Recently a woman disclosed to me that her ex harasses her verbally and electronically. Periodically he subjects her to explosive anger and threats.
“Why don’t you DO something?” her friends demand.
As if ten years of de-escalation, boundary setting and safety planning was not “doing something.” As if knowing and avoiding his triggers, staying calm and centered in the face of rage and hate, and organizing their interactions to minimize his access to her wasn’t self protection.
As if this woman does not practice self defense every minute of her life.
In a self defense class a student shared this scenario: She was stopped at a light in a local city when two groups of young men converged in the intersection. They were engaged in a heated verbal altercation. She tried to read their body language: Was a physical fight about to break out? Did anyone have a gun? She looked around the intersection: Could she back up? Could she drive around them on the curb? They dispersed as the light changed and she drove away. But afterwards she asked her self defense teachers, “What should I have done?”
Her self defense teachers said, “Read their body language. Look for a weapon. Examine your options for getting out of there.”
Third scenario, same self defense class as the second. A woman told the story of her friend who had been assaulted while running. A man came up behind her and pushed her forward. As she fell, he jumped on her back.
“What could she have done with someone on top of her?” the student asked.
“What did she do?” asked her teachers.
“She yelled. People noticed. He ran away.”
We dragged the mats in for the next class and taught some moves for getting away on the ground. But not because the woman in question had left anything out of her self defense response.
People want self defense to be about “kicking ass and taking names.” Not because they aspire to violence but because they long for a just and triumphant victory. They want to know they can face danger with decisive action. They want confidence that they’ll come out of an assault unscathed.
And sometimes they want assurance that they won’t be assaulted in the first place. They commit to self defense training as a prophylaxis: if I learn this, I’ll be invincible.
But the complex truth is that there’s only one person who holds the power to absolutely stop an assault, and that’s the attacker. The skills we bring to bear upon an assault in progress mitigate the harm but they can’t erase the intent. And having effectively navigated a dangerous situation does not leave a woman feeling the same as if she had never encountered the danger.
The woman whose ex curses her leaves their interactions feeling as if she’s been yelled at by someone who hates her. The woman who stopped at the red light drove away with adrenalin coursing through her body, heart racing and hands shaking. The woman who was pushed scraped her knees and hands and felt the fall reverberating in her bones for days.
A teenage student once challenged me, “My man says there’s a way that you can make yourself not feel pain. He does karate and his teacher taught him. He says you can punch him and it won’t do anything. Can you do that?”
She was testing me, to see if I was as kick-ass as her man and his compadres. Her magical thinking made me feel soft and sad. It is so terribly easy to hurt a human body—a fact that we rely upon in physical self defense. And humans are so incredibly resilient.
Self defense is about resilience. It’s what we do when faced with danger and fear. It is a triumph, of the “triumph of the human spirit” variety. But it’s not an untarnished joy-filled victory lap. It’s doing what has to be done. It’s getting through something we never should have had to face in the first place.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
mind body mama: Sneaking Around
Over the last few months Small went through a sneaking phase. Sweetiebabyhoneylicious and I are assiduous parents but we are distracted enough that the evidence of this sneaking escaped us entirely. What we couldn’t ignore was the guilt and remorse that dogged Small, finally catching her in a cascade of tearful confessions.
The night that the dam of deception broke Sweetie and I were sitting together on the sofa watching TV after Small’s bedtime—a rare moment of calm for us. Small came halfway down the stairs calling for me. “I have to talk to Mama!” she cried in a voice edged with panic. I lifted an eyebrow at Sweetie that said, “What fresh hell is this at 10 o’clock at night?”
Small was coming clean about the first—and most egregious—episode of sneaking. Hiccupping through her tears she choked out the story: During the time of the school book fair, she and I had strategized which books she would purchase. She was using her own piggy-bank money but I supervised because the book sale sells a whole lot of crap. (It pisses me off that the school endorses selling made-in-China plastic crap and third-rate comics passed off as “graphic novels,” but that’s another rant entirely.) Given that Small can tear through, say, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in a day or two, it’s important to me that the books we purchase be complex enough to sustain her interest for more than one read.
During the first pass at the book sale Small had selected a Pokémon reference guide that has become her constant companion. The sale was “buy one, get one” so she selected a graphic novel about mean girls as her second choice. I wasn’t thrilled by that but I made my peace with it.
What I didn’t know—what I learned through her tears and terror—was that the next day she snuck money out of her piggy bank and went back to the book sale where she bought two Disney easy readers. The covers said something about fairies and adventure, words that sing a siren song to my little girl.
