Mother's Motorbike Lesson

Why boys don't end up as mothers

Blokes seem to know about these things but mothers less so. I’m sure someone will be offended but my mother’s not. She’s the one I’m talking about.

See, boys usually see a dangerous opportunity as an invitation and mothers see the same thing as a warning.

So, when we got these farm bikes, us three boys were all over them, jumping ditches, doing donuts on the back lawn and seeing how far we could throw them without actually killing ourselves. They were so much fun, in fact, we just knew that Mum would absolutely love the amazing experience, too.

We were wrong but persistent. We nagged and nagged and nagged and, eventually, wore her down … and then realised how different mothers were. While we just leapt on and took off in a shower of stones, she took at least ten minutes getting her leg over and finding the handlebars. I assumed it was because mothers’ bodies were different but, later, realised she was terrified.

After some rudimentary lessons about accelerators and clutches controlled by hands and gear levers by feet – the opposite of a car – we expected her to roar off like Evel Knevil. But she didn’t. She just sat there revving the damned thing. We three yelled at her over the noise, perhaps imagining that our volume was more important than details. Frustrated by lack of progress, Geoff stepped on the gear lever and off went the machine with a wind-blown mother clinging desperately to the handlebars, bum bouncing and legs flapping.

The faster she went, the more she pulled back on the accelerator and she careened across the rough back yard, between sheets hanging on the line, through the ditch, dodging squawking chooks, the cat, and two startled dogs. She came to a graceful stop, embedded in the wire netting of the chook-house.

Scars from the wire took a week to heal and, seventy years later, the emotional scars of ‘those damned motorbike things’, as she called them, still remain.

Mmm, maybe mothers are different from boys, after all!