How Kickboxing Helped Me Not Lose All My Mind after My Kids Told Me The Worst
I’m hitting this punching bag with left jabs, high and low hooks, my left arm is burning, my knuckles are raw, my breathing is coming in controlled pants, and moisture is dripping into my eyes, but I don’t stop. I can’t. I’m focusing on my footwork, trying to remember my technique and straining to hear my trainer over the chest thumping trap music. Then we plummet to the floor for three push-ups, two plank jacks and then jump back up to do the punch combo again. We do a total of five combos, at least 15–20 movements a piece in each one, combined with floor work for an hour. The tangy smelling, heterogenous sweat of almost 20 women in a small kickboxing gym is proof that I have yet again staved off another mental breakdown, at least until I come back again. For me, every jab, hook or cross is a scream; every switch kick, right round and front push kick is how I cry.
See, I have chosen to negotiate my personal pain of finding out about my children’s long-term molestation with kickboxing. It was either that or lose my fucking mind over a fork being dropped or over the crinkle from a chip bag.
I still remember the day I found my therapist: I opened my laptop in a fugue state, typed in “therapists in Atlanta,” and called the first name on the list. Thank the gods of bars and drinks, she turned out to be the best damn thing that’s ever happened to me in figuring out the indescribable vomit of finding out someone put pencils in your daughters’ vaginas and the sharp part of the tape dispenser on your son’s penis.
Don’t think I headed to the gym or the therapist right away, oh no, I spent too much time being “Strong Black Woman” and “Perfect Christian Woman” to admit to needing help and pain stripped me like a couple chop shop thieves.
The pain will be around for awhile. I usually save seats for it and its sisters, Shame, Guilt and Blame when I’m out.
Oh, I’m sorry these seats are taken; my guilt shame and blame haven’t showed up yet. Sorry.”
Shame. At not being able to protect my kids. Guilt. At not being able to protect my kids. Blame. For not being able to protect my kids.
I don’t know if life has held this class for anyone else, but it has for me. One syllabus stating one single lesson to be repeated over and over; everything counts 100% of your grade and you’ve already failed so don’t bother with tests.
Life went to the front of the class and stated succinctly that no matter how many times I was told it is not my fault, I will always be convinced if I had done ???? it wouldn’t have happened and it will never NOT cause me to languish in deep psychic anguish as my reward; kind of like the guy on the cross had when his dad didn’t help him when he was crying out for it.
My kids assured me it always happened when my husband was at work or I was out with the offender’s mother, which was a lot since she was my best friend. Yeah, I wasn’t saving the world, I was hanging out while my kids were enduring the worst.
I’ll tell you another reason why I found myself in that gym. My assurance that I had God’s favor and that God spoke to me was a sacrosanct tenet of Evangelicalism. Evangelicals believe that God is very wordy. I just wished that voice would’ve told me to go home just once because my kids were in danger. I believed that God was absolutely totally concerned with “the things that concerned me,” and my kids, and they were at the top of that list for God. That assurance was strangled and left on a filthy mattress in my very broken heart. I used to feel like the world was a hostile land and I had an earpiece directly linked to God and was being given the right instructions. I was protected. I was certainly protected from the worst, right?
My faith in God was like I was surrounded by the enemy, out of ammo and listening for my commander to tell me where help was or when it was coming, it always came, but not this time. Instead I heard the sound of the comm link being severed. My earpiece with God fell silent. I was utterly abandoned. (Read the part again about dude on cross crying out to his dad.)
I felt so fucking offended too though! How dare this happen to them! To me!! I took mothering seriously. I was that mom. You know the one: I homeschooled, I fed them correctly, I taught them about God, I read to them, I talked to them early, oh, about that, I actually taught my kids how to talk early. I mean full sentences by 2 because I wanted them to be able, okay, get ready to laugh, tell me if someone was doing bad things to them. I didn’t want them to not be able to communicate to me just because they were young, if they were getting molested. Stupid, right?
I made meal plans, menus and prepared homecooked meals. I studied child rearing and development like a religion. Isn’t this shit supposed to happen to other mothers? The ones that leave their kids with Tay-Tay and parade a host of different men around their kids? Yeah, I was totally prejudiced against who this is supposed to happen to. Evangelicalism made me believe that God would never let anything happen to my kids because I was so good and doing all the right things. My faith is on life support right now. When people ask how are things I just tell them God and I are staying together for the kids but there’s no real passion there anymore.
I’m going to try, but it seems hopelessly inadequate to attempt to tell you what the first disclosure, fuck it, the thousandth disclousure, felt like. Since this is about pain, I will do my very best, Dear Reader, to, how they say, “put you there.”
You’re on your way to bed, the day having wrung every damn bit out of you. It’s 3 days after your daughter’s 12th birthday and she peeks her cute face in through your door and quickly says. “? and I did “some things” together and I just thought I’d tell you.
Utter silence. This is all you ‘hear’. Your mind clicks back on and you gather enough cells to question what you heard. You go to her to clarify. Perhaps it’s just childhood curiosity. You quickly learn childhood curiosity doesn’t last for seven years. Your other two kids peek their heads in and say ‘Well, since she’s talking.’ Oh, and one of the three is autistic. Yeah, there’s that. So, you listen and you feel disbelief, shock and revulsion but you can’t show the revulsion so you just go with disbelief and shock. Here is the closest proximity of what it’s like:
Say you and your lover are into kink (God/life in this case is the lover.) and he has you tied to a spanking bench and your anticipation is palpable. You love an erotic spanking and he’s done this many times before with fantastic results so it’s easy for you to make yourself vulnerable under his hand; you completely trust him. You have a safeword but you’ve never needed it. He has always played by the rules. Well, not all the time, but you’ve overlooked things and moved on. Your body is warmed up, you’re ready for the pleasurable sensation of the spanking and without warning he opens your ass up and shoves a grapefruit spoon straight into your asshole over and over again. For three years. That’s what the first, and kazillionith, of hearing those stories felt like.
You need paramedics, surgery, a long hospital stay to recuperate and all you get is…nothing. You fall straight into fix it mode because, well, there’s a whole fuckofalot to fix. All you can think of is getting help for your kids. This takes 3 and a half years of going into the dressing room trying people on to see if they fit, but you do eventually find them some great people and then you can focus on your own enormous pain which sometimes morphs into volcanic, town eating, sensational, people running down the fucking streets screaming to get away, anger. Enter my therapist stage left.
Then, I set out to hit something, thus my love of the slip, hooks, and precision of kickboxing. I don’t have to feel or think about anything except the hits, and sometimes, hell, all the time, I imagine the disgrace that has happened to my family and sometimes God is on my punching bag too. Yeah, God gets a good right hook sometimes. I trade in my psychic pain for physical pain and so far it’s been keeping you from seeing me on the news.
I’d put it off for a long time before I came to face the shitty fact that, for me at least, to try to heal, I need to hurt on the outside for a change instead of the inside.
