There is a moment in Far from the Tree by Robin Benway that I have been turning over in my head since I heard it.
Joaquin, one of three biological siblings separated as children, is talking about a bike he got as a little kid. He didn’t know how to ride it, so his foster dad put training wheels on. Normal enough. But even after Joaquin learned to ride, he didn’t want the training wheels taken off. Because training wheels always catch you. No matter what. And he had spent his whole life in foster care, never sure that anyone would be there to catch him. So he wanted those wheels to stay.
I paused the audiobook when I heard that. Not because it was a big dramatic scene or a climactic reveal. It was quiet. Almost offhand. But it stopped me cold, because I realized I could map my entire life onto that metaphor. Every stage, every hard season, every version of myself that needed steadying. There were always training wheels. Sometimes they were people. Sometimes they were habits or routines. Sometimes they were just me, white-knuckling it alone and pretending that counted.
And sometimes the wheels got taken off before I was ready.
The ones I didn’t know I needed
My maternal grandparents were training wheels I didn’t fully appreciate until they were gone.
I only saw them during summers and holidays and the occasional special event, so they weren’t part of my everyday life. But they were always, always there. They called. They showed up to piano and dance recitals. They made every Christmas feel like something out of a movie. Their home was this place where everything felt orderly and safe and warm in a way that my regular life didn’t always feel.
I remember one time sitting on my grandpa’s lap and just breaking down. Something had happened with my parents, something I was too young to process and too old to ignore, and I just fell apart. He didn’t try to fix it. He didn’t give me a speech. He just held me and told me things would be okay. He just radiated love. And somehow that was everything.
They brought order with them wherever they went. That sounds like a small thing, but when you’re a kid and parts of your world feel chaotic, the person who shows up and makes everything feel steady is doing more than they’ll ever know. I didn’t think of them as training wheels at the time. I just thought of them as my favorite grandparents. But they were the reason I didn’t tip over during some of the shakiest parts of growing up.
The ones I had to become
When I started my business, there were no training wheels waiting for me. I had to build them myself, in real time, while already pedaling.
My husband was supportive. I want to be clear about that because it matters. He believed in what I was building and he never made me feel crazy for trying. But support from the outside and being in it with you are two different things. He wasn’t the one fighting for leads every day, staying up late chasing deadlines, trying to keep current customers happy while finding new ones. That was just me. I was my own training wheels, my own safety net, and my own pep talk at two in the morning when I wasn’t sure any of it was going to work.
There’s a specific kind of loneliness to that. I remember being in my home office on the other side of the wall while my kids and husband ate dinner together. I could hear them laughing and talking, and I was fifteen feet away, missing it. Not because I didn’t want to be there but because I was terrified that if I didn’t meet a deadline or finish a project or keep growing the business, something bad would happen. The irony is that the bad thing was already happening: I was trading my kids’ childhoods for work. I was missing the games and the school events and hearing about them after, always from the other side of some wall I’d built myself.
Being your own training wheels is something people romanticize. The grind, the hustle, the “she built it all herself” narrative. And sure, there’s something real about the toughness it gives you. But I think it’s also just sad. Not a knock on anyone in my life. Just a true thing. When you’re the only thing keeping yourself upright, there’s no room to wobble. And everybody needs room to wobble sometimes.
The ones she won’t let me be
My oldest daughter is the toughest person I know. And it is both the thing I’m proudest of and the thing that breaks my heart the most.
She is strong in the way that makes you need to stand up straighter just being around her. She has been through the drama of high school, where teenage girls are cruel in ways that still shock me even though I lived through it myself. She has navigated boys coming in and out of the picture. She’s played college athletics and faced horrible leadership from adults who should have known better, dealt with a devastating injury, and pushed through things that would have flattened most people.
And through all of it, she’s maybe let me catch her once or twice but quickly realized it and recovered.
She doesn’t shut me out. That’s the thing, she lets me be there. She lets me stand right next to the bike. But she won’t let me touch the handlebars. She won’t lean into the training wheels even when she’s wobbling, because she is so determined to stay upright on her own.
