Hands

I found an old floppy disc with my initials. I was curious, so I put it in the floppy drive and looked through some of my old writings. Most were from 1999-2001. It is fascinating to read about my older kids when they were babies and toddlers. You think you won’t forget, but you do. I found the following thoughts about my now-third-grader. According to the disc, this mini-essay was created Tuesday, November 9th, 1999.

She is wearing a pair of white socks on her hands and she is eating a peeled banana. Sticky yellow film covers the socks, and tiny white cotton bits cover the banana. She is my daughter and she is two. As I watch her, I realize I am angry, amused, annoyed, and charmed, all at the same time. Only a toddler can inspire such conflicting emotions in an adult. I am pleased that she is happily eating something nutritious. Her socks are filthy, but they are pulled up to her elbows like thick white opera gloves. I sigh at her cuteness.

She has taught me that birthday candles can double as crayons, especially when the artist is using a black dishwasher door as their canvas. She has tried to convince me margarine and Coke make a delicious, satisfying breakfast. Since she discovered her love for margarine, I no longer have cubes in my butter dish—I have relief maps of the Grand Canyon where her little finger has carved trenches and rivulets.

My daughter’s hands are works of art in themselves. They are chubby and dimpled and just right for nibbling. Yes, they destroy potted plants and wield errant lipsticks over the coffee table. They have been known to hit her little brother and flush the unflushable down the toilet. But her hands have been known to pat my face lovingly as she says, “You are my cutie-mommy.” Her hands have pet soft puppies, felt daddy’s scratchy whisker face, and opened nearly every present under our Christmas trees. She learns so much everyday through her little fingers and her pink palms that I wonder where they will take her…

Will she be a healer, a nurse or doctor, tending to and comforting the sick with the cool touch of her palm on hot, worried foreheads? Will she create music on a piano that makes those listening catch their breath at her expressiveness? Maybe she will knead bread in a bakery, or eliminate bad hair days with the snip of her scissors. She could hold a firehose, drive a race car, write a story, milk a cow, or tend her garden. All of these things are possibilities—if I do my job and my hands do theirs.