Wax on, wax off

Last night I took Dash to his karate class, instead of hustling him out the door with his dad as I usually do. I thought it was the last of the session (in fact, there are two more) and I had never seen him in action.

We arrived a few minutes late, so as soon as we reached the gym Dash was kicking off shoes, peeling off socks, and joining the other children in front of the instructor. Half of them had proper white karate gear with orange belts; the other half, like him, were in regular clothes. I sat myself on a bench and watched my child in this new environment where he belonged and I was the outsider.

At first I felt a little bad for him: he seemed to have trouble catching up with what they were doing, and the instructor was moving quickly and could hardly see Dash behind the white-clad taller kids, who were clearly more advanced. But after a few minutes the class was split in two, with one teacher taking the orange-belters to the other end of the hall while Dash's class stayed with the other and broke down a long series of movements - punches, kicks, and blocks - to practice them over and over. It reminded me of my ballroom dancing classes, watching the movements and trying to replicate them with my unwieldy limbs - but then at least I had a partner to rely on, whose very presence helped my body remember what to do.

(I took ballroom and latin dancing classes for a few years before I left Dublin. I absolutely loved it. The only catch was that I functioned so much by muscle memory that though I could perform the steps perfectly with my own regular partner, I was pretty much lost without him. It wasn't that he was pushing me around the floor or that the others couldn't lead; it really was that when dancing with that one person my body knew where to go, but with anyone else, when I needed to engage my brain to tell my feet what to do, the process was much more prone to disaster.)

So there was Dash, clearly the smallest and probably also the youngest in his class - they can start at five, but it looked like the others were six or even older - giving it his all. While some kids were goofing off or just going through the motions, flopping their arms around like wet fish and shuffling through the steps, I could see the intensity in every move he made. His arms were strong, his fists clenched, his steps deliberate. He wasn't just gamely giving it a go; he was focused and determined and undeterred by the others a head taller. As the sequence got longer and the moves more complicated I was really impressed by his ability to put it all together and keep going in the right direction, even without the teacher to mirror.

The class ended after some fun mat instruction on how to fall correctly, and as I headed for the other side of the room with Dash, the black-belt instructor acknowledged me with a gruff - manly, karate-like - smile and said, "He's doing great."

Dash sat on the floor and I resisted the impulse to help him while he got his socks disentangled. It's only a year or so since he finally started to put them on himself, and now here he is taking classes, learning moves, knowing words I don't even know, putting his mark on the world.

He doesn't even want to do karate again next term. He's thinking maybe basketball.