Month 11: Living The Montage

{Prologue, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4}
{Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, Month 5, Month 6, Month 7, Month 8, 2016 WSD, Month 11, Month 12, Month 18}

It’s a randomly gorgeous morning in the middle of February, and we’ve interrupted start-of-class forms to stand outside the school and talk quietly in the cool breeze. I have no idea why, but he’ll tell me soon enough.

“Mommy …” he asks me, voice thick with the tears shining in his big brown eyes. The ones that look just like mine, if my eyes still had all that sweetness in them, “...  when do I get to do the wooden dummy?”

Ah, there it is. He’d been playing siu nim tao and watching an older student play a form on the jong when he’d suddenly turned to me with that unmistakable I’m Overwhelmed face. Hence: outside.

I don’t have a good answer, so I give him the only one I know, “You’ll learn the jong when your Sifu says you’re ready.”

“But when will that be?” his face crumbles.

So I hug him and ignore the snot he’s smearing all over my shirt because that’s what moms of eight year old boys do, and I tell him, “Just keep training hard, buddy. Keep listening and trying. You’ll get there,” because that’s what sihings of frustrated sidais do. Or at least what this sihing does.

He sniffles, “So … when do I get a white shirt?”

That one I know. “When you’ve trained for a year, dude. You’re almost there; just a few more months to go.”

He looks at me like I’m very nice, but I’m also very crazy. A few months to a third grader is a few eternities. But at least it’s a more recognizable timeline to a tangible milestone than “when your Sifu says you’re ready”. He nods acceptance and giggles when I tickle him (that’s a mom thing, not a sihing thing). When he trots off to class a little sniffly, but ready to work, all I can do is sigh.

Because, oh wow, do I know that feeling. That feeling of wanting to be good at a thing, so you start learning how to do the thing, and you work really hard for what feels like a long time, only to find yourself not so much good as slightly less terrible.

It’s a complicated feeling. A frustrating, complicated feeling. I blame Hollywood.

See, my boy and I both grew up on a steady diet of movie training montages. I learned from a young age that all you need to go from Know-Nothing Chump to Total Badass is a quirky teacher, a few minutes of clever editing, and some inspirational powerchords.

It’s the same every time ...

PROTAGONIST: I want to learn how to do The Thing.

TEACHER: I will not teach you because you are too old or too angry, or maybe that’s me.

PROTAGONIST: But if you don’t teach me then there’s no movie.

TEACHER: Well, when you put it that way ...

MONTAGE:

PROTAGONIST: I have learned so much! I am now The Best Around at doing The Thing!

… and yet somehow I never questioned this process. But I really, really should have. Because now that I’m actually training to do a Thing, I have no realistic concept of time. Kung fu training is measured in years, not minutes, and there’s no music. I want to gnash my teeth and claw at the movie screen and demand to know: what, Protagonist? WHAT DID YOU LEARN? What epic skills could you have POSSIBLY ABSORBED during two-and-a-half minutes of HUNGRY FREAKING EYES?!

Where are your bruises? Your callouses? Your subtlely altered physique that makes all of your clothes fit just a little bit wrong?

Did you ever have to drag yourself to class by the scruff of your own stubborn neck and make yourself do the damn training?

Was it a shock the first time you got so sweaty during a workout that you woke up the next morning with cramps in every major muscle? Did you have to re-think everything you thought you knew about how to hydrate your body and how to wash salt stains out of cotton shirts?

Did you ever glare at your hands for refusing to do two different things at the same time? The hands that are perfectly capable of steering of a half-ton machine at highway speeds while simultaneously selecting and implementing the correct gear to keep that machine’s engine running, but somehow can’t pull off a tan dar without trying to double-punch? Those ridiculous, traitorous hands?

Was there ever a point where you did one part of the Thing so many times that it got boring, until someone suggested that you think of the motion as starting from the elbow instead of the wrist, and suddenly it was fascinating all over again?

How many times did you stand there, all sweat and no breath, avoiding your training partner’s gaze in the hopes of getting just a few more seconds to recover before you dove right back into the drill?

What about setbacks? Did you ever get injured? Were you never knocked so flat by illness that you were forced to skip training until you were well enough to stand upright again? And then when you finally got back to training did you gasp and twinge and limp through it because when you dipped into your internal well of stamina you found it had been drained bone fricking dry?

Did you stand awkwardly in the world’s clumsiest horse until your knees screamed and you finally realized OH, maybe I should fix my feet? And then did you think you had horse All Figured Out until one day an older student came along and very patiently dragged you all over the floor until you realized what you were doing wrong?