I did not know that the coming days and weeks would bring a torrent of confessions. Not only had she purchased more books, she also bought specifically forbidden tchotchkes. She snuck money out of her piggy bank to buy popsicles at snack recess. She took the fourth Harry Potter out of the school library and read it during class time, even though I had told her not to read past book three. (The challenge of the advanced grade-school reader is matching ability to appropriate content; we thought the book might be too scary for her.)
All of this was ahead of us that first night. We sat together in her dark bed and I watched her weep, her little body shaking with regret and terror. Her relief at coming clean was tempered by her terror that I was going to yell at her.
But I had a bigger fear: the fear that my kid could be afraid to tell me something, anything. A bedrock of our safety plan is that we don’t keep secrets in our family. Of course there are topics of conversation which are appropriate for the adults; there are periods when any of us are preparing surprises for any others. But we cannot be compelled to keep information from each other.
This is central to my kid’s safety because it means that she can tell me if someone threatens her. I don’t know if this mantra—we don’t keep secrets in our family—would hold up in the scariest of circumstances, if a child predator attempted to groom or abuse her. I do know we’ve invoked it when Small’s relationship with a friend of the family entered grey area: Small attempting to manipulate her target into gifts or snacks beyond the family norm. Some sneaking happened there too, whereby Small didn’t want us to know when she’d scored treats. The grown-ups closed ranks to shut that down right away. We don’t keep secrets in our family. And also, if grown-ups are safe they will always tell your parents what is going on; they will always abide by family rules. This is the way we tell if a grown-up is safe.
I was mad. Over the coming weeks I grew more grim and disappointed. But I never yelled. That tragic night, I pointed out how awful Small felt and suggested the easy way to avoid feeling this way in the future: Don’t sneak. Small saw the wisdom and eventually the humor in this. We agreed she would forfeit the contraband, deposit her piggy bank money into a bank account, and perform some yard work without pay. But mostly I intoned our mantra, hoping that the emotion of the moment would help it marinate deep into her psyche: We don’t keep secrets in our family.
The night that the dam of deception broke Sweetie and I were sitting together on the sofa watching TV after Small’s bedtime—a rare moment of calm for us. Small came halfway down the stairs calling for me. “I have to talk to Mama!” she cried in a voice edged with panic. I lifted an eyebrow at Sweetie that said, “What fresh hell is this at 10 o’clock at night?”
Small was coming clean about the first—and most egregious—episode of sneaking. Hiccupping through her tears she choked out the story: During the time of the school book fair, she and I had strategized which books she would purchase. She was using her own piggy-bank money but I supervised because the book sale sells a whole lot of crap. (It pisses me off that the school endorses selling made-in-China plastic crap and third-rate comics passed off as “graphic novels,” but that’s another rant entirely.) Given that Small can tear through, say, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in a day or two, it’s important to me that the books we purchase be complex enough to sustain her interest for more than one read.
During the first pass at the book sale Small had selected a Pokémon reference guide that has become her constant companion. The sale was “buy one, get one” so she selected a graphic novel about mean girls as her second choice. I wasn’t thrilled by that but I made my peace with it.
What I didn’t know—what I learned through her tears and terror—was that the next day she snuck money out of her piggy bank and went back to the book sale where she bought two Disney easy readers. The covers said something about fairies and adventure, words that sing a siren song to my little girl.
I did not know that the coming days and weeks would bring a torrent of confessions. Not only had she purchased more books, she also bought specifically forbidden tchotchkes. She snuck money out of her piggy bank to buy popsicles at snack recess. She took the fourth Harry Potter out of the school library and read it during class time, even though I had told her not to read past book three. (The challenge of the advanced grade-school reader is matching ability to appropriate content; we thought the book might be too scary for her.)
All of this was ahead of us that first night. We sat together in her dark bed and I watched her weep, her little body shaking with regret and terror. Her relief at coming clean was tempered by her terror that I was going to yell at her.
But I had a bigger fear: the fear that my kid could be afraid to tell me something, anything. A bedrock of our safety plan is that we don’t keep secrets in our family. Of course there are topics of conversation which are appropriate for the adults; there are periods when any of us are preparing surprises for any others. But we cannot be compelled to keep information from each other.
