Letter of Recommendation: Fresh Air
Growing up, I was what we refer to in the biz as an “indoor kid.” I sat on a bench with my nose in a Judy Blume book while other girls played jump rope, cowered in fear anytime someone threw a ball in my direction, and had a mysterious, relentless stomachache during a good 10 years of P.E. periods. I cannot swim. I cannot throw. Other than a short stint in graduate school, which ended in a physical therapist working me up and then exclaiming “wow, it’s almost as if your body is fighting exercise,” I cannot run. But, thank the stars, when I was eight-years-old, my babysitter Chris, our psuedo-masculine stand-in for our father, who taught us how to crush a crossword puzzle but wouldn’t be caught dead at a professional sporting event, taught me how to ride a bicycle.
In this lovely article, The Joys of Biking At Night, Daniel Peña recommends riding at night. Just reading this piece gave me goosebumps, and a yearning for a freedom and healthy recklessness that is hard to come by in my life these days. I am no pro-biker. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a neon biking outfit, I basically have to get off my bike and walk up even the most modest of hills, and skinny tires make me nervous. But I still find it easy to transport myself to some of my most memorable bike rides by simply closing my eyes - riding home from a bar in Copenhagen in 3-inch heels, cruising around the waterfront in Brooklyn on a summer in July, following the Quai D’Orsay out all the way out to the Parisian suburbs before getting into an epic vacation quarrel with my husband that could only be reconciled over a late-night lamb shwarma.
Until recently, the thrill of the bike ride was something I could only achieve on my own. I have a child seat on the back of my bike, but I am not skilled enough to keep the bike from toppling over periodically, and my theater-nerd physique is no match for the numerous hills that lurk around every corner of the Bay Area. It’s a rare day where I can convince one of my kids to put their life in my hands and take a ride. But my husband, in his infinite wisdom (he was the one of, course, who purchased that all-healing lamb shwarma), splurged on a cargo e-bike that arrive last week. And now, all of a sudden, with an electric assist and a nifty little board on the back for both kids, anything is possible.
When I was pregnant with my first kid, the best piece of advice I got, other than “if you find yourself washing shit out of pants, throw them out” was, “when in doubt, go outside.” Shushing a newborn in the middle of the night, battling with a one-year-old over dinner, unsticking a toddler from ‘the stuck place,’ we remembered this. Sometimes it was as dramatic as howling, uncontrollable sobbing one minute and silent reverence the next. We would look up at the moon or watch the brazen urban squirrels tweak around our backyard, or walk as far as the end of the driveway and come back renewed.
But now that I have two kids who never can recall how to put pants on and are quite fond of Legos and couch forts, small encounters outside of the home require a lot more effort. And that’s where the bike comes in. It’s not an activity per se (“I DON’T WANT TO GO ON AN ADVENTURE MAMA!!!”), it requires almost zero exertion on their part (“MAMA I’M TOO TIRED TO WALK!!”). It simply a mode of transportation that it happens to possess within it all of the mind-altering alchemy of an early morning bird-watching session or a post-dinner sunset block walk.
And so yesterday morning, we loaded onto our new toy, no matter that most of the child-safety doo-dads haven’t arrived yet. We burst forth from our little world into the big one - and it was transcendent. In a car everything rushes by so quickly, the stops and starts mess with your flow, the metal frame separating you from the rest of humanity is both defensive and distancing. It’s why Los Angeles is the loneliest city I’ve ever lived in. But on the bike, an old-fashioned Rolls Royce parked in a driveway can be adequately ogled by all, a particularly splendid rose bush can be sniffed on the wind, a stranger can be waved at (“MAMA, I WAVED AND THEY WAVED BACK!").
The Victorians thought that a “change of air” was enough to drive away tuberculosis, or as they called it consumption (also, eek, “The White Death”). Like most pleasures of the era, changes of air were primarily available to men - women of any social status weren’t permitted to travel alone. And for the “high nervous sensibility” that, it was widely accepted, was found almost entirely in women, “sedative” climates like the desert were thought to be more appropriate than the over-stimulating airs of say, the Mediterranean coast. Women were mostly relegated to select spas thought to heal hysteria (I like to the think of them as “coochie resorts”). And journeying to new airs was, of course, a great privilege enjoyed only by the wealthy. It actually became quite trendy, which tells you something about how desperate they were for any kind of action back then.
I had intended to write about how the whipping wind and the sun on our skin and the city in our faces opened my children up to a calmer, gentler way of being. Over-stimulation in the service of clarity - like what Ritalin does to the brain. I wanted to tell you that it was a magic spell, a homeopathic pellet, that turned parenting into a piece of cake and childhood into a smooth something or other. But it didn’t happen that way. As soon as our happy ride to the park was over, everyone fell apart. There were tears, screams, hard-won negotiations, an extended debacle over literal peanuts. On the way home, I pulled over several times to say that it no longer felt safe to bike with them arguing and whining. At home, my daughter screamed, perhaps breaking her own record, for thirty minutes straight, while my son cried and slammed doors.
But, I realized, I think I’d misunderstood my friend’s advice. All this time, we hadn’t been going outside, marveling at the stars or the city bus, for the children. We were doing it for ourselves - reminding ourselves that there was something out there beyond the consumption of this one moment. Yesterday, while my children did their thing - displayed the external symptoms of having brains that grow like bamboo and bones that seem to stretch overnight, I remained uncharacteristically calm. Why wouldn’t I? I was there, under the clouds, in the street, passing by the cute dude giving me a little “sup” nod that I chose to interpret as “damn girl, how do you look so good with a helmet on???!!” and not “lady don’t you know that people can see your underwear when you bike in a dress??!” And even back at home, the world buzzed inside of me, battling the dangerous story that I, like other parents in the generation of optimization tell myself, that nothing is more important than my kids’ happiness and that if I do all the right things I will somehow have control over whether they are happy or not.
As I write this, my son is playing outside my window with his older next door neighbor - his “mentor” as I like to call her. For weeks now they have been brewing and casting spells. She has convinced him that she has been trained in the dark arts by a wizard who lives in the sky, and at this point she seems somewhat convinced of this herself. Whenever I ask them what their current potion will do to someone who drinks it (usually one of their younger sisters), they say they don’t know, we’ll have to wait and see. My son won’t let me near his concoctions, that’s how intensely he believes in their power.
I believe in the life outside of the lives I am consumed with protecting. In am convinced by the way the trees seem to scold me for my hubris, for spending one second thinking I could have a morning without pain and disappointment and anger, for telling myself that life is somehow supposed be without these things. I can’t be too reckless on my bright orange, electric, three-person-mom-bike, with my helmet on and my constant shouts of “no leaning!” But I can be out of my head and in the world, in the changed air. And I don’t even have to break a sweat.
-I am really digging the NYT Magazine’s Letter of Recommendation column. In addition to Peña’s piece on biking, I recommend (ha!) Sam Anderson’s ode to eating chips.
-For any other reading-at-recess-level dorks out there, this academic paper from the Journal of Tourism History on “Change of Air” in Victorian Times is off-the-hook!
My kids where as they say “on one” at dinner last night and so I went to the bathroom to have myself a cry (as you do) and I’m realizing after reading this that what I should have done was cry on my back porch. I’m also going to be referring to my time spent crying on the back porch as “going for a change of air” instead of “getting away from you people!” I’ll let you know if that does anything to shift the dinner time battle strategy at all.
Laughed out loud several times. Also Ebike (with cargo) on our “to buy one day” magic list.