My Mother's Hands

Peggy’s prompt for Feb 11, 2009. 25 minutes. “My mother’s hands”

My mother’s hands were an embarrassment to her during the years I knew her. Although I thought her hands looked just fine; she always kept her nails clean and trimmed and she used Jergen’s Hand Lotion every night, so to me they seemed soft and smooth. But to her, they were the hands of a farmer’s daughter—someone who as a child had worked in the fields, picking beans and tomatoes and bell peppers—and who for many years after that had washed clothes by hand, scrubbing them on a washboard, wringing them out by twisting and squeezing. She thought her knuckles were enlarged from hard work and that the veins on the back of her hands were to prominent.

More than anything, my mother wanted to be an educated middle-class lady, and she thought her hands put her squarely in the working class along with maids and housekeepers. As she got older, rheumatoid arthritis took an even heavier toll on her hand than did the farm work, and by the time she died, her hands were and looked crippled.

When I was a child, I would sometimes place one of my hands up against my mother’s hand and compare them for size. You have such nice hands, she’d say. I don’t want you to have to ruin them with hard work like I did. And so she deliberately spared me, and my sister, from much in the way of “heavy” housework, and required no yard work from us at all, although she herself worked in the yard all the time and had over time created a lush sub-tropical landscape for our modest home.

I think about all that now when I look at my own aging hands, with knobby knuckles and short fingernails, and enough age spots to make a face-lift seem ridiculous. And I’m grateful that my mother had “aspirations” for me to have an easier life than she did, and to instill a love of learning and knowledge in me that serves me still. But I feel sad that she didn’t love her hands like I loved them. When I think of my mother I often think of her hands, her warm, gentle, capable, hard-working, loving hands.