Month 24: I Made It.

{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}

Kung Fu Story Time:

I kicked a car.

In my defense, the car totally started it.

One fine morning, I’m walking my kids into their school (they’re in elementary, so they’re still young enough to enjoy being seen in public with their Mom), and I have one kid holding each of my hands. We’re about to cross the line of cars dropping off their respective kids, so I clock which car we’ll need to walk in front of and catch the driver’s eye. My hands are full, so I gesture with my head as if to say “Hey, we’re gonna walk past you”. The driver nods. The three of us start to walk in front of his car when it suddenly lurches forward and -

BAM!

- I shove both kids behind my back, plant one foot on the ground in backhorse stance and slam the other foot into the bumper of this guy’s car so hard the sound of it turns every head in the school drop-off line. I don’t even think about it; just get the kids safe and kick.

The driver is staring at me, all wide eyes and dropped jaw. I’m staring at him, my heel digging into his bumper like it wants to punch a hole through the engine block. Everyone, teachers and kids and other parents, is staring at both of us. Slowly, I take my foot off the car and hold the driver’s gaze with a hard glare while my kids and I finish crossing his path. Only once we’re safely past do I glance down to make sure I didn’t leave a dent on the bumper (nope, not that strong, more’s the pity).

As we walk away, my son asks, “Mommy, why did you kick that car?”

My daughter answers him, “Because that car wasn’t Being Safe, so she had to kick it to make it stop. Right, Mommy?”

“That’s right,” I reply, with all the quiet satisfaction of a Mama Bear polishing her claws.

~fin~

So, okay.

Maybe his foot slipped off the brake accidental-like.

Maybe he misinterpreted my eloquent head gesture to mean “Hey, you in the car, go ahead and drive by while my two young children and I stand here in the middle of a parking lot because that’s totally safe” and was honestly surprised when we walked in front of him.

Maybe he got swept up in the Lord of the Flies-esque entitlement warzone that is the elementary school drop-off line and tried to intimidate us in retaliation for the two-second delay we were causing him.

I’ll never know. We did not have a conversation. My inner Mama Bear was in charge at that moment, and she didn’t give a shit what the driver of the car that nearly ran over her two children had to say for himself. He seemed to sense that and wisely stayed in his car.

To be clear: I am not saying that kicking cars is a good strategy. It’s not. Don’t kick cars. There is nothing a wee human foot can do to stop a half-ton of moving metal. I’m very lucky the driver stopped.

What I am saying is that, once upon a time, my reflex would’ve been to grab my kids by the scruff and jump back. Maybe squawk a little. Definitely scurry out of the way and splutter with impotent terror and anger at our near-collision. But nowadays, when confronted with an incoming threat while my hands are full of my beloved offspring, my reflex is to calmly plant a solid horse stance and kick the bad thing as hard as I can till it stops coming at us. Apparently.

That is a fundamental change. A thorough rewiring of basic caveman-level functions. Somebody took the time to tinker with my Fight or Flight responses, bypassing Flight entirely and adding a complex option tree of aggressive defenses and crippling techniques to Fight. That somebody was me, and my Sifu, Simo, a small army of other students, and Grandmaster Moy Tung. And the time it took was two years.

I have completed the Two Year Training Program at Moy Yat Kung Fu Academy.

According to the structure of the Two Year Program, based on the consistent time and effort that I’ve put into my training, I am now a basic expert in Ving Tsun kung fu. Which is quite possibly the strangest sentence I’ve ever written about myself.

At first, it didn’t feel real. For a while now, I’ve been cruising on a wave of steady momentum in my training, only somewhat hampered by my wackadoo health. Somewhere along the line in the past 24 months, kung fu became less about physical therapy for my lupus-addled body and more about genuinely enjoying the training. I’d been happily trucking right along on my kung fu journey, so interested in the new bits of road beneath my feet that I missed the milestone as I passed it by.

Then Simo reminded me to stop wearing my dingy white training shirt (for 2nd year students) and start wearing my bright blue training shirt (for 3rd year students). I blinked. That couldn’t be right. No way that kind of time had passed. I mean, sure, I had been attending class three times a week, almost every week, for as many weeks as it took to add up to two years. And yeah, finishing the Two Year Program had always been the goal, but … surely that was still in some kind of hazily defined distant future, like always?

