“Just look where you want to go,” David said, jogging beside me with one hand on the bike seat, the other hovering near my shoulder. “Don’t look down.” But I was thirty-five years old, wobbling down an empty parking lot on a borrowed bike, and looking down felt like the only honest response to this particular humiliation. My knuckles were white on the handlebars. My legs, which had carried me through marathons and up mountains, suddenly felt like someone else’s limbs—uncertain, uncoordinated, childish.

“You’re doing great,” he lied cheerfully. We both knew I wasn’t. I’d traveled to forty countries, defended a dissertation, navigated my mother through chemo—but I couldn’t ride a bike. The simple machine that most people master before they lose their baby teeth was my Everest, and my partner of three years was discovering this about me in real time, his face cycling through confusion, tenderness, and something I couldn’t quite name. Later, I’d recognize it as the look of someone seeing past my careful competence to the frightened child underneath.

The morning had started with his innocent suggestion of a bike ride through the park. “It’s supposed to be beautiful today,” he’d said over coffee, scrolling through his phone. “We could grab those rental bikes, make a whole thing of it.” I felt my body go rigid, the same ancient alarm system that once warned me when my mother was having a bad day, when I needed to be the adult before school. “I don’t really bike,” I said carefully. He looked up, amused. “Come on, everyone bikes. It’s like—” He stopped, seeing my face. “You don’t know how to ride a bike.”

It wasn’t a question. The silence stretched between us, filled with all the normal childhood things I’d never done. How do you explain that when other kids were learning to balance on two wheels, you were learning to balance a checkbook? That your after-school hours were spent cooking dinner for three younger siblings, not riding around the neighborhood? That there was no money for bikes, no time for wobbling, no room for being bad at something that didn’t matter?

“I’ll teach you,” he said simply, as if it were that easy. As if you could just decide to reclaim what you’d never had.

The competent child

I became an adult at eight years old, the day my mother first couldn’t get out of bed. Depression, we’d call it now, though then it was just “Mom’s bad days” that stretched into bad weeks, bad months. My father worked double shifts at the plant; someone had to keep things running. That someone was me—eldest daughter, natural caretaker, the one who figured things out.

Research on parentification shows that children who take on adult responsibilities experience accelerated maturation in some areas while others remain frozen. We become tiny adults with massive gaps, like a house built without a foundation. I could meal plan for a family of six by fourth grade but couldn’t tell you what playing felt like. I knew how to forge my mother’s signature on permission slips but had never learned to cartwheel, to roller skate, to fail at something inconsequential.

There’s a particular kind of childhood that creates adults who can’t play. We were the kids teachers called “mature for your age,” a compliment that meant we’d learned to suppress the childish parts that inconvenienced adults. Developmental psychologists now understand that play isn’t frivolous but fundamental—it’s how children learn to experiment, to fail safely, to imagine different ways of being. When you skip that stage, you become an adult who can run a board meeting but panics at the thought of karaoke, who manages million-dollar budgets but can’t finger-paint without apologizing for the mess.

My siblings learned to ride bikes eventually—borrowed ones, hand-me-downs from neighbors, wonky-wheeled things they’d fall off laughing in the street while I watched from the kitchen window, making sure dinner didn’t burn. I told myself I was too old by then, that it would be embarrassing to learn alongside six-year-olds. But really, I was terrified of being bad at something in public, of needing help, of not getting it right the first time.

The irony is that I became a teacher, spent years encouraging students to embrace the productive struggle, to see failure as information. “Learning happens in the wobble,” I’d tell them, believing it completely for everyone but myself. I studied Carol Dweck’s growth mindset research, could lecture on neuroplasticity and the adult brain’s capacity for change. But there’s a difference between knowing something intellectually and feeling it in your body—between understanding that struggle is necessary and actually letting yourself struggle where someone can see.

The body remembers

“Okay, just put your foot here,” David said, pointing to the pedal. We’d driven to an empty office park on a Sunday, away from joggers and dog walkers and anyone who might witness this. He’d adjusted the seat three times already, trying to find the sweet spot where I could touch the ground but still pedal properly. Every adjustment felt like a concession to my failure.

My body, which had always been reliable, suddenly felt foreign. Trauma researchers like Bessel van der Kolk write about how the body keeps score of our experiences, holding memories in muscle and bone. Standing there, one foot on the pedal, one on the ground, I felt eight years old again—but not in the good way people mean when they talk about feeling like a kid. I felt the eight-year-old who knew that falling meant no one would catch her, that wobbling was a luxury we couldn’t afford.

