Her Hands

I look at my hands and see hers. The flat nails, corrugated due to a lack of some or other vitamin. I rub his loose skinned little body with the olive oil and Dutch Medicine infusion and remember her hands doing the same on another body, one that was somewhat bigger. I wipe the hairy new baby shoulders and hear her say, “Wipe properly to help all that hair fall off.”

I see her rubbing the joints, stretching the little limbs, exercising them. “Come now, don’t be lazy,” she’d croon. I remember removing fluff from a little fist, one that was attached to a body that she was bathing, many years ago. More than twenty, in fact. Babies today… they don’t collect fluff in tightly closed fists. Their hands are open from the very first day.

I think of her hands now. How loose the skin seems. Papery, like the rice paper that I had used not too long ago for a macadamia nut nougat. They’re darker too, darker than I remember them being when she could still bathe little babes. When she taught me how to bathe them. When she taught me how to form a koeksuster, or knead a yeast dough. She was good at that. I can almost taste the milk tart, a baked one, mind, that would always be made on the day she bakes coconut tart.

She’s forgotten how to do those things. She’s confused, bewildered by why she can’t seem to remember being told things that people insist they had told her. She’s scared, alarmed by her forgetfulness. She’s scared to bathe babies, or bake milk tart. She’s scared to knead a yeast dough. She’s intimidated by her daughters’ efficiency in their homes. Yet they are the products of those hands that she seems to see as useless now, that she folds away uncertainly. And I feel like crying.

I want to tell her that it is okay to be getting older, that sometimes we need help and that saying so doesn’t diminish us. But I can’t. The words catch in my throat. I see the fear in her eyes, the self doubt. I want to put a hand, one that looks like hers used to, and moves with the confidence that once possessed her own hands, I want to lay it on her furrowed brow, the only sign that belies her befuddled state of mind. I want to say, “It’s okay, I’m here…” But the silence between us stretches and stretches…