This is central to my kid’s safety because it means that she can tell me if someone threatens her. I don’t know if this mantra—we don’t keep secrets in our family—would hold up in the scariest of circumstances, if a child predator attempted to groom or abuse her. I do know we’ve invoked it when Small’s relationship with a friend of the family entered grey area: Small attempting to manipulate her target into gifts or snacks beyond the family norm. Some sneaking happened there too, whereby Small didn’t want us to know when she’d scored treats. The grown-ups closed ranks to shut that down right away. We don’t keep secrets in our family. And also, if grown-ups are safe they will always tell your parents what is going on; they will always abide by family rules. This is the way we tell if a grown-up is safe.
I was mad. Over the coming weeks I grew more grim and disappointed. But I never yelled. That tragic night, I pointed out how awful Small felt and suggested the easy way to avoid feeling this way in the future: Don’t sneak. Small saw the wisdom and eventually the humor in this. We agreed she would forfeit the contraband, deposit her piggy bank money into a bank account, and perform some yard work without pay. But mostly I intoned our mantra, hoping that the emotion of the moment would help it marinate deep into her psyche: We don’t keep secrets in our family.
Friday, June 11, 2010
mind body mama: We Are the Folk
A couple of weeks ago, I taught my beginning Shuri Ryu karate students the opening moves of a Goju karate form. Which would have been lovely, had I not thought—and told them—that I was teaching the opening moves of their own Shuri Ryu form.
If you’re not a martial artist, just imagine this: you have struggled valiantly through the first few weeks of Argentine tango class. A vague and shadowy body memory is developing. You think you might actually know what your left and right feet are supposed to do at a certain moment. Then your bossy and ridiculously self confident instructor accidentally teaches you Mambo footwork, right when you are at your most vulnerably bewildered.
Back at the School of Come the Revolution I learned that beginners will call a teacher out over real and imagined mistakes. The sanguine New Englander I taught with for half a decade told me not to lose sleep over it. She deadpanned, “It doesn’t matter what you tell them, they are going to say another teacher showed it to them differently.” She wasn’t disrespecting our students. She knew that the nuances of teaching and learning styles, combined with the desperation many students feel to get it right, mean that a teacher of beginners will be pressed for accuracy and specificity and conformity beyond all reasonable measure.
Which is why I wasn’t entirely surprised when a student called out from the back row, “They taught it to us differently last week.”
But I was a little taken aback when she demanded, “Can you promise this is not going to change again?”
The light was dawning that I might have slipped into my original style of karate, that I might have made an error. One clue was the fact that I had made the same mistake while practicing the form with Small in our kitchen a few weeks prior. Another clue is that I will always make this kind of mistake.
My two styles of karate are cousins to one another, separated only by one master’s preferences or height or left-handedness. I know nothing of these masters, but I make up stories: One went to China, fell in love with kung fu and came back to karate crouching low and moving like a cat. Another broke up a bar fight and developed a deep respect for the elbow strike as it caught him in the chin and threw him across the room. Another met a teacher whose movement made his heart race with desire. He followed this teacher, watching and mimicking, trying to master the thing he wanted.
I imagine these legends because this is how my karate training has been: I fall in love. I grow hungry for technique, for accomplishment, for a quality of moving. I want some movement in my body like I’d want a lover; I crave it like I crave ice cream in the last days of my cycle. They say martial artists are disciplined, but it’s not obligation or rigor that drives me to practice my forms. It is pure and naked want.
The teachers who have only studied one style of karate are inclined to say things like, “The way we make a fist presents the hand in the strongest position,” but I know to my bones that’s not true. I know to say, “The people who developed this style felt that this hand position was the strongest.” Because the other masters whose forms run in my muscles thought something different, and they weren’t wrong. The forms they passed down express what their bodies wanted, the technique they found most useful and beautiful. The self-defense teacher in me knows that what works is never wrong.
These arts are a giant game of telephone, a message passed from one body to another. We try to honor the tradition and collective wisdom of a particular style and replicate what we are taught. But each of us changes the forms whether or not we make a mistake. We transform them through our preferences or height or left-handedness. We change it through what works best for each of us, and because of what we love.
So to my student I said, “No. I can’t promise that this won’t change. I can’t promise that I will never make a mistake teaching, and I can’t promise that another teacher won’t make a mistake. These forms are alive, they are always changing. The sooner you can roll with that, the happier you will be. A wise teacher once told me: Karate is a folk art. We are the folk.”
If you’re not a martial artist, just imagine this: you have struggled valiantly through the first few weeks of Argentine tango class. A vague and shadowy body memory is developing. You think you might actually know what your left and right feet are supposed to do at a certain moment. Then your bossy and ridiculously self confident instructor accidentally teaches you Mambo footwork, right when you are at your most vulnerably bewildered.
