Fifteen years is a long time.   It’s the time it take for that adorable, sweet, little baby to become the evil demonic teenager of doom.  It’s the time it takes for your car to go from brand spanking new to an old junker.  It’s five times over the time it takes for a computer to become obsolete.  Fifteen years is also the time it took me to learn how to punch.  Now to be fair, I wasn’t putting a lot of effort into it until recently; but let’s face it, punching shouldn’t be that difficult to learn.  For me it was a monumental task. 

First of all, I never learned to even throw right.  My father is a great person, but he was also a little overprotective of me.  He wouldn’t let me do much of anything physical.  I could play tennis, but little league was right out, because those boy will come straight at you with those cleats.  Yes, my father actually told me that.  He also told me that ferris wheels were dangerous, skateboards were rolling death, and that you might as well buy your coffin the moment you got on a motorcycle.  He was always on queue with a story about how he had a friend whose kid broke their back doing this or that, and usually this or that was something that sounded like a lot of fun.  The only advantage this restriction yielded was to get me out of mowing the lawn.  Once when I offered to help him, he told me that I was too small and the lawn mower could cut me up.  He wasn’t too pleased when I reminded him of this later when I was home from college and he asked me to do the lawn.

My father was also against self defense training for me.  Since I was small for my age all through school, this made me a target for bullies.  I didn’t get beaten as much as intimidated and pushed around.  I remember once when someone threatened to beat me up, I asked my father to teach me how to punch and he told me that he didn’t move out the shithole city to the suburbs so his daughter could fight.  I tried to teach myself how to punch that day by smacking the tile wall in the bathroom for a while.  It really didn’t help.  I had no idea what I was doing.

So we fast forward to my twenties.  I had gone from nerd to party girl.  The big joke I often tell people is how glad I am that “Girls Gone Wild” was not around then.  I am very happy to have no video footage of my various exploits.   But even then, I loved the martial arts.  Unfortunately, I never participated. Well except for my weekly superhero game where we pretended to kick bad-guys butts while enjoying a diet of Pringles and French onion dip, washed down with Mountain Dew mixed with Pixie Sticks.  I could always fight, at least on paper.   I just loved to announce my super attack, roll the dice and hear about how I knocked some henchman into a tree.  But that was as far as my martial arts experience went.  However, I lived like I could defend myself.  I was fearless. I had no ability to defend myself whatsoever, but as the saying goes, God protects drunks and fools.  I was a little of both.  I used to end up the weirdest places.  I’d be passed-out drunk on the streets of Manhattan and nothing would happen to me.  I would go places on whim with people I barely knew and I was perfectly ok.  It was the damnedest thing.  However, I was just lucky, not really ok.  After a few years, I began to figure that out.

Sometime in my mid twenties, I decided that I needed to grow some fangs.  I didn’t want to be harmless anymore.  So I took some archery lessons, and some Aikido.  Ok, we know that this is not the route for true self defense, but it was the beginning of the path.  The one thing I did pick up was how to manipulate my own weight and how to fall, mostly.  I still hurt myself in spastic non-martial arts related falls semi-regularly. 

Then came my Sifu, Marie.  We were friends, and as we became closer, she decided to try to teach me something.   Besides letting me hit her in the nose with a broom stick, she was very patient in her attempts to train me.  She tried everything from Boxing to Karate to Tai Chi.  I was spastic in everything she tried.  This continued on and off for years.  She would try to teach me something; I would spas out trying to learn it; I would give up feeling like a loser.  It wasn’t her fault.  I just didn’t get it.  No matter what we did, I would hit ‘like a girl’ and end up doing what Sifu Marie refers to as ‘Panda Style’ waving my arms around in a ridiculous manner.

Earlier this year Sifu Marie decided to try to teach me JKD.  I guess she had nothing to lose.  The worse that could happen is that I would screw that up too.  So she started inundating me with Bruce Lee documentaries, movies, theory, and more theory.  I didn’t mind.  I liked the stuff.  My training went from sporadic to intense.  It was no longer when we got to it, but every moment we weren’t actively doing something else.  She read to me through the shower curtain, when I washed my tired ass after a long day and a long run in 90 degree heat.  She put on video clips of various instructors demonstrating techniques as I ate.   She gave me books and printouts to study while I was at work.  (I am surrounded by them now, as I type.)  It was on.

We study. We practice.  We spar regularly, along with the constant theory.  I still frequently feel like a complete moron.  We don’t wear any protective gear, but we pull our punches.  Even so, I’ve been clocked a number times.  My bruises are probably not nearly as bad as other peoples are when they first start training; but Sifu Marie also knows that I have to go to my nine to five geek job, and I can’t look like I slept in the running drier. 

The good news is that somehow I learned how to punch.  I can kick too.  It’s about time.  There was no light bulb that went off, no moment of understanding.  Just one day we were demonstrating a punch to a client, and it dawned on me that at some point I figured this out.  I still can't pinpoint the moment; I probably never will.  I am also learning how to take a punch.  There is nothing quite like that first hand experience of getting smacked in the temple and being knocked the hell out.  I remember the dizzying effect and thinking, “I don’t want to get hit in that spot again.”  I guess that’s how you learn to protect yourself.

As far as I know, I am not all that good yet.  Sifu Marie says to stop thinking that way, that if I sucked, she would tell me.  So I guess I’m ok.  I don’t feel like I could take anyone in a fight though.  I have to admit to having bad thoughts of wanting to try to kick someone’s ass.  Yes, it’s wrong thinking, but I still ponder it.

So yes, it took me at least fifteen years to learn to throw a punch.  But later, is better than never.

      Click to go back