Speaking of other students, do you have any? Are they just off-camera and we don’t see them? Being a movie protagonist seems lonely. How are you learning every aspect of The Thing if you’re never getting anyone else’s perspective?

Have you ever relied on your own clumsy instincts to withstand a flurry of limbs wielded by a much more senior student? Did that sihing slip past your woefully insufficient guard to tap you on the chest not once, not twice, but three times before the screaming in your muscles finally forced you to call a halt during which you stood there, all baffled and breathless? Did you look at your sihing and gasp “One of these days, I’m gonna feel like I know what’s going on, right?”, and then she laughed and shook her head and said “When you do, let me know, because I still have no clue”?

Because that’s the thing about the movie montage: IT ENDS. Real training doesn’t.

Movie protagonists get to tie up their training in a neat little narrative bow; the music fades and the hero has achieved all the perfection that they need to triumph. If my montage ever ends, it’ll be because I ended it, not because I ran out of things to learn. In a month, in a year, in ten years, I’ll still be finding new things to work on.

Sometimes I, like my boy, face that never-ending road of learning that stretches out past the horizon and it all seems so incredibly daunting. I look at all the ground not yet covered and it feels like I’ll just never get there, like every step I’ve already taken, no matter how many, won’t ever be enough. It’s a bummer. A big, heavy, smothering, make-you-wanna-stand-outside-the-school-and-cry bummer.

Screw that.

Trying to train under the weight of all that self-inflicted discouragement is like trying to brush your teeth while eating oreos. Messy and gross and counterproductive as hell.

So I’m working on tearing my gaze away from that horizon and focusing on the patch of road that’s under my feet. Less worrying about when the hell I’m ever gonna get good at kung fu and more enjoying the drill that’s happening right now. Turns out, all the good stuff is in the montage. All the ups and downs, the thousand little triumphs for every thousand little hurts, the layer upon layer of fatigue and effort that eventually add up to real skill, all of it. The best things happen while Eye Of The Tiger is playing.

Hopefully, my boy will follow my lead - just knowing that he’s watching helps keep me on track. Because kids are always watching, and listening, and repeating what they’ve learned. Which can be awesome or it can land you in a parent-teacher conference. Or both!

Ultimately, I kinda feel bad for Protagonist. Once the montage is over, their journey ends. Maybe not until after a number of increasingly gawd-awful sequels, but eventually. Me, I get to keep going. And going. And going some more. All the going. For as long as I want or until my Sifu gets sick of me, whichever comes first.

Until then, I’ll do my best to forget all this montage crap and just train. I can’t promise there won’t be the occasional one of these, though:

If you think I don’t have my very own Rocky Balboa grey sweats and Chucks, then we have not met.

Month 6: Pros & Cons

{Prologue, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4}
{Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, Month 5, Month 6, Month 7, Month 8, 2016 WSD, Month 11, Month 12}

When I first started training in Kung Fu, I promised myself that I’d stick it out for at least six months. 

I know it doesn't seem like much of a commitment, but I honestly wasn't sure I would survive the first class, let alone forty-some-odd more classes after that. Considering my physical condition at the time that I started (poor-to-middling) and my own natural tendency to not do difficult things, six months felt like a pretty ambitious goal.

It also seemed like a reasonable amount of time to dedicate to an activity so far outside of my comfort zone that it would need to invent faster-than-light travel in order to reach my comfort zone while I was still young enough to participate. Two months to warm up to the training, two months to settle into a routine, two months to decide whether or not I hated it. And if it turned out that Kung Fu was not for me, that the benefits were outweighed by the costs to my family, my time, my poor beleaguered health, nobody would judge me for bowing out after half a year of honestly trying.

Sensible, right? So here I am, six months later. Time to evaluate. Continuing with the sensible approach, I shall attempt to list the pros and cons of my training experience.