Back at the School of Come the Revolution I learned that beginners will call a teacher out over real and imagined mistakes. The sanguine New Englander I taught with for half a decade told me not to lose sleep over it. She deadpanned, “It doesn’t matter what you tell them, they are going to say another teacher showed it to them differently.” She wasn’t disrespecting our students. She knew that the nuances of teaching and learning styles, combined with the desperation many students feel to get it right, mean that a teacher of beginners will be pressed for accuracy and specificity and conformity beyond all reasonable measure.
Which is why I wasn’t entirely surprised when a student called out from the back row, “They taught it to us differently last week.”
But I was a little taken aback when she demanded, “Can you promise this is not going to change again?”
The light was dawning that I might have slipped into my original style of karate, that I might have made an error. One clue was the fact that I had made the same mistake while practicing the form with Small in our kitchen a few weeks prior. Another clue is that I will always make this kind of mistake.
My two styles of karate are cousins to one another, separated only by one master’s preferences or height or left-handedness. I know nothing of these masters, but I make up stories: One went to China, fell in love with kung fu and came back to karate crouching low and moving like a cat. Another broke up a bar fight and developed a deep respect for the elbow strike as it caught him in the chin and threw him across the room. Another met a teacher whose movement made his heart race with desire. He followed this teacher, watching and mimicking, trying to master the thing he wanted.
I imagine these legends because this is how my karate training has been: I fall in love. I grow hungry for technique, for accomplishment, for a quality of moving. I want some movement in my body like I’d want a lover; I crave it like I crave ice cream in the last days of my cycle. They say martial artists are disciplined, but it’s not obligation or rigor that drives me to practice my forms. It is pure and naked want.
The teachers who have only studied one style of karate are inclined to say things like, “The way we make a fist presents the hand in the strongest position,” but I know to my bones that’s not true. I know to say, “The people who developed this style felt that this hand position was the strongest.” Because the other masters whose forms run in my muscles thought something different, and they weren’t wrong. The forms they passed down express what their bodies wanted, the technique they found most useful and beautiful. The self-defense teacher in me knows that what works is never wrong.
These arts are a giant game of telephone, a message passed from one body to another. We try to honor the tradition and collective wisdom of a particular style and replicate what we are taught. But each of us changes the forms whether or not we make a mistake. We transform them through our preferences or height or left-handedness. We change it through what works best for each of us, and because of what we love.
So to my student I said, “No. I can’t promise that this won’t change. I can’t promise that I will never make a mistake teaching, and I can’t promise that another teacher won’t make a mistake. These forms are alive, they are always changing. The sooner you can roll with that, the happier you will be. A wise teacher once told me: Karate is a folk art. We are the folk.”
mind body mama: Where Have I Been?
I've been a little erratic in my mind-body-mama posting the past few weeks. I'm committed to getting back on track, but in the meantime you can follow what I've been up to here:
At Safety Net, I've been writing promotional copy for the National Women's Martial Arts Federation Self Defense Instructors' Conference.
At The Aspire Project of the Daily Hampshire Gazette, I've been participating in my community's ongoing conversation about the form of violence called "bullying."
Also, if you're looking for some great new blog content check out my friend Amy Pybus (another Aspire contributor) at her new blog Sitting on the Baby. Keep an eye on Amy, she's helping me take over the world.
At Safety Net, I've been writing promotional copy for the National Women's Martial Arts Federation Self Defense Instructors' Conference.
At The Aspire Project of the Daily Hampshire Gazette, I've been participating in my community's ongoing conversation about the form of violence called "bullying."
Also, if you're looking for some great new blog content check out my friend Amy Pybus (another Aspire contributor) at her new blog Sitting on the Baby. Keep an eye on Amy, she's helping me take over the world.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Mind Body Mama: An Open Letter to Rachel Maddow
I'm delighted to participate in Blogging for LGBT Families Day 2010, coordinated by the good folks at Mombian.
I had the great good fortune to live in the listening area of the tiny Western Massachusetts radio station where Rachel Maddow hosted a morning show called The Big Breakfast before her Big Break. As I am not a cable television subscriber, I can honestly say I was more influenced by Dr. Maddow before she became truly famous than after.
