Which hand? who cares.....

When I was about 3 years old I have a memory of a meal, during which my father decided to try to get to use my right hand, rather than my left hand, to feed myself.  I scooped some food out of a bowl using a spoon –with my left hand.  My father stopped me, took the spoon from my left hand and placed it in my right hand.  I put the spoonful of food into my mouth with my right hand, and removed the spoon from my mouth with my left hand.  This was repeated two or three more times, I probably thought it was some kind of game…. My mother spoke up, saying, “leave her alone, at least she’s eating.”  My father stopped interfering with my meal.

My being left handed bothered my father.  He was born in a very different time, in 1901.  When my father went to school it was still believed by many that being left-handed was bad or evil.  My father attended a Catholic school.  The nuns, believing that left-handedness was evil, tied my father’s left hand to his torso.  They forced children to be right handed.

Myself, I was left to my own devices –no one interfered with my being left-handed after that meal and my father’s failed attempt to change my behavior.  It wasn’t until kindergarten that I realized the difference.  They gave me leftie scissors.  Useless things.  I watched as other children easily cut construction paper with scissors that did not have “leftie” embossed on the blades.  I tried to use the “leftie” scissors,… they did not cut the paper, they bent the paper, or they tore the paper, but they did not cut.  It was as if there was not even sharpness to the blades.  I waited patiently, for the little girl next to me to finish cutting paper and put her scissors down.  When she did I picked up her scissors and snipped away as if it were a normal, every day thing for me to use my right hand. 

From that day forward I learned simply by watching how other people performed every day functions – right-handed people.  I am not sure that my parents took notice.  Not a lot was said about it during my childhood.  It was not until I was in high school that anyone paid much attention to my being left handed.  It had to do with handwriting.  I am talking about cursive handwriting.  When we were taught to write cursive, in grade school, the teachers made us turn the paper sideways on the desk, sort of clockwise, forcing us to twist the left arm around in a curve around the paper….. so that the top of the page was to the right side of the desk.  Now, in high school, I met a girl who was left handed and turned her paper the opposite way –to the left –leaving her arm off the desk and hand following the pencil across the page.  It made so much sense!! 

The next semester I took a class called Creative Stitchery.  This was needlepoint, embroidery, knitting, and crocheting.  And the issue was crocheting.  I had tried it the year before, at home.  My mother got a booklet about crocheting with the left hand holding the hook.  It was impossible for me to do, because I had been watching my mother and aunts crochet holding the hook in their right hands.  I have always been incapable of even holding the yarn with my right hand, let alone the hook with the left!  My teach in Creative Stitchery thought that I was going crochet with my left hand, so she sat next to me to watch.  Imagine her surprise when I picked up the yarn with my left hand and the hook with the right.  I happily crocheted away like a pro!

One thing I have come to realize is that my people, my family, we are not complainers, we are fixers.  We find solutions, mine was to do almost everything like a right-handed person, except write.  I naturally pick up a writing instrument with my left hand.  I know left from right by pretending that I am picking up a pen.  I have never complained or felt left out (no pun intended) by my left-handedness, I simply used my right hand for most activities.  In my case it’s true what they say: the left hand truly does not know what the right hand is doing…..   I have even learned to print rather well with my right hand, although I have read that lefties are more adaptable to learning to write with the right.

In closing I am compelled to repeat a saying I learned as a teenager:  

If the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body; then left handed people are the only ones in their right mind.

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