Being a parent – yes, I know that it’s a responsibility and blah, blah, blah – but it’s really cool. Being a single parent, eh, it’s a little bit harder and you’ve got to really pay attention to the cool bits because half the time you’re just doing the surviving bits. You just want to get through, you know. You kinda give up on ‘excel’, and you just want to make sure that it’s clean, washed, fed, and educated. And delivered to extramurals. Once you’ve done that, you’re winning at life. And if they get to excel, then that’s a bonus!
With my Mouse, I’m very, very lucky and I’m very, very happy to say that she takes that all on herself. And she’s just amazing. For example, she did her first Amashova at 10 years old, which upsets me because she beat me by 30 years. She also beat me by three years for her first live performance at the Playhouse. Which is also slightly upsetting. I’m the over-achiever in this family and somebody is treading on my toes!
It’s fine.
I’m not bitter.
But she is a little bit of an over-achiever.
I remember, for the Amashova, I was supposed to ride with Sky Tshabalala, my sports presenter on East Coast Breakfast; he was humming and hawing and he had a golf day to do the next day. He didn’t want to do the 65km. I wanted to do the 65km. So as a last-minute thing I turned to my daughter and said, “Baby, do you want to ride the Amashova?” and she was like, “How far is it?”.
So, there I am trying to do the math in my head because I don’t know how to explain 35km to a 10-year-old… We do cycle every now and then from the Bike & Bean to uShaka and back again, but only on days when there isn’t a headwind, because on the cycle back the wind destroys dad. And that’s roughly 10kms…. I think?! So, the Amashova would be four of those… roughly. So, in answer to her question I say, “It’s like riding from Bike & Bean to uShaka and back again four times”. “Ok, let’s do it.” “Are you sure baby?”
Now you must remember I don’t even let her go on her scooter or skateboard or bicycle down the hill on my driveway, because that’s how dads are.
Paranoid.
I didn’t even THINK about Fields Hill.
There we are going down Fields Hill and my speedometer on my ‘larney’ bike (because that’s how I roll) says we’re clocking 42km/h – it suddenly hits me like a ton of bricks. I can do absolutely nothing if something happens here. I can’t jump out. I can’t dive out. I can’t save her. Yes, she’s got her helmet on, yes there’s 30 000 other people there, but if she comes a cropper??
I realised that I am parenting here and I am not winning!
I did not think about this. Going 42km/h down Fields Hill. (Bearing in mind that the following weekend was her debut at the Playhouse.)
There I was shouting, “Don’t look back at me! Look forward! Watch the road! Tap the brake!”
I don’t think I did well in that situation. I think I might have panicked. I definitely panicked. But we survived Fields Hill, and we survived Amashova.
Only once did I get an “Are we there yet?”. I think that’s what made me the proudest. Here’s a child that just took the challenge and decided to do something outside of her comfort zone and did not complain. It’s daunting to do a 35km cycle for your first time.
You explain exactly the same way as when you’re driving from Durban to Plettenburg, or Joburg to Durban, or Bloemfontein to Cape Town and you have children in the car. You tell them how far it is in ways that they’ll understand.
So obviously I told her (after we’d done 30kms) that we’d only done 5km and we still had 30km to go (Insert evil dad laugh here)). There was a slight moment of panic and the shoulders went down in defeat. Of course, I did the dad thing and admitted my mistake.
I mean, who would torture their child like that?
That was epic.
By Darren Maule.