I listened to Rachel daily throughout my pregnancy and in the first year at home with my baby. Like everyone who loves her now, I admired Rachel’s wit, warmth and politics. In the intimate venue of local radio she had an incredible knack for creating community and connection. I called the station often, attended promotional events and even brought my baby to her going away party—in a cigar bar, where I gave the departing dignitary a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans and directions to my favorite Chinatown Vietnamese dive . I wanted to find a way to thank her for keeping me from losing my mind.
In my daughter’s first year, a six-foot-tall Subaru driving lesbian with a wicked cackle and self-described Don King hair, on the invisible verge of super-stardom, was one of my lifelines to sanity. Perhaps only a lesbian can appreciate the cultural phenomenon that is Rachel Maddow, but I hope any mama can relate to this extraordinary time of life.
Dear Rachel Maddow,
It’s been a few years now, and I know you’ve had a lot of exciting experiences in the intervening time. But you might remember me as the listener who brought her puking baby into the radio station when you were a morning dj and I was a stay-at-home mom, hanging on your every witticism to get me through the early daylight hours. Whole Foods sponsored a free breakfast buffet that morning; it took more than a little spit-up to keep this nursing mama from all the wheat-free vegan French toast she could swallow.
I called in a few times; once I told you my birth story, describing childbirth as sexual and religious ecstasy. I’m afraid I shocked us both. Prolonged sleep deprivation combined with the lactation hormone cocktail sure does a number on a person’s verbal inhibitions.
I misplaced the baby once when we were on the phone. She crawled off and I had to run through the house looking for her while trying to answer the quiz questions. I won the coffee mug though. Right from the start of this parenting adventure I’ve been a mean multi-tasker. I’m sure you can relate.
Your meteoric—and completely deserved, I mean no disrespect—rise to fame has dazzled me with what can be accomplished in half a decade: Get your own TV show! Influence the heart of a nation during an historic election! Become a Jeopardy question! My job, and I’m proud to call it that, is less quantifiable. But I conclude that I’ve done at least 1500 loads of laundry, and washed dishes by hand for 22 straight days. Such diversity in the human experience, even among women of the same nation, region, generation and sexual orientation!
It’s not like I haven’t been doing something important. I’ve been nurturing the soul of the next generation! I’ve had some set-backs, but I’m sure that’s true of anyone. I know it took you a while to get that MSNBC gig. So I won’t feel bad that I forgot to teach my kid how to hold a fork properly. Someday she’ll be able to eat a whole meal without biting her own hands. I can feel proud of my contribution to society, especially if I choose to forget that study that said kids want to spend less time with their parents, and the other one that said kids who go to daycare do just as well as kids who have a stay-at-home mom. Also if I disregard predictions that college tuitions, currently at a dollar figure curiously close to my household income, will continue to skyrocket throughout my daughter’s adolescence.
Fortunately, forgetting is not challenging. I seem not to have recovered the brain cells lost in the first three months of motherhood, a time that I fondly call baby boot-camp. Just this week I lost a basket of clean laundry, which inconveniently contained all my underpants. I draw a direct connection between events like this and that long-ago night when I couldn’t remember how a person might tell time if they were far from a clock, pinned in an armchair by a suckling parasite. I knew there must be a method; maybe I could invent something that would be helpful, a little later, when I was not so tired? (Hint: wrist-watch.)
Motherhood is indeed transformational, and it transformed me into the kind of person who can’t recall the basic technology of modern life or keep track of inanimate objects. It was a little rocky adjusting to this seismic change. The nights were long but they always ended, and then your show came on the radio! You were there for me in those first days of stunning stupidity and I’ll always be grateful.
Things are a little different now that my kid is more of a person than a parasite. Sometimes I can even form a thought, although she usually makes sure that I lose track of it with a well-timed interruption. I’ve read that you use earplugs so you can focus your brilliance on what you are reading and writing. If you ask me, your staff is a bunch of light-weights if they are bested by this trick; a champion interrupter like my little darling could easily bypass such a technicality. Have they tried climbing on your lap or breaking things around the studio? Jumping up and down right next to you is also effective. I’m just saying.
I know you’re busy now with all those radio and television shows, not to mention the book you’re writing. And I read in the New York Times that you still take the trash to the dump yourself. That’s nice. Sometimes my daughter helps with the compost. She says it smells bad but I make her do it anyway. How many bad smells have I endured for her sake, I ask you? But I do have all that laundry waiting.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane. We should touch base again sometime, maybe five years from now? I’d love to hear what you’re up to.
Warmest regards,
Your friend and loyal fan,
Lynne Marie
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)