A few weeks ago tears leaked down my face as I stood on a squishy balance beam and did slow front kicks.  Kicks that were only level with my waist.  Slow.  Wobbly.   I was sweating and worn out after 20 and trying to surreptitiously use my sleeve to dry my face.

I hate it when I leak tears.  Undignified.  Immature.  Silly.  Cue more tears.

That was six week post surgery, 18 weeks post injury, the point where putting on the knee brace in the morning had become as automatic as unplugging my phone from it's charger.  I was in a rehab-rut.  A rehabilitation tire-rut in mud partially frozen over with slushy ice kept shadowed by the back of the garage.

What's hard wasn't the suddenly atrophied muscles and too tight jeans or even the hard work of physical therapy; it was the fatigue of the smallness of the therapy.  Willing those muscles to remember how to tighten.  Just tighten.  Just stinking flexing those quads whose address my brain had lost.  The silliness of the minutia that included being congratulated for doing a wobbly waist-high front kick.

But it hurt. And I couldn't sleep well.  And I found myself whining.  And then I loathed myself for whining so I ate more chocolate and rationalized not doing all my PT homework because it was so meager anyway.  That part of me always eager for defeat threatened to rise in triumph.  Denouncing every small victory as insignificant and unworthy.

Lately, I've thought about my martial arts students and what I want them to learn as they come up on testing time; it reminded me that what I can't do now and even what I may never be able to do again is irrelevant.  The power of studying a discipline such as martial arts is in honing the skill of breaking down large problems into personalized and manageable chunks.   And then sticking with it, growing with it- day after day in the now- enjoying every victory and being thankful for every lesson along the way.  Then applying that same discipline to every important aspect of life.

Rank, testings, competitions: all are fun and even inspiring but they are not necessarily the end game.  It's more personal than that.  I work towards my students doing this.  I can do this.

And I can do it with a bit of professional curiosity and joy.

Grief: a cat,
quiet and heavy.
Settling on your chest
at two a.m. inhaling
your exhalations.
Whispery whiskers,
tickling your lips.



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On my kitchen counter I have an espresso machine and a French press.  On my stove I have a percolator, an Italian stove top espresso maker and a Turkish cezve. Because, umm,  because- actually I have no good reason to have 5 ways to make coffee.  I just really really like coffee.

Sometimes you want your cup of joe with a nice creme, and sometimes you want a demitasse filled with coffee thick enough to chew- you get the idea.

When I got the cezve from a daughter this Christmas I researched Turkish and Greek coffee making videos and started boiling away.  I experimented enough with different recipes that I couldn't sleep.  So I took some time off and came back to the cezve from a different angle.  Almond milk.

What if I boiled the coffee directly in almond milk instead of water?

And I discovered perfection and a bit of an oddity.  If you boil Turkish coffee in almond milk not only do you still get that wonderful froth but the coffee somehow ends up tasting like hot cocoa without the treacle-like sweetness of hot cocoa.  Not to mention strength and thickness wise it is like having your coffee and eating it too.

2018- may I discover something new each week, and may at least some of the discoveries be more life changingly profound but all just as delicious as this week's new newness.

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I love teaching martial arts.  I love having a mat full of kids; it's a mat full of potential and I don't mean just martial arts potential.

Someday everyone of "my" kids is going to be out there; adulting.  I'd like to think that the discipline, focus, patience and kindness they practice every time they come onto the mats will become part of who they are.

A couple of days ago I was talking with a class about how performing kata solo in front of an audience can be nerve wracking or scary but it helps you lock the moves into memory and strengthens your ability to rely on your own knowledge.  I thought I'd segue into a little motivational talk on the importance of forcing oneself out of comfort zones to practice self-reliance and strength....

It was all going well; one child raised their hand and talked about how scary it was presenting a science project at school, another child talked about dance class.  Encouraged I said, "Find something a little scary, like doing your kata in front of your family or friends, and make yourself do it.  Practice bravery."

At this point a nine year old raised his hand; with a frightening lack of facetiousness he blurted, "I think playing with snakes in the dark is scary!"

Umm.
We took a water break.


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Confidence is a shell game.

Fake it 'till you make it.
Speak softly so people will listen;
except sometimes they won't.

       Is that where the big stick comes into play?

Believe in yourself,
your talents,
your skills,
your worth.

       But what's the grading scale?

Know yourself,
your talents,
your skills,
your worth.

       Is there an office for remediation?

But don't think so much.
Convoluted venn diagram contraindications.