Grappling with my own warped kung fu space/time continuum, I slipped my old training slippers off of my feet, the ones I’d been wearing since my third week, ready to replace them with a brand new pair. I stopped. Stared at the soles of my slippers, old and new. There was all the proof I needed.

One hour of training (left) vs 500+ hours of training (right)

My old slippers had been through some tribulations. The seams were frayed, the insoles were shredded, and somehow the hard plastic soles had been worn paper thin by floors made of smooth wood and slate. Unless some mischievous fey creatures had been sneaking into my home at night and gnawing on my slippers, this damage was all done by me. By my training. For two years.

Well hot damn, I actually made it. Me. The middle-aged overweight chronically ill suburban mother of two. I did that.

Technically, I could stop here. Having completed the program, I have all of the basic tools of kung fu that will serve me well for the rest of my days even if I never set foot in another class again.

Physical Protection - While I have no desire to know if I could kick someone’s ass, I’m confident in my ability to keep someone from kicking mine.

Health - My mind and body have reconciled, and now my body is stronger than it’s ever been. Not in terms of raw power, so much as what it can endure and how easily it can recover. And when you’ve got a forever-disease that’ll drop-kick your body through the seven layers of hell just for funzies, that comes in pretty handy.

Patience With My Limits - Used-to-be, I’d rage against anything that tried to limit me, fling myself against barriers just because they dared to thwart me and then sulk when I couldn’t get past them because that’s kind of how barriers work. Now, though, I know what I can handle (a helluva lot) and what I can’t. I’ve figured out that if it’s bigger than what I can handle, it’s probably pretty damn big. I’ll either try again when I’m stronger, or just ask for help.

Doing Less Harm … - I’ve been hit really hard, many many times, by people who are much scarier than me. The world didn’t end. In fact, I kept going, knowing that if I got hit again I’d be just fine. Bruised, maybe, but fine. The calm that comes with that knowledge seeps into my everyday life. I’m nicer than I was two years ago. Not too nice (*cough-car kicker-cough*) but certainly more patient, more helpful. Less cantankerous now that I don’t feel like I have to gnash my teeth and swipe my claws at the whole world just to keep myself physically and emotionally safe.

… Taking Less Shit - All of those things - self-defense, health, knowing my limits, being at peace - add up to a person who can’t easily be pushed around. It’s hard to intimidate a woman who happily spends her free time learning the most efficient ways to make an attacker swallow their own blood.

All of that is my kung fu. Every student has their own kung fu. There are others like it, but this one is mine. A big shiny treasure trove of skill and experience that I’ve spent the past two years building, gathering bits from other students, catching pieces from instructors. My own personal hoard of calm badassery. I could stop my training right here, and for the rest of my life I would be a better person for what I’ve achieved.

But …

… why in the WORLD would I stop now?

Now, when I’m finally comfortable enough with my own kung fu to enjoy the work so much that I forget to compare myself to other students.

Now, when the voice in my head that used to be so loud when it told me how fat and slovenly and ridiculous I look can barely be heard over the roaring quiet of my kung fu.

Now, when I suddenly realize that the amount of effort I once spent scrambling for a white-knuckle grip on just one or two concepts in a class, I can now spend on absorbing multiple new details and integrating them into known techniques and flowing comfortably from one drill to the next because I’ve either done them before or I know the pieces that make them.

Because it turns out the more kung fu you have, the more kung fu you get. Which means that there is a potentially infinite world of kung fu out there, an endless landscape of wisdoms and humilities and epiphanies and tricky brutalities, all waiting for me to learn it … if only I have the will to keep training.

My choice is pretty clear.

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 3: One Of The Big Kids

{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 Three is the best month of training. So far. I'll 'splain exactly why in a bit.

First, some real talk: I have a problem with authority. Always have.