“I’ve got you,” David said, and I wanted to believe him. This man who’d held my hand through my mother’s final illness, who’d seen me ugly-cry over grant rejections, who knew exactly how I liked my coffee—surely I could trust him with this. But trusting someone to love your competence is different from trusting them to love your incompetence.

I pushed off, felt the bike lurch forward. David jogged beside me, one hand steady on the seat. “Pedal!” he called out, laughing. “You have to pedal!” But I was frozen, coasting on momentum and terror, waiting for the inevitable crash. When it came—a slow-motion topple into the grass—he was there, catching the bike if not quite me, his face all concern. “You okay? That was actually pretty good for a first try.”

I sat in the grass, thirty-five years old, and felt something crack open in my chest. Not pain, exactly, but a kind of recognition. This is what I’d missed: the right to fall and be picked up, to be bad at something and still be loved, to wobble without the weight of the world depending on my balance.

The uses of incompetence

There’s a cultural story we tell about childhood in America, one that historians like Philippe Ariès remind us is relatively recent. The idea of childhood as a protected time for play and growth is a modern luxury, one that has never been equally distributed. For children in poverty, in trauma, in families that need them to be functional rather than free, childhood becomes something that happens to other people.

But there’s another layer to this story, one about gender and expectation. The parentified child is often a daughter, trained from birth to anticipate needs, to caretake, to put others first. We learn that our value lies in our competence, our ability to handle things, our skill at making life easier for everyone else. Research on childhood gender roles shows that girls are more likely to take on household responsibilities, to be praised for being “helpful” and “mature,” to derive identity from caretaking competence.

The cost becomes clear only later, in relationships where we can’t let our partners see us struggle, in jobs where we volunteer for everything because being needed feels like being loved, in the bone-deep exhaustion of never being off duty. The competent child becomes the woman who can’t ask for help, who interprets needing support as failure, who would rather skip experiences entirely than be witnessed in the learning stage.

“Again?” David asked, helping me up. There was nothing in his voice but encouragement, maybe a little amusement. No frustration, no impatience, no sense that I was taking too long or asking too much. Attachment researchers write about earned security—the ability to develop healthier patterns even if you didn’t start with them. But it requires what I was doing right now: being vulnerable in the presence of someone safe, letting them see the parts you’ve hidden, trusting that incompetence won’t mean abandonment.

I got back on the bike.

Learning to wobble

The next two hours blurred into a study of regression and progress. Neuroscience research on adult learning shows that our brains remain capable of forming new motor patterns throughout life, but it requires something children do naturally: the willingness to be terrible at something for a while.

David developed a system. He’d run beside me, calling out instructions: “Eyes up! Keep pedaling! You’re doing it!” When I’d inevitably veer toward a curb, he’d steady the bike, his presence constant as gravity. Slowly, I began to trust—not just him, but the physics of forward motion, the gyroscopic magic that keeps a bike upright when it’s moving.

“I’m going to let go for a second,” he warned, and I felt the absence of his hand like a missing tooth. But I was still upright, still moving, my legs remembering what to do. Five seconds, ten, twenty. The parking lot opened up before me, vast and full of possibility. I was riding a bike. Badly, slowly, with the grace of a newborn giraffe, but riding nonetheless.

The feeling was indescribable. Not accomplishment, exactly—I’d felt that before, knew its contours intimately. This was something else: joy without purpose, movement without productivity, the pure animal pleasure of doing something just because you can. I thought of Stuart Brown’s work on play, how he describes it as a state of being rather than an activity—purposeless, all-consuming, done for its own sake. For the first time in my conscious memory, I was playing.

I made it halfway across the parking lot before the wobble started. But this time, instead of panicking, I heard myself laugh—a sound so unexpected that it broke my concentration completely. I tilted, overcorrected, and went down in a heap of limbs and spinning wheels. David was there in seconds, but I was already laughing harder, sprawled on asphalt like a kid who’d tried something impossible and lived to tell about it.

“You okay?” he asked, but he was laughing too, seeing what I was seeing: his overly serious, perpetually responsible girlfriend covered in parking lot dust, grinning like she’d discovered sugar.

“Again,” I said.

