AN EMOTIONAL MOMENT TRIGGERED BY A PINK BIKE

IIt’s the day after my little girl’s third birthday. Among a mountain of pink and purple plastic ponies, unicorns and miniature women with unattainable figures, there is a bicycle. Before having a daughter, this bike would have induced nausea in me. It’s pink. It has a pink basket. It has pink stabilisers. It has a rubber cat’s head on the handlebars that honks when squeezed. It has sickly-sweet decals of flowers and innocence all over it. It’s basically Priscilla, Queen Of The Bike Stand. However, I do have this small, blonde, opinionated little woman in my life now and, as such, a new Instagram-like filter has been added to my eyes, allowing me to see such things in a new light.

Let me take you back a few days before the party. I’m in the sports megastore with my wife. As usual, she’s not allowing me to buy catapults, crossbows or hunting knives and, instead, we stand in front of this garish little vehicle, smile at each other and agree that it’s perfect for our daughter Betsy Pearl.

But I, of course, have to turn this basic, happy time into a maudlin, tear-jerking, nostalgia-fest. My wife can sense something is wrong. She asks me what’s wrong and the question becomes a wrecking ball hitting the paper-thin wall of my “midlife crisis emotion-dam”.

What bursts out of me is that this cute, pink bike is actually the end of innocence!

This is the bike I will teach my daughter to pedal and steer. This is the bike from which I will remove the stabilisers and watch her wobbling along before falling off. She’ll cry and I’ll kiss her grazed knees better. This is the bike she’ll outgrow and which will then gather cobwebs behind the shed.

These are the memories I’ll think about when she leaves school, or goes to university. On the day she gets married and my wife finds me sobbing in a quiet corner, these are the stories I’ll recount of a time I can never get back: how it all went too quickly and that I’m losing my little girl.

So there’s a part of me that hates that bike and everything it stands for and, for now at least, I’m overjoyed that she’s ignoring it and hiding in its cardboard packing instead.