MAMA: Adventures in Martial Arts and Motherhood

Hello blog readers! It has been awhile, I know. Sometimes I get so caught up with mom-ing, teaching and trying to keep up with that 17 year old's leg attacks that my brain cannot be bothered to put two sentences together. This BJJ life is hard ya'll. But I am writing to let you know that from now on all my thoughts and brilliant ramblings will be directly posted to the MAMA Facebook page instead of here. So if you are still interested in hearing about my life please go like my page: https://www.facebook.com/MamaMartialArtsMommyArchives/?hc_ref=ARRKm25w6q5uszYWUeUPu9BFpch8KxcbPw2AhY30kVw_8B3092MQkh4t5_S9CjS-5rA&fref=nf That is where you can read all about Maya's latest accomplishments, my "big guy smash" struggles, my obsessive love of coffee, and whether or not I think the romper is a reasonable fashion choice. (Spoiler alert, I don't.) The posts will be slightly shorter so those of you with minimal free time and short attention spans can still enjoy...

I'm just going to be honest with you. We have been lied to. We have been lied to and we are still being lied to, every single day. Oh don't get me wrong, bad shit is going to happen to us. Bad shit is going to happen to the people we care about, stuff that is simply unavoidable. Someone is going to lose their job. Someone is going to get sick. Someone is even going to die. These are the things that happen to us human beings in the course of a normal life. No matter how much we sleep, how few carbs we eat and how much meditation we do, we are going to have pain and we are going to have to go through it. There is no avoiding that. But this other stuff? This stuff someone tried to convince us was normal? It is bullshit. All of it. The part about your body falling apart. About you not being able to do what you used to. About your sore back and aching knees being just "a natural part of aging." About how "everyone is tired all the time." All lies. Yo...

To the girl at the open mat who thought my body was a grappling dummy, I get it. You probably train at one of those giant schools in the city where everyone is constantly struggling to catch up to the two guys at the top who the instructor actually pays attention to. One of those gyms where everyone goes hard all the time, unless you are injured of course (which happens often) or you have ringworm (also a regular occurrence since guys are constantly taking off their shirts and rolling in sweat puddles). I get that we are both purple belts, and that I met you like thirty seconds ago, so of course there has to be some kind of pecking order established. I mean if you care about that. The other option would be to say "Hello new friend, nice to meet another woman who shares this crazy thing called jiu-jitsu. Lets work on some techniques together." But no, you wouldn't know about that. To you, every match is a challenge, every roll is the ADCC finals. So whatever, you establish...

(For the "squad". #unicornseveryone) Yesterday, while I was in Starbucks waiting for my coffee, I had the pleasure of observing a group of tween girls doing what tween girls are now required to do in Starbucks, which is take selfies with their unicorn frappachinos.  Now to be fair, I have not tasted this thing. (I like coffee. Sweet, caffeinated, brown coffee.) But as far as I can tell it was created by Starbucks for the sole purpose of getting people to post pics of it on Instagram. I am not sure if anyone who buys it actually drinks it, or if they just walk around Brooklyn until it melts, stopping in front of various landmarks to make duck faces into their Iphones. Those tweens LOVE their social media. You know who else loves it? Martial artists. My news feed is full of posts from people who train. Sometimes it is because something exciting has happened, like a tournament win or a brand new belt. Other times it is just a pic of them in their gi with the captio...

Thursday 12:00 noon Brooklyn As we are lining up for class, our instructor always asks us to "set our intention" for the hour, what do we hope to get out of it, what is our goal. Because I expect this comment, I often give some thought to this concept when I wake up Thursday morning. This class is my hardest. There is a lot of rolling. It is full of advanced students, many of them martial arts teachers themselves. Most of the top brown belts in the organization are there, as well as a few black belts. It is taught by an impressive (and somewhat intimidating) man who has been around the martial arts even longer than I have. He is the perfect balance of kind and tough, encouraging and terrifying. The energy in the room is always high, always positive. Everyone is super nice and helpful. It is a great environment to learn jiu-jitsu. It is also somewhat outside my comfort zone.  Going outside my comfort zone is very good for me. You know how the rest of that speech goes. ...

On Friday afternoons I teach three back to back kids classes, starting with 3 and 4 year old beginners and ending with my most advanced 6-8 year olds, who are yellow belt and higher. Yesterday I had my group of 5 reviewing one of their old blue belt katas. About halfway through I stopped them and shook my head. "That was terrible." One of my little yellow belts, a smart, skilled 7 year old boy named Lennon laughed out loud, his eyes wide, shocked. Did I really just say that? "It is not my job to make you feel good," I explained. "It is my job to make you get better. If you got up there and did your best work but it wasn't perfect I would never call your kata terrible. But that kata that you guys just did was not your best. That was sloppy. I have seen you all do that same kata much, much better. I would be a bad teacher if you got up there and did a messy, lazy punch and I said "Good job!" You can do it much, much better. So do it." The...

My karate instructor, the late, great Shihan William Oliver, used to joke about how everyone always wanted to tell him their troubles.  He would listen to these confessions daily as if he were a priest, or perhaps a free therapist, offering up snippets of advice that, if we are being honest, he was no more qualified to give than anyone else in the room. But he was a karate master, therefore it was assumed he knew everything about everything, had some magic key that could transform your miserable life into something glorious. "I need to install a couch," he would say. And then ultimately, "I just want to teach karate." I just want to do heel hooks. Listen, I get that this is complicated for you. I get that you need to fit me into a little martial arts box somewhere. Am I one of the super competitive ones? Am I just training for fun? Am I on the team that believes in one teacher for life or the one that feels the need to travel to a different open mat every weeken...