Only God remains,
immutable and most surprisingly of all;
omnisciently still in love with us all.


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Planning...
A skill I'm working on.

I fly by the seat of my pants.
Most of the time.
I plan just enough to have a track to be derailed from
because, duh, trains can't fly.

My 10 year plan?
It's been: be alive
while not eating cat food as a dietary staple.

It's not lack of faith nor a paucity of dreaming.
It's years of mothering and multitasking others.
Years where flexibility equaled survival.
And admittedly the latent tendency to let a teenaged daughter convince me to purchase new socks.


The exact same socks I had in 7th grade.
Except in 7th grade I wanted to be too cool for pompoms so I cut the pompoms off.
Pompoms- eternally derailing but actually kind of fun.

Anyway,
what was I planning?


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Everyday decisions.

No puppy dog tails,
Instead mostly Dribs.

I've started testing for my second degree in mixed martial arts which ends late September 2018.
I've got a plan- and a training schedule for the pre-season and I'm pondering running shoes and the disappointing impracticality of 35 year long-desired nose piercing.

I'm vibrating now but I know the dream squisher is coming:
the Everyday Drab.

I was told last weekend to have one goal and accomplish it.  I don't have one goal, my brain is too messy for that.  Jujitsu- siren song, Goju Shorei- rock in my awkward shoe.  Curses, I find myself lusting after swords and hakama.  Or maybe I'm just a little in love with Caitlin Dechelle.

And that's just martial life goals.

Drips and drops.

Everyday.
Because brains and muscles take time and everyday coffee needs brewing, children need civilizing, bills need paying,  mowing needs scheduling and eyebrows (occasionally) need plucking.

One goal? ARGGHHHH.

So it's everyday drips and drops the dribs and drabs of training for a person who loves grand schemes.  Living... everyday... patiently, it's a hard skill.  The lack of fanfare a temptation to quit and not even  grandly; just slowly fade until life is just a series of everydays, all passing through.

This testing? Drips and drops, dribs and finding joy in drabs.
Hoping for sugar and spice along the way.


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One shining morning at our Baltimore, Maryland kitchen table, with early a.m. sunlight glancing off a mixture of airborne dust motes and chalk dust,  my father let ME squeeze a bladder that puffed chalk off the surface of some ancient tablets while leaving chalk in the cuneiform impressions left by a thousand or two year old scribe. ME, small, young and hyper me, was trusted to hold the entire tool in my hand like a real archeologist.

It spurred me to find important artifacts on my own.  I dug in my back yard.  Some old milk jars and a broken bracelet were not that exotic and the holes left behind annoyed my mom, especially when she realized I had but a vague idea of where our property line was situated but when we went to Texas that summer I hit pay dirt.  A real artifact!  Something impressive that had been alive a long time ago:!

We had driven out to my grandfathers farm one hot summer day in West Texas with an Aunt following my granddad's El Camino pickup in our family vehicle, a Volkswagen Beetle, a dream vehicle lacking both air conditioning and space for its family of 6.  I remember dust and annoying my mother by asking why Granddaddy lived in town but farmed out of town while my other grandfather lived on his farm.  The niceties of a economically devastating drought decades prior not being quite proper to bring up.

I decided to distance myself from my inexplicably annoyed mom for a bit and found something wonderful.  Something large and mysterious and definitely within the purview of both an archeologist and paleontologist.  Something that Had to be taken home to investigate further and to use a prop for future pretends.  And with the mysterious power sometimes imbued to children under the age of six I managed to wrestle my find to the Volkswagen and stow it under the driver's seat completely unseen.

On the drive home after about 1 minute my mother suddenly asked, "Who stepped in a cow patty?"  Everyone dutifully looked- a task not made easy by how tightly we were all packed in that baby blue, 1975 Volkswagen Beetle.

1 minute more passed and my mother more sharply asked, "Who got manure on their clothing?"  Everyone was clean.

Ten more seconds and my mom jerked the car over to the shoulder and shouts, "Everyone out- someone stinks to high heaven!"

We all disembarked and were all visually checked and double checked by both my mother and my Aunt.  Suddenly I was nervous; things were often my fault.

We got back in.  My mother was gagging, everyone else was also now complaining of the smell.  My aunt suggested that there could be a dead animal in a ditch and that we just needed to drive faster.  We drove faster as my mom gagged more and more frequently.  The car swerved a final time to the shoulder and she leapt out, gagging quite grossly.  She had a sensitive nose.

