MAMA: Adventures in Martial Arts and Motherhood

Promotions are awesome. There are few things more exhilarating than a fancy new belt tied around your waist. I mean look at those kids over there!  Look how happy they are to be junior black belts! All that hard work, all those days of promotion, finally over. And now they get to come to karate class every day just like they used to except they get to line up somewhere different, and people call them "Senpai" so and so, and oh my god they also get to put on a BLACK BELT! Every single time they take class!! (Those of you who have been there understand what I am talking about. That belt. It is yours now. Forever. And not only do you get to keep it, but you get to WEAR it. In class! Its incredible really.) When it comes to karate, I have been a black belt for so long that I rarely think about promotions anymore. I still take class because I enjoy it. And because I need to teach this stuff and I cannot teach things that I never practice. But if I am being perfectly honest, most

This is my third time starting this post. I know I have something to say but for some reason I am finding it hard to put my finger on exactly what it is, what story I want to tell.  Jiu Jitsu has always been a struggle for me. In the end, that may be why I actually love it so much. It has never been easy. In fact, some days it is so hard that I cannot imagine getting up the next day and going back to class. And I have done hard. I am a fifth degree black belt in karate. I used to fight a scary man named Paul Williams on Friday nights who would sometimes push his sparring partners into a corner and pummel them until the bell rang.  But Jiu Jitsu is a different kind of hard. True sometimes I am still fighting to survive. (Like that time last year when I suddenly found myself rolling with the spazziest white belt in the room and knew that if every ounce of my focus was not on, I was getting injured. Not tapped. Injured. Perhaps seriously. ) But if I am being honest, most of my rounds