There was a dude, I almost wrote guy but guy is not as familiar as this dude was to me and guy is so vague but this dude has more character than a vague male term, the dude use to tell me how much he loved my hands.
My hands are not that special. They are not especially aesthetically pleasing. I have an average size palm with average sized fingers. Each of my pinkies are crooked at the last bend, to the left, hugging the finger before it. If I hold out my hands and mirror my pinkies it makes a v shape, my dad who I inherited these fingers from said they were p shooters, in which we could close one eye and aim or judge distance. He did this by example multiple times in my life. As I have done after him many times in telling others, as I am telling now.
I have somehow become sort of infatuated with my hands as well.
I like that they are not too big or too small.
I use to work in a production room where my job was to write a price on a price tag. I priced 2,000 to 2,500 pieces of clothes a day. A thousand pieces in four hours. Two hundred and fifty pieces and hour. I use to watch my hands form the numbers to make time go by. The way my fingers bent to grasp a grease pencil was both humbling and arrogant. I could find joy and appreciation for a tedious mind numbing task, but I found it in the admiration of my own hands.
It has been a while since I have watched my hands, I haven't worked in almost three years now. I had my first child, adopted my step daughter when my husband was granted sole custody, and recently I have given birth to a second son.
On Monday morning after I finished drinking coffee my littlest one woke up from a nap crying because he was wet. As I folded the straps of a fresh diaper I noticed my hands one again. They spoke to me, they said as they moved and fastened the diaper, you are still lovely, and more still, you are graceful and you are nurturing. They haven't stopped talking since. They tell me I am hard working when I wash dishes or fold laundry. They tell me I am a good cook, they tell me I am an artist as I paint or sketch or do my daughter's hair. These conversations with my hands have become a solid foundation for my confidence in the days that have threatened me with loneliness or insecurity or boredom. And even now as I conclude these words on my mobile device I feel a sense of endearment towards my thumbs as they dance across the touch screen to form these words. |
Submission Name: Conversations with My Hands
