She grew up in a house where nobody ever fought. He’s a combat coach. Now they’re raising a kid together.
When our daughter was still a baby, Nic taught her how to hit him. He would raise his hands, turned toward her like flat pads, and show her how to close her tiny hand into a fist and drive it into his palms. He also allowed her—is too strong a word, but he was decisively neutral on the matter—to hit him in a more childlike way, slapping with the palm of her hand on his chest and torso, winding up for haymakers she’d land in his belly.
The first time Margo saw this, she wanted to scream. She was not raised to engage with physicality. Her family played sports, but that was it, and in those contexts, they were using their own bodies alongside other bodies, rather than engaging physically with one another. She remembers being rough with her younger sister and receiving tremendous shame for it.
Nic has been a parent for three and a half years longer than Margo has, and together we parent our daughter, 3, and Nic’s son , 6. Bringing our divergent experiences with physicality into our home as parents and trying to join them into a coherent family culture has been a learning experience for all of us. It has asked Margo to reframe her core assumptions around the meaning of force, power, and consent.
In the world, Nic points out, women are largely on the receiving end of violence, and in his family that was contrasted with his mom, who would teach the kids judo and jujitsu techniques. His aunt was a national judo champion, and the best judoka in the family. People would come to spar with the family, and they would be paired with his aunt, who is 5-foot-4 on a good day. He grew up seeing pictures of her throwing 200-pound men, their heels flying in the air.
With children, consent is a practice—they are literally practicing it, testing the boundaries of what happens when they violate it, checking to make sure it is reciprocal, feeling for all the edges. Sometimes, our kid hits Margo outside the space of permissioned rough play, with all the wild vigor of a still-forming human who cannot always control her urges, who occasionally wants to see what will happen if she just lets her body loose.
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