SavageTimes

Today, my son earned his First Degree Brown Belt in karate.  He will almost certainly earn his Junior Black Belt (junior because he will be under 16) during his thirteenth year, a goal of his since he was 8.

My husband and I both felt karate would be good for him: he thrives on structure and order, demands respect from others and has a difficult time taking direction from those who haven’t earned his respect.  He is also not one of the bigger kids in his age group, nor a big team sports player, and we wanted him to have confidence in himself and his own strengths.

But he was young enough ,when we started him, for us to talk him into it so that it felt like his choice.  Not something we could do now, but it worked then.

Still: the first several weeks he cried during his half hour private practices, and I had to literally shove him through the dojo to get him into the once a week group practices.  He complained about going, cried on the way there, told me constantly he wanted to quit.  Sometime around his second year he decided he wanted to get his Black Belt by the time he was 13, and he even asked his Sensei if that was possible.

Sometime around his 4th year, he wanted to quit, and I let him.  If this was going to be a focus, a drive, it needed to be HIS focus and drive.  He was old enough, at that point, to know who he was.  It was a huge risk, because he was good, and he showed promise.  But I was tired of fighting him, and his dad agreed any future he had, needed to be his choice.

He lasted two weeks before asking to go back.  He told me he felt empty without practice, without the grounding the dojo offered.  And there was his goal to contend with–he was, he decided, not a quitter.

So he went back, and he has never looked back.

Still, every test has brought nerves with it, and I am reminded of the little boy who practiced with silent tears running down his face every week for a many weeks, and the feel of his fingers digging into mine as I shoved him across the dojo’s threshold, away from me, into a life of his own.

Then there was today.  He paced and stared, stared and paced at me all morning as he has always done before a test.  But it wasn’t because he was nervous.  This time, he assured me, he knew he could do this.  There wasn’t, he told me, anything they could throw at him that he wouldn’t know or couldn’t figure out.  He just wanted to get there, to DO IT.

After the test, his sensei took his belt to lay down the third and final black stripe signifying his degree, and he said to my son, “Black Belt is next.”

And my son, face flushed and body tired, straightened his shoulders and said in a voice I don’t think I have ever heard him use, said, “I look forward to it, sir.”

He may not be a Black Belt yet.  But today, I saw the man in my little boy.