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It’s like learning to ride a bike.

I think about that phrase often these days, as we’ve given the boys new bikes–not the crappy Cars– and Paw Patrol-themed hunks of metal they had before, but legitimate ones they can ride for years. They both still sport training wheels, which is a liability in a place where every other kid seems to not do so, but I’m willing to bet none of them ever had spinal surgery and a halo when they were two so they can ride off into the sunset for all I care; we will get there when we get there. Which, by our estimates, will be tomorrow, when we take our maiden voyage without said training wheels. #prayersplease

The other day, The Kid–after yelling at me to “keep holding him!” (he had a fall a couple of weeks ago and hasn’t bounced back yet)–started his ride with a query for me. “So,” he began. “How’s it going with your husband, Dad? Is he being nice to you? Tell me some stories about it.”

Later on the trail, we talked about fear and how it can help us in dangerous situations but hurt us other times, if we let it run the show. This may be the hardest part of parenting to me: the groundwork-laying that–instead of letting me off the hook to just skip over the givens that I’ve come to accept–asks me to teach these details to my kids, which can be sooooo tedious and always involves questions from them, typically of the why variety–my least favourite.

But this time, after my lecture on fear, TK just nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s why I ask you those questions at the beginning of the ride. And why I want to talk the whole way. So I don’t think about my fear.”

This is the same kid who, this morning, wheels turning almost visibly in his head, turned to me and said, “Mom? I think human beings are actually the disease that is killing the earth.” So…yeah. My mind’s been blown a few times lately by him.

And it’s been beaten down, by this whole unrequested teaching gig. We struggle over next-level addition and subtraction and multiplication and division and I want to scream (and often do), and then I remember that it wasn’t long ago we were struggling through adding single digits together, and now I get (get?) to watch him put the pieces together, build on top of what we’ve already done. This is what learning looks like, what growth looks like, and I’m bearing witness to it in a way I never would have chosen and will be happy to hand off again but for now…it’s a bit breathtaking.

Little Brother works alongside us, starting with the basics as kindergarteners do, and after he reads a bit and adds a bit and spells a bit, he calls me over to his break area, the tent that’s been set up in our living room/school annex/fort centre, and he invites me inside to tell him, again, the fart story I made up a few days ago, and he laughs as hard this time as he did the first. And instead of giving into tedium and claustrophobia I try to sit there, in that close space with him, where it is warm and did I mention close, and I remember being a kid myself and gravitating toward spaces like this that felt me-sized and safe. And I feel that way again, with him pressed into me. Back to the basics.

My first day of working at NYU, I was introduced to an over-fifty-years-my-senior Southern gentleman in a bowtie who immediately became one of my closest friends at work, and in life. We would meet at the opera and ballet and over lunches. Once I moved, and would come back for visits, he and I would catch up at his apartment overlooking Central Park, and I’d call him from Atlanta to update him on my life. He always sent a Christmas card. Five years ago, he took me for dessert while I was in New York for the weekend, and as we said goodbye on the corner of Central Park West and he walked away, a feeling pierced me that this was the last time I’d see him.

I was right. The next time I called him, it was clear he was struggling to remember who I was but was making a valiant effort of pretending he knew. This week, I got another feeling, and I searched online to find out he passed away a month ago, of natural causes, in his apartment overlooking Central Park. He was ninety-five.

I grieve for him. There seems to be grief to spare these days, given the new world we inhabit. I find myself writing in my planner now not what I’m going to do but what we’ve done, memorable things the boys have said or small events that have already taken place. Commemorations. This act not of planning so much now, but remembering. Re-membering, the pieces starting small but somehow building, all these moments of endings and beginnings adding together to create a whole and new thing.