“Aikido Odyssey: Suburban midlife mom finds her Grasshopper” by Marguerite Del Giudice

When I hobbled home from my first aikido class in January 1997, my middle-aged body creaked like an old ship that had been suddenly sent, unprepared and unarmed, to war.

“They knocked me down 300 times,” I murmured to my husband and waddled off to the shower, my hips aching like a pair of 2-by-4’s that that had been asked to hold up a house.

As a young girl, I had identified with Grasshopper, the martial-arts priesthood apprentice in the surprise-hit ‘70s television show Kung Fu, and something in me way back then had resonated with the idea of the soul expressing itself through the body. All I can say about my first aikido night those many years ago is that—beyond the soreness and the shock of falling down repeatedly—Grasshopper stirred in me once again.

Our sons, 10 and 7 at the time, came to thrill at the sight of me returning home from training in such a disheveled state, bright-eyed and fagged out, my sweat-soaked hair stuck to my head and separated into unattractive little tufts.

“Gee, Mom,” they’d say, their eyes shining with a weird joy. “You really smell!”

How did I get there?

After getting married, I had put my writing career largely aside to concentrate on our home and children. I wrote occasional magazine articles, launched house-decorating projects, volunteered at the elementary school, and dreamed up unconsummated community improvement plans that mostly involved parking, murals, and plants. But in whatever way it is that you feel yourself in the world, I was a caged bird and had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared into the suburban abyss.

“You need to exercise,” my husband would periodically intone. “You need a physical outlet.”
Over the years, like many a woman my age (pre-Title IX) who had never “found her sport,” I dabbled: I swam thousands of laps, played racquetball (mostly by myself—better workout), hit the tennis courts, jogged outside, treadmilled inside, lifted weights, and white-water-rafted as far away as the Bio-Bio River in the Chilean Andes. All had served their purpose at the time, but each lacked what I can only describe as sufficient spiritual weight to sustain me over a lifetime.

Then one day, while listening to an audio tape about the Enneagram system of personality types, the narrator started talking about aikido, and I found myself immediately captivated by the idea of a martial art that was martial without being violent—a spiritual practice through the body. The dancelike movements; the focus on intuition, positioning, timing, and speed, rather than physical power; the subtleties of receiving an attack without necessarily ceding ground and entering an attack as a way of defusing it.

The description of aikido which struck me then, and strikes me still, likened matching moves with an aikido master to wrestling with an empty jacket. But what moved me most was the art’s radical principle of protecting not just oneself but also one’s attacker from harm. Platonic love as a practical defense. Imagine that.

Now, more than 12 years into this odyssey—I was 45 when I started; I’m 57 now—aching hips no longer waken me like thunder in the night, and my heart still leaps when I’m drawn into a break fall, my partner blending me with gravity in such a way that my entirely extended body slams down flat and loud on the mat, wrung out like a wet sheet in the wind.

In the end, I suppose what aikido gives me is time, or, actually, the experience of losing time altogether. On the mat, I get to feel myself, as in no other circumstance, purely in the moment through my body. I get to revisit the time-free me of yesteryear—a high-spirited tomboy in suburban New Jersey who climbed too high in trees and could leap down six steps at a time and stick the landing. Aikido keeps a certain preadolescent vitality alive in me. In my early training years, I would spontaneously take forward rolls over laundry piles in our upstairs hallway, or, on occasion, out in the neighborhood, throw myself onto the sidewalk, so I could experience what it would take, how my body would have to move, in order to minimize the impact and allow me to pop up from the concrete, unscathed and exhilarated. At times, I admit, I would eye the 13 steps leading to our cellar with a weird craving to jump.

Then a couple of winters ago, I actually did fall, at the top of our front hallway steps, while wearing wet rubber snow shoes that had lost their tread. I remember being completely vertical, with my feet facing the ceiling, and saying to myself, “Oh, you’re upside down.” I wasn’t afraid so much as aware of being in flight. I was empty. The next thing I knew, I was tapping out by the front door, an implausibly long distance away, measured later at 20 feet, unharmed, oddly at ease, and feeling as if the floor had somehow given way beneath me, that it had “bowed” to receive my body, so soft was my landing. I can only speculate that, having fallen safely at least a few hundred thousand times over the years, my body actually knew what to do; and, I learned, it would do it for me, as long as I relaxed, accepted what was happening, and stayed out of its way.

Ah, aikido. Nothing in life has so captured my imagination or filled me with such exquisite purposelessness and divine indifference. Finally, I have found my sport. My inner athlete has her song. Grasshopper lives.

Marguerite Del Giudice, a writer and life coach whose work has most recently appeared in National Geographic, teaches and trains with Sensei David Goldberg, at the River of Life Martial Arts and Wellness Center, outside Philadelphia, in Ft. Washington, PA.

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