By Nancie Carmichael –
There was a story on Good Morning America this morning on the latest beauty craze—how to make your hands not look like your mother’s hands. It seems you can do all kinds of things to rejuvenate your face, but well, the hands are a dead give-away on your age.
For a mere $14,000 you can have fat taken from your back and injected into your hands, and voila!—cover those wrinkles and unsightly veins that are…yes…reminiscent of dear old mom. If you don’t have an extra $14,000 lying around, there are other procedures in the $1,500 range that can help. (Help the plastic surgery industry, that’s for sure.)
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I turned the TV off and stared down at my hands. Sure enough—they’re looking like Mom’s. When my grandma died, I went with my mother to the funeral home. My mother tenderly touched my grandma’s hands and said, “She worked so hard!” My widowed grandmother raised four children without benefit of Social Security in the depression, working two or three jobs—cooking for harvesters, cleaning houses, babysitting. Later, she helped my own mother on our farm in Montana, gardening, doing the laundry. She killed a pheasant once outside our house, and cooked it for dinner.
My mother’s hands in turn cared for her large family of seven children. They also played the violin and guitar and wrote stories late at night. Her hands bathed our babies and made the best huckleberry pie in the world. Her hands wrote thousands of letters to us after we children scattered across the nation and world, making us laugh and get homesick.
My own hands have seen their share of work. As I look at them, they represent countless meals, laundry, cleaning, loving my five children and now my ten grandchildren. They’ve also written books; edited others’ books; played the piano; and dealt with some horrific messes only a mother would admit to cleaning.
So even though I admit to a fleeting flirtation with the idea of recycling back fat, I don’t think I’m going in for major hand rejuvenation. It would be like destroying the finish on a valuable antique, and they tell you on Antiques Roadshow that’s a big no-no. These hands need to quit writing this post now and get to work. Some of our grandchildren are coming for spring break to do snowboarding and there’s a request for clam chowder.
Maybe later, I can work in a manicure.
Nancie Carmichael is a speaker and author of several books, including, “Lord, Bless My Child” (with her husband, Bill) “Selah—Time to Stop, Think, and Step into Your Future”, “Surviving One Bad Year—Seven Spiritual Strategies to Lead You to a New Beginning.” Contact her at nanciecarmichael@yahoo and visit her website, nanciecarmichael.com, or visit her on Facebook.
1 thought on “Mother’s Hands”
I love this. More than once I have been brought to tears when I glanced at my mom’s hands during a conversation and realized the years of love that are etched in every scar and wrinkle. Truly, a beauty that cannot be matched.