GUEST BLOG, written by Ms. Jen
GUEST BLOG, written by Ms. Jen:
Pictured above is a flyer we are handing out, with an offer of two weeks of free classes at our school. I wanted to give a little bit of backstory about why we created this flyer in particular…
Some of you know me as one of the black belts at Ambition Taekwondo; some of you have been in classes taught by me. But you may not know the reason I am a black belt. Or the reason I am in Taekwondo at all. That reason is the two little girls in the picture above.
The girl on the right is Sunny. She was my first child. When I adopted her at age 4.5, she was tiny. 28 pounds and wearing 18-month clothing. I didn’t know this before I adopted her, but she also had cerebral palsy. I was afraid for her: of the kids in school who might tease her, bullies that might try to push her around, and boys (boyfriends or strangers) that might someday try to take advantage of her.
I put Sunny and her sister Maisy, and later my other two kids, in Taekwondo classes because I knew they would be vulnerable targets for people who might want to harm them. The statistics are scary. As this image says, “Nearly 1 in 5 American women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.” I have 3 girls, and I don’t like those odds.
What my kids have learned from Taekwondo goes far beyond technique and curriculum. Though they are small for their age, they are physically strong. Much more so than their peers. But more than that, they are confident in their abilities. They will tell you themselves that they are strong. They know it. They are determined. They have learned through their experiences here that anything worth doing is worth working for. Even when they struggle with something, they believe that it is possible with hard work.
I think about Sunny, working on her double roundhouse break for her brown belt test. Her cerebral palsy meant that her standing leg was weak, and it was difficult for her to do the first break, maintain her balance, then generate enough power to break the second board with the same leg. She worked on it for months. For me, it was heartbreaking to watch because she just wanted to do it so badly. I wanted to fix it for
Those moments are the reason I have them in Taekwondo. No one is ever going to make those girls do anything they don’t want to do. Because not only are they physically strong and trained in self-defense, but because they value themselves.
As for me, I started Taekwondo because I was at the school every day with the girls, watching
It was not natural to me. In a family of athletes, I was the small, nerdy one. 5’3”, 115 pounds; read lots and lots of books but never played a single sport. (At least not willingly.) Growing up, I was good at a lot of things – school, art, music – none of them of any use at all when it came to breaking a brick or doing a backspin. It was shocking to me how hard it
How could I ask my daughters to do something I could not do myself? How could I give them something I didn’t have? And if I was asking them to believe in themselves enough to work on something that seemed impossible, I should be able to do the same. That is why I have my black belt now. That is why I want to be a part of the school. Because of what it has done for my kids, and for me.
A year or so ago, Sunny was working on her