similarly, Greta and I spent part of our last session talking about how, with the right support for anxiety, the brain begins to create new neural pathways. Taking care of your mental health doesn’t just help you in the present–it changes you biologically in ways that will impact your future. My once-anxious brain is rewiring itself. With support, change is possible. As the youths would say, “cringe.” But the science is there to back it up.
Getting a new bike doesn’t fix all of my problems, of course. I still have to park a 75-lb contraption on an incline while keeping a small child from darting into the street. There will still be rainy days when biking isn’t joyful. But the support makes a difference.
So what hill have you been dreading lately? What’s been causing you to blame yourself? Is it time to invest in yourself (preferably interest-free)? I hope you, too, can soon feel the world open before you.
Take good care,
Dot
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Haley Nahman, also writing about support this week: “The self-care myth is seductive. The calls to care for ourselves have never been louder, more urgent, more prescriptive, more convincing. It’s nice to imagine that with the right routine and the right state of mind we might single-handedly change our lot in life. The counter-intuitive truth is that the most productive forms of self-care—adequate rest, nourishment, agency—require a decent amount of social and economic support from our families, our bosses, our communities, our government.”
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A little support here? Out West They Ask What My Husband Does by Amanda Jane Jones:
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I loved this! Such a good message, and the way you tell it makes me feel like I'm riding on the bike with your daughter. I'm going to share a link to this in my off-Substack newsletter this Sunday.