See, I am the oldest of five children. The Biggest Sister. The playground defender, bedtime ignorer, and nutritionally inadvisable snack provider. The parental underboss: not exactly in charge, but I’d do in a pinch. The superhero who knew how to do All The Things (for no better reason than I had already learned how when they weren’t watching). The one who got the bumps and bruises and scars that taught four kids what not to do. The one who stress-tested The Rules so they’d be all comfy and broken in by the time my siblings got around to using them. The first of our generation to be given pieces of grown-up responsibility to handle, and the first to spectacularly screw those responsibilities right the hell up. The Example: good, bad, and very bad.

Now that all my sibs and I are grown, I’m the mother of two small children and the undisputed bossypants mamabear of my own little household. All of this, combined with the natural contrariness that seems writ upon my bones, and you’re dealing with someone who has all the willingness to cooperate with authority of your average scalded housecat.

I have an instinctual disregard for anyone who might wish to boss me around. If you could spare a moment’s sympathetic thought for my parents, teachers, and employers, I’m sure they would appreciate it.

To be clear: this is a character flaw. One that I have an on-again-off-again struggle with. It’s exactly the last thing in the world I would want to bring into Kung Fu training, but I could no more easily leave it behind than I could unzip my skin and check my contrary bones at the door. Dilemma.

Luckily, the Ving Tsun system is ready for punks like me.

There are many parts to this system, most of which I could probably list in under a minute but will spend the next many years of my life trying to fully comprehend. The one that’s most relevant to who I’ve been up to this point and where I am now in my training (and this blog post), is the concept of Kung Fu Family.

Kung Fu Family isn’t just a nice idea. It’s not some empty slogan, a set of words to be mouthed as needed, slapped on to a conversation to add the illusion of meaning, convenient and disposable as a post-it note. The concept of family permeates every aspect of this training, starting with the very basic structure of who’s who in the school.

We’ve got the school’s dad and mom: Sifu and Simo. All of the other students are siblings. Some are older because they’ve been training longer; we call them sihing. Some are younger because they’re newer to the school; they’re called sidai. It’s a hierarchy of sorts, but only for lack of a better word because it’s got nothing to do with skill or merit or some arbitrary measurement of each student’s worth, and everything to do with when we started training. We’re all equals, it’s just that some of us have been there longer than others. The first student to join the school would be the oldest sihing, and the most recent student to sign up would be the youngest sidai.

Which means that when I walked into that school for my first class, I suddenly became everybody’s baby sister.

I’ve never been baby anything to anybody who hadn’t given birth to me, much less to a small army of strangers trained in hand-to-hand combat. Nothing about my life experience thus far could have prepared me for this. When confronted with bizarro circumstances, my instinct is typically to puff up and bullrush my way through until things look familiar again. Which is exactly how you don’t learn Kung Fu.

So for the past three months, I’ve reined in that instinct and tried to keep myself on a simple three step program:

1 - show up for training
2 - keep my sassmouth closed and my ears open
3 - watch my sihings

If any of my new older brothers and sisters had ever tried to alpha dog me, had ever done any of the thousand little dominance displays we humans are too often capable of, had ever bossed or barked or demanded, I would have turned on my little heel, sashayed away, and never looked back. But that’s not what good sihing do, at least not at this school.

Being sidai does not come easily to me. I'm just too me for it to ever feel natural, and I’m going to slip up every now and again. Hell, just this past week I showed half an ounce of accidental disrespect to a sihing by thoughtlessly setting up my hands for a two-person drill as though I was the sihing. And you know what? Days later I’m still all squirmy inside about it, actually chagrined at myself for being the kind of pain in the ass I’ve always been. Weird.

See, when my sihings are all, for the most part, calm and skilled, friendly and willing to help a newbie along without being condescending, and (bless them, this above all) patient, well … it’s not so much a matter of having to suppress my attitude problems as it is not having to use them at all. The sihings are there to help their sidais, just as they are helped by their own sihings. Not just willing to work with the younger students, but happy to. Showing respect to people like that ain’t difficult.

Which isn’t to say that all sihings are the same. Oh, very far from it. Each offers their own lessons, just by being themselves.

