My Mom's Ugly Hands

My mom was always ashamed of her hands.

Her fingers were short and thick. Her thumbs were flat and wide. She had spent most of her life doing manual labor. She worked in fields where the wooden handles of the rakes and hoes rubbed her hands raw and left thick callouses. She cleaned houses in the days before Swiffers where she washed the floors on her hands and knees and rung out the rags in dirty water buckets full of skin-burning chemicals. She washed them in homemade lye soap – lye being the key ingredient.

She used to file her finger nails to points because somehow, she thought this made them look longer and thinner. Really, it just looked like she could take your eye out.

Whenever my mom posed for a photo, she held her hands behind her back or cupped them together in a little ball. When she looked at her pictures, her eyes always went to her hands. She was sure that everyone noticed – and were appalled by – her hands.

I have my mother’s hands. Short, thick fingers. My pinky nail is wider than most people’s pointer finger. As a teenager at the store, I would look at those stick-on-nail packages and laugh. The fake nail for the thumb is the only one I would be able to use and it would go on my pinky. But I’m not ashamed of my hands like my mother was. They are just what they are.

My self-esteem wasn’t tied to my hands. [My nose is another story.]

To my mother, her hands represented a past that she didn’t want to remember. Her hands never let her forget. And she thought that every single person who looked at her hands could read her story and didn’t like what they read.

I imagine the day I see my mom in Heaven. A lot of people seem to think we will all look like super models in Heaven – perfect bodies, perfect faces. [I wonder what super models think they’ll look like.] But I don’t think we’ll look much different than we do now. I think only how we see ourselves will change. We will see the beautiful person God created us to be and all of our lumps and warts will be no different than spots on a leopard or stripes on a zebra. Perhaps?

And there will be my mom in Heaven with those same hands. The real difference will be that now when she looks at them, they will be beautiful.