PROS of Kung Fu training:

• Improved physical and emotional stamina. If I can slog through hours of sweat-soaked exertion and only dissolve into a puddle of scalding, frustrated tears once in half a year? Well, then there just ain’t much I can’t do.
• Symptoms of my forever-disease have never been so mild and manageable. Starting this training was a gamble, a wild toss of the dice that such a dramatic change to my exercise might do more good than harm. I had nothing but a vague hope that studying a martial art might be like couples’ counseling for my mind and body, giving them a project to work on together instead of fighting each other all the time. And it seems I may have been right: the inflammation in my joints is minimal, my mobility is hugely improved, and I’m just not so daggum tired all the time. Which is great, because I love being right.
• Now a part of a solid community of people who know that I have lupus and treat me like an adult about it. By which I mean they’ll scrub up with hand sanitizer before we work out, and they’ll respect my need to take breaks, but we are Gonna. Work. Out. And they generally don’t say any of the facepalm-worthy things that people can't seem to help saying to the chronically ill*, either because they’d never think to say them or because we’re all too busy training to talk. Either way, I’m happy.
• Greater confidence moving through a world that is suddenly much less full of insurmountable threats. Spend enough time imprinting your muscle memory with a variety of efficient ways to overcome physical confrontations, and the world is a less scary place. Especially for a lady.
• Greater humility to balance that confidence. I train with the kids’ class most of the time, see. Nothing keeps you humble about your kung fu, and about life in general, quite like getting your ass handed to you by a sihing who’s half your size and one-third your age. Speaking of which ...
• My kids and I have something in common besides the fact that we live in the same house. They’re training right along with me. We bond over the challenge of drills and our mutual post-workout stank.

CONS of Kung Fu training:

• Spangly dangly earrings no longer swing prettily over my shoulders. Because I have muscle there, now? Apparently? Weird.
• Newfound tendency to talk about Kung Fu. Like, a lot. Please stop me.
• No longer able to pawn heavy lifting tasks off onto my mighty husband. I am now perfectly capable of lifting rather heavy things. A solid tan sao can haul an awful lot of groceries, y’all. (note to self: move this one to the Pros list)
• Strangers seem to feel that I owe them an explanation for my forearm bruises. Dear Concerned World: I am not being abused. Promise.

Girls can play rough, too, ya know.

Well. That seems like a pretty clear balance far in the PROS favor. But what about the introspective overthinking about the philosophical impact of my choices? Haven’t done nearly enough of that.

How has my perspective changed over the past six months?, I wonder to myself. Once upon a not-so-long-ago time, I had never thrown a punch in my life. Physical confrontation was something that I blithely pretended could never happen to me in this modern civilized world. Because ignorance is the best prevention. OBVIOUSLY.

Now, though? I’ve lost count of how many punches I’ve thrown and have been thrown at me. Thousands, maybe? No idea. Enough that a punch has ceased to be an astounding alien weapon, and has become a common tool, something that I use so often that it’s worn shiny and smooth, comfortable and efficient. All of the techniques that I’ve learned are tools. No more exotic than a hammer. There’s nothing mystical about them, just the simple physics of muscle and bone, plus a lot of practice.

It’s easy to forget that the vast majority of people are not familiar with hitting and being hit. That when such things happen, it can seem too fast to follow, mysterious and complex and a little scary. Recently, Sifu and I did a brief demonstration of basic self defense techniques on a morning news show. During the demo, I did a simple tan sao followed by a pak dar to escape Sifu’s grip. My punch happened to tap his microphone, which made it sound very impressive to the viewers at home. Ditto for our lovely hostess, apparently:

(click this link to view the video that would be embedded here if I was smarter)

It was just a twist of a tan, then a pak dar. Just a little something that I learned on maybe my second night at Women’s Self Defense, before my actual training even started, but to the nice lady on camera with us it was magic. And Six Months Ago Me would have been right there with her, all agog and what-sorcery-is-this. But after spending hours out of every week for the past half a year training, immersed in the small, quiet sea of Kung Fu, where force is not the rocks we crash against, but the tide with which we ebb and flow, I’m seeing a different kind of magic.

The kind of magic that inspires swooning waxy-poetic run-on sentences, apparently. Not even sorry.

What I see is the kind of magic that’s not magic at all. It’s just practice. Hard work. Sweat. Repetition of good technique, or at least repetition until the technique gets good. Learning all of the pieces and then mix-and-matching them to suit any situation. Hitting and getting hit, and conditioning the body’s reflexes to handle both ends of that equation.

Any ol’ fool who’s willing to work at it can do this stuff. You can tell, because I’m doing it. A lot has changed in the past six months, but the basic facts about me remain the same. Still thirty-five years old. Still clumsy. Still the stay-at-home mom of two. Still chronically ill. And also? Still training.

Seems I’ve gone and talked myself into not quitting. I’ll give that Six-Month Milestone Quit Option a jaunty wave as I cruise by, on my way out the door to class. Because this training is totally worth a little less dangly in my spangly earrings.

*I’ve heard every single one of these things, in some form or another. If you look closely in that video around the 3:15 mark, you’ll find me and my overly aggressive lipstick.