I watch her and I want to scream “just let me catch you, just this once.” Not because she can’t handle it - she clearly can. But because there is nothing wrong with letting someone else hold you steady when the road gets rough. You don’t have to be constantly wrecking and tipping over for training wheels to matter. Sometimes you just need them for the one or two big spills. The ones that would hurt a lot less if you’d let somebody soften the landing. You don’t have to carry all that weight yourself and stay so tense and perfectly balanced, training wheels are sometimes there for a reason.
But she’s not wired that way. And I love her for exactly who she is, even when who she is makes me want to wrap her in bubble wrap and tell her the world doesn’t always deserve her toughness - the people sending big gusts in her direction and making her wobble, don’t always deserve her ability to stay upright and peddle on.
The one that never left
And then there’s the training wheel I’ve had the longest.
I’ve never been great at friendships. That’s not self-pity, it’s just the truth. I was always easy to forget, easy to walk away from when someone more fun or more outgoing came along. I’m introverted and sensitive. I wasn’t the one organizing the group hangouts or keeping the group chat alive because I’d rather have been home and alone (probably reading). And so people drifted, the way they do when you’re not loud enough to hold their attention.
But there’s this one friend. We met around junior high. We’ve lived several states apart for basically our entire lives. But, we were in each other’s weddings, she’s one of my boys’ Godmothers, and we still get together now, in our late forties, and it still feels like no time has passed.
She’s the wobbly training wheel on one side of the bike. The one that’s been there so long the treads are worn smooth. The wheel that’s starting to look more square than round from all the times the bike sat still for a while, or hit the brakes too hard, or caught me on a big spill. She didn’t have a matching wheel on the other side because she was only one person in what could have been, maybe should have been, a whole network of friends. But she was the lone survivor. And honestly, she probably worked harder than I did to make sure we stayed in each other’s lives, because she’s a better person than me in that way.
A handwritten letter when I needed one, always signed with LYLAS (Love You Like A Sister). An phone call or email or text that came at the right time. An Instagram meme DM’d that said “I’m still here” without having to say it. She’s the one wheel that never came off the bike. And I don’t think I’ve told her enough what that means.
The thing nobody tells you about training wheels
Here’s what Joaquin’s story unlocked for me, the part I’m still sitting with:
Training wheels don’t get a say in when they come off. And neither do you.
My grandparents didn’t choose to leave. I didn’t choose to lose them. I would have kept those wheels on my entire life if I could have, because I loved them beyond measure and they made the world feel safe. But they died, and the training wheels were removed without my agreement, without my will, without anyone asking if I was ready to ride without them. I wasn’t. You just do it anyway. I wish for them back, for even just an hour, every single day.
And then there are the wheels like my friend, the ones that are beat up and worn down and maybe don’t spin as smoothly as they used to, but they are still bolted on. Still there. Still catching you on the wobbles even after decades of road.
I think we spend a lot of time talking about independence. About learning to ride without the training wheels. About being strong enough to balance on your own. And that’s fine. I’ve done it. I’ve been my own wheels more times than I can count. But Joaquin didn’t want his training wheels off because he knew something most of us take too long to learn: there is nothing weak about wanting something there to catch you. The weakness is pretending you don’t need it.
So what are your training wheels? The people, the habits, the one friend who never left, the version of yourself that showed up when no one else did? Are they still there? Did you choose to take them off, or did someone else make that call for you?
I’m still figuring out my own answers. But I know this much: some of my training wheels were taken too soon, some of them I had to become myself, one of them won’t let me help no matter how much I want to, and one of them has been wobbling along beside me for thirty-five years with no intention of quitting.
I’ll take the wobbly wheel. Every time.
The line that started this is in Far from the Tree by Robin Benway. If you want the book, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.
Tell me about your wobbly wheel. The one that’s beat up and worn smooth and still bolted on after all these years. Who is it? And does that person know what they are to you? The comment button is right here:
"Training wheels" is exactly the language I've needed. I've always called mine guardrails — my philosophy raising my kids was never about preventing every swerve, just making sure they couldn't fully derail.
Reading about your daughter who won't let you touch the handlebars hit hard. I think I built guardrails partly so my kids wouldn't need to ask permission to wobble.
This one came from a single bike metaphor in Far From the Tree, and it undid me a little. It got me thinking about training wheels as every person, and every version of myself, that quietly kept me upright before I learned to balance on my own. This might be the most personal thing I've written here so far. Who were the training wheels in your life, the ones holding you steady before you even noticed they were there?