You know when you have been friends with someone for awhile and one day while you are just sitting around thinking about them you suddenly remember first meeting them? And then you have that weird moment where you realize that that person you met years ago and that person who is your good buddy now are actually the same? And your brain goes, whoa, really? That is Jim? But he is so different now! Jiu jitsu and I have had a very long, very rocky relationship. There was the first six months, where I really could only attend class once a week and did not learn a single thing other than how to not suffocate while someone was sitting on my chest. Then there were the months and months where all I did was tap. Stuck on the bottom again, tap. Whoops, got triangled, tap. What in the world is this guy doing with my lapel....oh, tap, tap, tap! And so on. All new BJJ students get very comfortable with slamming their hand against the mat over and over again in defeat, but I was particularly skille...

In a desperate desire to increase my BJJ training time, I have recently organized some midday workouts with a few friends and training partners. The good news is that I am now getting a lot of extra work in. The bad news is that it never seems to be enough. There are just too many things I am not perfect at yet (read: everything), too many ideas and moves and drills and concepts that I want to improve at. Lately I have also been tossing around the idea of competing in BJJ for the first time. So over the weekend I decided to watch a few videos of someone who was the kind of competitor who would be in my division. (In other words, another very tiny purple belt.) This particular girl happens to also be an amateur MMA fighter, so what I watched was tape of her in a cage somewhere in Long Island attempting to pummel another tiny girl to death.  She was decent, this MMA girl. A good double leg takedown. A sharp front kick. A nice arm bar. She is 23. I hope she makes it. With ...

On the Friday evening, right after September 11, 2001, business owners all up and down Broadway were putting candles out in front of their stores. Other Upper Westside residents were putting them outside their apartment buildings, or on their windowsills, or in a makeshift alter on a random street corner. I remember walking up West End Avenue, amidst this sea of twinkling lights, and feeling at the same time both completely lost, and eternally grateful for the place I was walking towards. Since it was Friday night at the UWS dojo, we had sparring class. We wrapped up our hands, stuck them into our old, faded boxing gloves, and punched and kicked each other for an hour while out on Broadway the candles burned their way down to tiny nubs. This is not like that. I would never claim that the inauguration of a new president, no matter how repugnant and scary he may be, is comparable to the thousands of lives lost to those two airplanes. But it is Friday. And once again, I feel the sam...

When I was younger, I used to get a lot of stomach issues; heartburn, pains, bloating. I also had pretty bad health anxiety. These two things are not a good combination. Over the course of a couple of years I took every kind of antacid known to man, messed around with my diet and sat in multiple doctor's offices convinced that it was only a matter of time before they diagnosed a severe bleeding ulcer. There was nothing really wrong with me. About three summers ago I had a sinus infection. After a few days of antibiotics, I decided to sleep propped up on a stack of pillows in order to alleviate some of the sinus pressure and woke up with terrible neck and shoulder pain. This led to weeks of heating pads and ice packs and massages, along with a very panicky day where I swore I had meningitis. (I didn't. Health anxiety can be very convincing.) The shoulder/neck problems continued on and off for months, which eventually led to an MRI, which led to a diagnosis of herniated discs...

There was this guy who used to spar with us on Fridays, many, many years ago. Lets call him Bob. Bob was a black belt. He was very fast and super strong and I used to watch him knock the other students around the floor, terrified of when it would be my turn to fight him. When I finally faced off in front of him, I was pretty pathetic. I basically stood there with my hands up, afraid to throw anything for fear of getting killed. After about 30 seconds of this, Bob gave me a look of utter disgust and said, ''I am not going to hurt you." Apparently the idea that he, a big, male karate black belt, would attempt to kill me, a five foot two, relatively inexperienced lady, was incredibly insulting to him. "Just throw. Move around. It will be fine." It was fine. Ironically, Bob ultimately ended up being one of my favorite people to spar with. That was later, when I switched from being timid and sloppy to being that tiny aggressive girl who really loved the hard roun...

In November of 2004, about a week after the unexpected death of our karate instructor, my husband (boyfriend at the time) and I held a meeting of parents at the old dojo. We sat with a small group of shell-shocked moms and dads to discuss the future of the kids classes, while their children had slippery sock races across the smooth wooden floor. We couldn't really stay in that space for long, we told them. The landlord wanted us out. We'd basically be squatting there until they locked the door or we found a new place.  But yes, we suppose we can have classes again if you want us to. I mean if you don't mind your kids taking karate with us instead of their real teacher who is dead now. Taking classes in the room where their teacher passed away. You know, if that isn't weird. (Don't worry, we didn't actually say all that. Not out loud anyway.) Yes, they said. Please have class. Can we have it tomorrow? Then two tween-aged junior black belt girls offered us the...

I am one of the lucky ones. While politically and internationally, 2016 was somewhat of a shit show, inside my own small circle it was a great year. I learned how to climb up cliff faces and how to be a little less afraid of the woods. I got my purple belt in jiu-jitsu. I taught another wonderful session of Kindergarten karate at PS84 in Brooklyn, along with all of my normal classes at the dojo. I finally got my drivers license, and leased a new car. On top of these cool accomplishments, I trained a lot. I learned a lot. I hugged my daughter a lot. I spent 365 days basically living my life and I am fortunate that that life is pretty damn good. Also, there was coffee. Lots of delicious coffee. But I know that I am one of the lucky ones. Close friends of mine suffered greatly this year. There was illness and injury, personal and financial stresses. There were unmet goals and disappointing outcomes. Lots of celebrities died this year. And then of course, there was Trump. I am g...