But this time as my mom crouched by the car, head near the ground trying not to vomit from the mysteriously terrible smell with a car full of adolescent onlookers she spotted something white sticking up just a bit from under her car seat.  White and definitely not part of the car.

All I remember next is my mother's version of cussing (which never included any actual curse words) as she and my aunt worked for 15 minutes to get my find dislodged from underneath her driver's seat and tossed into the ditch.  I was heartbroken.

I learned then that it's age that makes things interesting; the tablets Dad had been translating were accounting lists of goods sold in an ancient Mesopotamian market.  And organic things must be very, very, very aged before you are allowed to either collect them or find them interesting.  Recently deceased and somewhat still-gooey cow skulls, even if they did have horns, were unequivocally not old enough to be interesting and more importantly not collectable.

My career trajectory was obliviated.  I was devastated and changed my future professional goals to things that wouldn't require as much time; settling for a future as a stunt double or spy.  Or both.



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Swinging
Apartment complex leaf capped
brown branches
multi-storied above.

Swinging high
Swinging cold
Swinging sock-less alone.

Swinging
Campfire smoking kerosene
log scented
pseudo wilderness below.

Swinging high
Swinging cold
Swinging sock-less.

Swinging
till tree dumping to state park sounds
of exotic
bathhouse directed golf carts.

Swinging high
Swinging warm
Swinging surrounded

in borrowed socks.


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Boxes and dust and questions.
That drawer full of miscellany ignored with determination
until unceremoniously dumped in a box at the last.

Every adult needs a drawer of easily accessible guilt.
Where to put it in the new house?

How do you pack a still-damp shower curtain anyway?
Why have I held on to this and not that and
where the heck did I pack my skillet?

Being taught how much wrapping paper is cushioning enough;
learning that that was not enough.

Leaving always has a being left.
Leaving is adventure.

Except-
Parenting is all about being left.
But there's joy there in the cascading crescendo of being left.
It starts with spoons held in chubby fists,
and ends... when they have a family confab and take your driver's license away.

Part of that joy?
Their junk drawer of remonstrances calls only to them,
and the damp shower curtain?

They"ll learn to leave it behind.



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I napped today after morning jujitsu.
In my gi.
During the day.
A week day.

I fixed sautéd spinach and pork chops and served it with a red blend on china at my dining room table.
For lunch.
On a week day.
Watermelon for dessert plus a bite of apple fritter my nine year old had wantonly abandoned on a plate uncleared from breakfast.

Because, I didn't do the breakfast dishes until AFTER lunch.

Then I cruised Facebook without (much) guilt and thought about weighty reading without opening a book,
And a meaning filled life, without getting up.
And paths, without planning.
And my children, without them present.
And kata without kata-ing,
And I uttered prayers, without enough faith.

And then I took another nap.
On a week day.
It was pretend-
Just for the luxury.

Vacationing on a beach could be better;
my Instagram account could stop languishing,
but for now, vacationing with naps and china and play-acting at thought and action and especially praying,
Praying to the God of the Universe, who created beaches but never takes time off from listening to even my weak prayers, is vacation enough.

Now,  off to wash my bedspread because
I fell asleep after jujitsu in my gi during the day,
on a week day,
which even on vacation,

is actually really gross.



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I'm blessed with two sisters.  Both are often irritatingly wise so when one suggested that I ditch my daily checklists and myriad of schedules for the summer I grudgingly gave it a go.

It's been rough for a person who judges herself at the end of the day by how many boxes are ticked off.  My mental, "Am I a good person?" as I drift off to sleep has no data driven answer.

I'm paperless, light, and the world hasn't ended.

Weird.

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Each spring I want to rent a humongous, ridiculous, turbo powered leaf blower; open the front and back doors of my house and blow the entire contents of my dusty wintery home to the curb.

I also wish I could do that with my brain.  There are so many things I want to learn, so many goals that I set for myself.  Taken singly each are awesome and accomplishable.  Accomplishable is probably not really a word but that's o.k. because when lumped together and attempted in a jumble my goals are not accomplishable anyway.

Mental spring cleaning.  Physical spring cleaning.  Probably shouldn't attempt the two at the same time; I might find my own body lying by the curb.


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No Sarcasm, Just Logic.

While pointing at his knee, my sensei carefully demonstrated a neatly chambered and recoiled front kick for a weyr of awed Little Dragons. He then asked them what was really important in order to do the kick correctly.

Their hands shot into the air; bellies thrust out and excitement blazing.  The boy called upon to answer, proudly shouted his knowledge for the rest of the class, who nodded in sage agreement, "YOU HAVE TO HAVE LEGS!"



