Men

Mom's are great. They can do Kung Fu as good as anyone. Women power rah rah rah and all that.
But the last couple of classes in the park other dad's showed up for the class too. Again, Mom's are great, but i got a different feeling from having all the boys and the dad's running around and punching things. Something that I had been missing. It's probably because I usually interact with moms a lot more than dads, on the playground, waiting for playgroup to end. etc.
But with the dad's it felt like the first time I really joined Woo Ching White Crane. There were female students too, but the predominantly male atmosphere was something that my 14 year old mind needed.
I had been part of another Kung Fu school before headed by Bo Sim Mark. She was good at what she was teaching, and I'm not even going to get into the differences in Kung Fu or training methods here. I'm just talking about atmosphere. Maybe it's because my dad died when i was four, or maybe it was because he never taught me Kung Fu but we watched a lot of TVB and Kung Fu movies together... and I guess I really needed to learn Kung Fu from a man, from like a real, from China, rough around the edges, smoking, kick ass man.

Now I do not have the same personality as my Sifu. Probably because I was raised almost entirely by women. My mother, my aunts, my teachers. In fact some neighbors of my Grandmother in Philadelphia would sometimes step in to try and be a man around me telling my mother I needed it. What did we do? Not Kung Fu exactly, but the American version. We got baseball gloves and played catch. Played some basketball. I wasn't shown how to punch but they explained that if I were to punch someone in the nose to aim for the back of their head. I was still very young and my mom didn't want me to fight. (But actually she had been in quite a few bloody fights in her neighborhood and her Catholic School as a child. but that is another story, which I have probably related already.)
 I don't smoke or fight and I'm not that macho or old country. In fact I like reading and playing dulcimer and drawing. I'm pretty introverted and physically inactive... except for Kung Fu. But I noticed that after having been in the female realm for so long... You know, strollers that are built for someone shorter than I am (I'm not tall) and I don't know there is a lot of children's things that are just more geared toward women. It didn't bother me. And after so much masculinity around the Kung Fu school I welcomed the female change. But Having the dads come to the Kung Fu playgroup gave me that feeling. We were men hanging out with our boys doing Kung Fu. Of course everything needs a balance, and probably if it's all men all the time that is no good. For instance, I've noticed that the playgroups can be more centered and focused simply by having a few girls in the mix. And mothers feel more comfortable expressing opinion probably, where as men seem to automatically sense hierarchical systems. But just as some things can need a woman's touch. I'm pretty sure things can also use a man's touch too. Just saying it's good to have men around, as a boy, and as a man.