How To Become A Ninja In Your 30s
For Many, Ninja Training Starts Early, But Here Are Some Tips For Those Of Us Who Missed The Boat
One of the side benefits of hopping on board the baby boat well into your 30s is that you learn so much about yourself that you didn’t even know before. By the time we reach about 40, many think we’ve got ourselves pretty well figured out. I dare you to get pregnant and keep that mindset.
To start, hormones do amazing and dramatic things to your mind, body and soul. Like an actress preparing for one of the biggest roles of their lives, pregnant women gain 40 pounds using a special technique involving mostly french fries and chocolate-covered Oreos. They lose interest in things that they used to love and pick up new interest in things that they thought they’d never even pay two cents to.
And eventually, most, if not all mothers learn how to become ninjas.
The ninja skills come a little later into the motherhood. They start very subtly. No smashing wood blocks in half, no carrying giant bags of rocks up ancient Asian staircases.
Training begins on the very first day a mother is left alone with a new baby. In trying to think of clever ways to lay down the sleeping baby and get out of the room without waking him or her, mothers discover powers that she’d only read about in books or seen on Sunday afternoon matinees.
As she tries to tiptoe out, sure, it takes a few tries but eventually her feet begin to actually leave the ground in a fashion not unlike Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Before she knows it, she is flying, like Peter Pan.
Some time passes and she swears her home was haunted by the ghost of her former self, the way that she switches from one room to the next as she carries out errands like the silent invisible breeze.
She learns to open drawers without touching them and closes them without a sound— is it ESP at work? Dishes get washed with nary a clink nor a clank; the patter of her footsteps no longer exist.
She can practically dream the refrigerator open and when it closes, it is with the same tone of a soft kiss on a baby’s freshly bathed cheek.
Chairs slide across the marble tiled kitchen floor like papers shuffling across a carpet. The noises of the home at their highest volume resemble a quiet phone call to a friend.
Showering, opening mail, returning books to book shelves, putting toys away, even flushing the toilet are sounds that barely factor into her life anymore. Because she — and you — are well on your way to becoming a ninja.
Have a baby and try tap dancing. The metal pats on the shoe heels sound like wet feet on grass. Your ability to slip into and out of a sleeping baby’s room has taken on a new dimension.
Strangely, your partner / in-laws have not acquired the skills of the ninja. In fact, they have somehow gotten further away from quietude, as if they never knew it at all. Every “hush!” and “shhh!” you offer is moot. They don’t understand the incredible ability you’ve developed to become like the shadow people. Their clomping feet, stomping tree trunk legs, flippant door slamming and devil-may-care cupboard clapping echo now with the sounds of 1000 soldiers rushing into battle. Were you on the battle field, you’d easily squelch their noises as you jumped off a nearby mountain and flew down atop them silently, from the night sky. But here in the baby’s lair, you’re forced to cross your fingers and hope their repeated noise errors pass effortlessly through the child’s seeping mind.
Alas, it rarely does, and now the ninja’s reign and the silence are both broken. We must start anew later, and the circle continues; ninja magic stomped out by Frankenstein feet; a ghost-like presence tempered by the crashing of dishes; the wind’s whisper followed by the oblivious slamming of a door.
This is the late 30 to early 40 something ninja mom’s cross to bear. A late-in-life ninja’s day to day is, just like any other’s, rife with problems, though these are special problems, as they are #NinjaProblems.