Some sihings are extremely tuned in to a sidai’s fatigue level, and will call a halt to the exercise at the first over-large huff of tired breath. Which is a mixed blessing. I mean, I do get tired suddenly and often apropos of not much at all thanks to that whole chronic illness thing, but I’m also prone to melodrama. That gusty sigh in the middle of Pak Sao could be a surprise onrush of fatigue, or it could be that I just remembered that I have two loads of laundry waiting at home for me to sort and fold. I can either babble an apology and explain myself every time this happens, or just stay focused in the moment and stop being a drama queen. Huff only when I need to huff.

Some sihings are vocally encouraging, cheering you on even as they come at you with forearms like accelerating concrete pylons. It’s like trading blows with a very skilled, utterly merciless golden retriever. Pak’ing punches like theirs really helps me get over that whole fear reactivity thing. Because if I flinch away from that simple exercise I might as well keep on backing up out the door and go hide in my car until a real grown-up can come rescue me from my life choices.

Some sihings are so quiet, not just in voice but in personal energy, as though if you dropped them into a pond they’d slip peacefully through the water without leaving so much as a ripple, that I can almost forget that they’re even in the room, that anyone else is in the room, and the world can shrink down to nothing more than the play of hands and the lesson of the drills. Their focus is like an aura that moves with them, and when we work out together I get to borrow it for a little while.

Sometimes they’re all precision, the kind of sihings who make horse stance look graceful, with huen saos you could set your watch by. Sometimes they’re all power, the force behind their hands just enough to imply that there could be ever so much more. Sometimes they’re all control, calm limbs marking the drill, holding position quietly until the mistake is seen and corrected, helping the sidai to sculpt their muscle memory. Sometimes they’re all of those things at once.

Occasionally, I wonder what kind of sihing I am, but I’ll never have the cajones to ask one of my sidais. Because I do have sidais, now. I’ve been in the school, a part of the family, for long enough that new students have joined up behind me. Finally, someone upon whom to inflict my frustrated Big Sister-ness. As interpreted through the lens of all that my sihings have demonstrated, of course. Got to give back all the good that I’ve gotten.

It’s a relief, not being the baby any more. A big step, and one of many reasons why Month Three is The Best Month.

Up to this point, for the past dozen or so weeks, I’ve felt like the awkward puppy person trying to scamper along with the big dogs. Which, for a career Oldest Sibling like me, is pretty wretched. Not because anybody made me feel that way, mind you. Sifu, Simo, all of my sihings, they’ve all been, in their own ways, the very soul of patient encouragement. Any perceived awkwardness is coming from inside my own contrary skull.

They’ve hung in with me while I’ve tried to get all three stages of Siu Nim Tao out of my head and into my muscles while soaking up enough of a working Kung Fu vocabulary to know what to expect when new drills are introduced. When a sihing introduced me to Lop Sao, I knew by the name of the drill that there would be a curving of a monkey-paw hand over a wrist and a pulling of the limb. What I didn’t know, but would quickly learn, was that this would be the first drill that actually felt like I was doing some legit Kung Fu. Not just fumbling through the placement of limbs on an endless repetition until the muscles can do it on their own without my mental micromanagement, but actual practical application of what I’ve been learning.

Look at me, world! I can do Lop Sao. I'm Kung Fu’ing. I Kung Fu now.

Now, in marvelous Month Three, I can ask half-bright questions about the science behind the drills, rather than just going through the motions by rote. When we circle up for conditioning I can lead the group through an exercise and not feel like a goober. I may have to close my eyes when I do it, because seeing other folks’ limbs moving slightly out of step with mine throws off my groove like hearing my own voice echo back on a phone line, but I get it done. The first time I led a group of my sihings through Siu Nim Tao without any of those endless awkward moments where everybody’s holding still waiting for me to remember what the next move is? Felt like a miniature Christmas.

This is what a baby bird feels like when it perches on the edge of its nest. Totally gonna fly any day now.

And yes, I know that soon I’ll be learning even more new things and basically starting back over on that whole repeat-it-till-the-body-memorizes-it cycle, but I’m cool with that. Thanks to this whole huge family that I had no idea I would be gaining when I started this wacky training thing, I have the basic tools I need to make it work. They’re not handing me the keys to the Kung Fu Family car or anything, but at least I’m out of diapers. 

I’m one of the big kids, now.