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| Okay, so he must be around here somewhere! |
It’s taken me a while to realize the unique challenges of
being a bikewife. I didn’t even know I was one until a while ago. In fact, for
a long time into my bike marriage (and let’s face it, if you marry a cyclist
you marry bikes) I was a cyclist too, and I think that hid many of the symptoms
of bikewifery. Now it is as clear as the difference between Shimano and Campy.
I am a bikewife.
I first recognized the bikewife syndrome when I was still
delusional, thinking that because I rode bikes too, there was nothing to worry
about. I had just hired a very bright young woman as an assistant on a project
I was working on. She was in her early twenties, and this was her first real
job after college. She had recently married her boyfriend, and was telling me about
the first time she met what was then her future mother in-law – I think we may
have begun the conversation in a form of commiseration about in laws. The bike
part came later.
She told me that they had gone to visit his mother and stay
for the weekend. He was the only son, and he was still her precious little boy.
The visit didn’t start out well for my poor assistant . It was pretty clear that
she wasn’t what his Mom had in mind as a suitable girl for her darling little
boy. And bikes were about to make the whole thing worse. At the end of the
first day,he asked her if it would be okay if the next morning he went for a
bike ride. She said she happily agreed, and then she said those fateful words…
That was before I understood that ‘going for a bike ride’ meant he’d be
gone for hours!
And so it was. Five hours to be exact. Five hours, 38
minutes, and 24 seconds. He returned to find her shut in the bedroom, snotty
nosed and tear-streaked, and his mother feeling smug and singing happily to
herself as she bustled about the kitchen.
She went on to tell me how they bought a two bedroom apartment
so there would be a ‘bike room’. How they lived on the outskirts of town – even
though it meant she had a terrible commute each day – so they could be closer
to ‘good riding’. How there was always a bike chain in the kitchen sink. As she
went on, I could only give her a hug and say, ‘There, there. I know. You’re a
bike wife.’
Are you a bike wife? Do you know – and care – about the
difference between titanium, carbon, and aluminum, because you understand that
these simple words affect whether your family goes on vacation to Hawaii, to
visit your parents, or camping in the backyard? Do you recognize your spouse’s
friends when they are in lycra and helmets, but wonder who that oddly familiar
weirdo is in the suit waving to you on the street? Are your Sunday mornings –
and early afternoons – spent alone with your cornflakes and reading the paper
in solitude? Do you have a seemingly endless list of household chores and
repairs that you know you eventually will just do yourself? Does the toolbox
have more allen keys than all the other tools combined? Can your husband ride
his bike up Mount Everest, but you have to open the pickle jar for him? Yes?
Welcome to the world of bikewives. It’s not easy being a
bikewife, but take heart. You are not alone. We bikewives are here for you.