What we reclaim

We went back every Sunday for a month. Each time, I’d wobble less, ride farther, fall better. David graduated from running beside me to riding his own bike in lazy circles, calling out encouragement and bad jokes. I learned to turn, to brake without panic, to coast down slight inclines with something approaching confidence. But more than the mechanical skills, I was learning something else: how to be witnessed in my incompetence, how to accept help without apology, how to play.

Learning to ride at thirty-five was like discovering a door in a wall I’d walked past every day—a passage back to the person I might have been if I’d had the luxury of a different childhood. Not that I would trade my siblings for a more carefree youth. The competencies I developed young served me well, made me who I am. But contemporary psychologists understand that healing doesn’t mean erasing the past—it means expanding beyond the limitations it created. The parentified child in me will always be there, scanning for needs to meet, problems to solve. But now she shares space with other parts: the wobbling beginner, the laughing faller, the woman who can be held steady by someone else’s hand.

On our last Sunday lesson, David suggested we try the actual park path. “You’re ready,” he said, and for once, I believed him. We set off together, me on my cherry-red cruiser, him beside me on his weather-beaten mountain bike. The path was crowded with real cyclists, families, joggers—all the competent people I’d been avoiding. But something had shifted. When a five-year-old on a tiny pink bike zoomed past me, training wheels blazing, I didn’t feel shame. I felt kinship.

Halfway around the lake, we stopped for water. An elderly couple sat on the bench beside us, watching their grandchildren chase ducks. “Beautiful day for a ride,” the woman said, smiling at our bikes. “Took him forever to learn,” she added, nudging her husband. “I taught him sixty years ago.”

“She just learned last month,” David said, pointing at me with pride that made my chest tight. “Thirty-five years old and killing it.”

The woman looked at me with something like recognition. “Good for you,” she said softly. “It’s never too late to learn what you missed.”

The ongoingness of it

I bike regularly now, though I’ll never be fast or particularly graceful. My riding style is cautious, upright, decidedly un-athletic. But I go anyway, pedaling through my neighborhood in the early mornings, nodding at other riders who have no idea what a small miracle is passing them by.

David bought me my own bike for my thirty-sixth birthday—bright yellow, with a basket and a bell that sounds like childhood. I cried when he wheeled it out, not because it was expensive (it wasn’t) or beautiful (though it is), but because it was the first toy anyone had ever given me. A gift with no purpose but joy, no function but play.

Psychologists who study adult development talk about “developmental tasks”—the skills and capacities we need to master at each life stage. But what about the ones we missed? What about those of us who learned to file taxes before we learned to play tag, who could change diapers before we could ride bikes? The gift of adulthood, it turns out, is that development isn’t actually linear. You can circle back, pick up what you missed, become more whole at any age.

Sometimes I think about that first day in the parking lot, how David held the bike steady while I climbed on, how he ran beside me calling out encouragement for something most people master in kindergarten. The love in that patience still takes my breath away. It’s easy to love someone’s accomplishments, their competencies, their strengths. It’s a rarer thing to love their wobbles, to celebrate their small victories over things that come easily to others.

The parentified child in me still shows up, especially in times of stress. She wants to handle everything, fix everything, need nothing. But now I can recognize her, thank her for keeping us safe all those years, and gently remind her that we have other options. We can ask for help. We can be beginners. We can wobble and fall and trust that someone will be there, not because we’re useful or competent or easy to love, but because that’s what love is—holding each other steady while we learn what we missed.

Last week, I rode to the grocery store—a small errand that still feels like freedom. As I locked my bike to the rack, a little girl and her father pulled up beside me. She was about seven, legs akimbo, helmet askew, clearly new to the whole enterprise. “Good job, baby,” her father said as she climbed off. “You’re getting so much better.”

She beamed at him, then at me, as if we were all part of some secret society. “I just learned last summer,” she confided. “I used to be really scared, but now I love it.”

“Me too,” I told her, meaning every word. “I just learned last year, and I was scared too.”

Her eyes widened. “But you’re a grown-up!”

“I know,” I said, adjusting my basket, feeling the sun on my face and the simple possibility of movement, of balance, of going somewhere under my own power. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

She nodded solemnly, as if we’d shared something profound. And maybe we had—this understanding that it’s never too late to wobble, to discover the child you never got to be. That she’s in there, waiting, no matter how old you get or how competent you’ve become. That all it takes is the right person, an empty parking lot, and the courage to put your feet on the pedals and push off into the uncertain, playful, possible world.