These Hands

When my son was born, I noticed his chubby cheeks, his lips, his overbite—they were mine. The mystery that had been kicking and tumbling inside of me for months had also performed that most beautiful genetic miracle: my son looked like me.

Over that first day, I studied him carefully, wondering whether he would keep breathing if I looked away, how someone so small could possibly cry so loudly. I also kept watch to see if his hands might tremble or if his voice would quake like mine. Though I will love him just as much, perhaps more, if he shares my neurological disorder, there is a dark pit inside of me that fears it. In my imagination, I see this baby become a little boy and not understand why he can’t run as fast as the other children. I see him being teased for a funny voice that he can’t control. My heart breaks over and over for these tiny fictions, and I understand why my own mother so frequently apologizes for giving me the condition that I’ve got.

I love my own mother no less for her genetic gifts. It’s a mixed pot of bad nerves and good temperament. As I age, I recognize with that everyday horror that I am very much turning into my mother—with her silliness, her rages, and her shaky hands.

A few years ago at my grandmother’s funeral, I really noticed for the first time how alike our hands were. From the shape of our palms, the length of our fingers, to the long curve of our fingertips. Packed into the rec room at my great uncle’s farm, another uncle, a former priest, led the small family memorial. Most who knew my grandmother were long dead and so this tiny wake with her remaining family seemed a reasonable tribute. More practically, her closest living family member, her brother, needed to be there. He was for the most part bed-ridden at the time, and so in folding chairs and at his bedside, we gathered to tell stories and look at long-faded pictures. We sang hymns that the older generation knew by heart.

As a wavering hymn rose from our ranks, my great uncle’s eyes began to well up with tears. Sitting next to him on the edge of his home hospital bed, I also felt the clanging supports of the bed’s frame began to shake. His weeping was quiet, respectful. But as the rest of him filled with emotion, his legs began to tremble uncontrollably. I recognized the symptom—when under strain, my already unstable nerves give way as well. I loved him more for our shared weakness.

The hymns grew louder, mournful. I glanced to my right where my mother was sitting. Over the previous five years, she had magicked a reserve of strength I hardly understood as she cared for her disappearing mother. Grandma had first broken hips, but then as the dementia set in, forgotten my mother completely, lost the ability to speak, and finally been reduced to that most unforgiving state—a barely functioning body, eyes open, but no one home. Grandma was gone long before she had died.

And all that time, my mother was a force. With stubborn compassion, she was stalwartly there. Here then, finally, at this tiny memorial, I saw her begin to break at the edges.

Her hands never stop moving, but as we sang, her arms began to jump as if marionette’s strings were being plucked. I saw her grief in her waves of uncontrollable, jerky gesticulations.

This is when I recognized my own hands in hers, really saw how the minor differences, the lines of age, were what tied us together even more. I glanced down at my own clasped fingers, and noticed with bemused surprise, that they rested tremulously atop a leg that was keeping its own time.

There we were, in vibrating togetherness—all awash in life’s commonest tragedy—and with the signs of our inheritance most apparent, undeniably connected. This was it. This was family.

Our son has my husband’s hands, they are meaty, shaped for work, all the way down to the fingertips, but then, they are mine. They are my mother’s. And that little sign, that slope between father and mother might mean the difference for him. I touch those delicate fingers with mine and know he is ours. And with a ghostly recognition, know that years from now when my own mother is gone, I will see her in his fingertips. I will see the shadow of a strong and quiet legacy. They will be his, and they will be ours, whether his hands come to move at his will or on their own.