WAR ON TWO WHEELS

There was a quaking fury in her voice.

“Get ON your bike,” she said. A few feet in front of her, a small boy in a lopsided cycling helmet was wheeling a bicycle and snivelling. She followed him through the allotments with a brightly coloured bike of her own, with me behind the two of them, eavesdropping, and mostly trying to overtake so I’d make it to the bus stop.

“I don’t want to,” he sniffed.

“Get on your bike or we’re going to be late.”

I walked faster along the narrow grass path, and tried to say excuse me. The drama was still unfolding though, and I had questions. Why didn’t he want to get on his bike? What had happened? How did this parenting situation start? And when?

“Do you realise what you’re doing to me right now?” quivered the Mum. Her voice was loud and angry. Closed question with consequences, thought I. There’s no way he can answer it. Deliberately rhetorical of course: the intended response is to get out of the trap by conforming to the requirement, instead of answering the question; don’t understand the problem, but ‘getting on bike’ seems to be the answer, whatever this yes/no question means.

The little boy was however, perplexed, unaware of rhetoric, and said nothing. She persisted.

“Get on your bike or you’ll be late for school.” 

“No!” Tears now.

The angrier his Mum got, the less likely he was to give in. Somehow conflict had taught him to fight his oppressor. He was not cycling anywhere out of this parenting stalemate.

I picked my moment and strode past. I was half-tempted to go for a cheery ‘Morning!’ but I thought better of it. They were behind me now, wheeling slowly towards the gate. She looked furious and exasperated in a way that seems to encircle parents of young children; he was staring at the ground, red faced with tears and confusion. War has no victors, I said to myself.

“Right, well that’s IT!” she shouted. “I’m leaving without you, BYE!”

I heard him wail.

“Have a nice day!” she called sarcastically, pedalling slowly away from him. I swung open the gate and walked out into the road. Somehow I knew that that tactic, the old ‘feign defeat to provoke a surrender move’, was just not going to improve things for them. It very rarely does.

But I’m not an end-of-the-rope-parent trying to get my kids to school. What would I know? What should she do to calm this down, solve the stalemate and end up with the best result?

I realised that I just didn’t know.

I also realised that this was probably the end of a much longer drama, and one that I hadn’t seen. Perhaps a breakfast got spilled. Perhaps a shoe was lost or hair hadn’t been brushed. Perhaps looking after kids and getting them to school is less flex-and-flow, and more military-drill the night before.

Perhaps I’m a bit naive. I’d probably have just walked slowly and silently to school and arrived late, with all the consequence that that might bring. Perhaps I’d have trained myself to get to places fifteen minutes earlier.

I fished my phone out of my pocket and checked the time.

“Oh unbelievable!” I said out loud. I slipped the phone back, shoved the other arm through the rucksack strap and sprinted for the bus. I was late.