It's All About Your Goals.

As a Dragon left the school I gave him a high five for his hard work; as he passed by to the front door another sensei congratulated him on his focus.  His mom, trailing behind while juggling keys, a wallet and his dragon belt, looked up and said, "You did good but I want to see you snap more when you punch."  He responded happily and loudly enough for the whole dojo, "Yeah, but it was a great class Mom, I didn't get ANY wedgies!"



The Unfortunate Thing About Dojo Mirrors.

It's always a male Little Dragon with only brothers at home: why shut the rest room door?



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My superpower as a mother?

While grocery shopping for the week with three boys in tow I can put a huge box of chocolate candies in the cart, transfer it to the conveyor belt, pay for it, have it bagged, have my boys load it in the van, have them carry it to the kitchen and yet whisk it to safety WITHOUT them ever becoming aware of its existence.

Proof that invisibility can be cast by sheer strength of a mother's desperation to occasionally not share.




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Being a reader means mourning, often.  Hearing a voice that you've grown to know, that's rolled about in your head for pages and pages of years but is now finished.  Gone.

And you wake.  And look about, and real life seems a bit pale.   Your voice, in your own head, retains a slight accent or even the cadence of the book's voice.   You feel vague and restless.  Hungover.

Eat chocolate.  Do jujitsu.
Walk in sunshine.

When there's no chocolate, no jujitsu and no sunshine?

That's when being a reader is a really regretful thing.  You can no more solve the problem by picking up another book than you can adopt a new puppy to take place of a beloved aged dog that has finally died.

Haphazardly flipping back to a few favorite passages; walking about crankily and daydreaming of being a better person while fussing about muddy footprints in the den, because it's all about finishing the words.

Letting them roll hither and thither to finally settle.  Deciding if the voice was right or smart or even likable.

Finishing the words so that you can find your own voice again.



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The joys of parenting are small,
continual.
Drips and drips.
An automatic coffee maker.

From long ago fat toddler arms hugging my neck, skin on skin with a powdery scent; the joys have changed.
Superseding dirty socks left on sofas and curfew disagreements.

Watching my nine year old, the morning light glancing off his neck, make pancakes from scratch;
the family sized mixing bowl bigger than his body.
Resting while my fifteen year old does jump kicks.  Enjoying his dancer's spin and grace but basking in his smile after spinning flops.
Reading group texts amongst grown children
where they tease and plan get-togethers. And include me.

All drips, that make splashes
that fill my mug.



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Standing alone together,
moving in unison.
Awaiting cues while
straining sideway's vision.

Willing body parts to flow
and snap.
Not jerk and wobble.
Because muscle memory works both ways.

Listening for breathing.
Remembering to breathe
while imagining foes;
tickled by wayward brain's imagination.

Sweat incommensurate
with visible work.  Rumpled gi and
itchy eyebrow ignored.

Hoping belt doesn't fall completely off;
next cue almost missed.

Connected to everyone but
working from inside out:
Minute shifting, balance testing.
Intent searching.

What does that angle mean?

Energy sharing or draining,
conducting or insulating across the mats.
Line drills,

Electricity.


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,

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Why are toddler bellies so cute?
It must be ingrained in us by God.  Hardwired for our species survival.

Last night at Karate a mom confessed.

"My 2 year old opened the staff fridge, and ate your chocolate. I'll bring you some more!"

I looked back with horror, because I have a lot of chocolate in the staff fridge.  A lot.  All a bit fancy and far more than any 2 year old could or should eat.

Dark,  lovely chocolate.
Chocolate rations.
Chocolate covered pumpkin seeds.
Chocolate covered chilis and chocolate with dried cherries.
Chocolate soul and body.  
Chocolate that I don't share with my own children.

Just how much did he consume?

"I hope he's going to be okay?" I gasped with dismay.  Dismay at both her probable evening full of a stomach-achy two year old and my chocolate loss.  Grief started to set in.  How could this happen?  When can I get to Trader Joe's again!?

Then I looked down.  The guilty one was standing beside her,  with a round full belly poking out between his tee-shirt and his pants.  He was holding her hand with a bit of chocolate smeared down his forearm and had the most cherubic satisfied chocolaty smile I've ever seen.

But the belly?  It was the belly.  It was so cute, so adorable.  I couldn't even hang on to annoyance much less grief.

The phrase, "A belly laugh" has a whole new dimension.
And it's a wonderful dimension full of dark chocolate.



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