When I was a child, my mom would watch me play the piano. Her eyes would lock in on my fingers as they moved over the black and white keys. She enjoyed the music, I think, but her gaze always seemed to settle on my hands. “Such beautiful fingers,” she’d comment. “Not like mine.”
I never quite understood it. I’d hold my hands out in front of me for inspection and then look back at my mom’s. There didn’t seem to be anything extraordinary about the hands I had been given. In many ways, they were much like my mom’s: thin, but not fragile, knobby knuckles, blueish green veins evident beneath our olive-toned skin.
But at the time, I liked that mom thought mine were different.
I suppose we all go through phases where we want to be distinct from our mothers. Maybe it’s appearance or personality, reputation or preferences, but after all those years of asking for snacks and pulling at our mother’s shirttails, we begin to resist being quite so connected, quite so the same. We all have our reasons. But there’s something freeing in the differentiation.
So I took great pride in the fact my hands were not like my mother’s. Looking back, however, I wonder whether mom’s fascination with my hands was less about their particular aesthetic and more about what she hoped those hands would offer me. Now a mother myself, I know how much we want our kids to live a pain-free life. Just last night, I went to one of our son’s performances and had to actively not stare down one of his classmates who has been consistently unkind. It wasn’t my finest moment. But it was a reminder how far we can go as parents to want something more, something better for our kids—even if it comes out sideways.
Maybe mom simply hoped that the differences she saw in my hands would fill them in ways hers had been emptied.
In a couple months, I turn 40, and lately, I have been noticing some changes in my hands. The joints often appear swollen, and the skin is a bit looser, having accumulated new creases and folds. The veins are a little, well, vein-ier. On days when I have sat at the computer for hours, typing out words, I often catch myself rubbing the place where my thumb meets my wrist. The first time I realized I was doing it, my mind flashed back to my mother standing next to me at the piano. It was a movement I had subconsciously seen her do for years and years, but it wasn’t until my own hands throbbed with the beginnings of arthritis did the full truth hit me.
My hands are just like my mother’s.
But this time, the thought was not abhorrent. Instead, I called Mom and asked her when her pain began, how she managed it, how I could keep mine at bay. I confided in her my fears of being a writer who one day may not be able to use her hands. “I cannot NOT write, Mom!” She listened and empathized. The next time she came over, she brought me pain cream to try, and as I gently massaged the ointment onto my joints, we laughed at what we had become: two arthritic women, standing in the kitchen swapping remedies.
Some days, I still worry about my hands. When the weather turns cold and gray, the pain grows, and I wonder whether this time will be the time when it stays. But then I remember the hands of my mother and think, “Maybe it will not be so bad.”
***
Wishing you all a happy Mother’s Day, with all its joys and complications.
grace + peace,
Sarah