My Mom's Hands
I never grew out of holding my mother’s hands. They’re rough. Oftentimes they’re covered in new burns or healing ones. They aren’t polished, but they’re still perfect. I rarely tell her this, though. It’s actually really easy for me to be critical of my mom. But I think of her frequently when I’m not with her. And I think about her hands.
Like most moms, mine wakes up at the crack of dawn and goes about her morning in probably the loudest way a human possibly could. This would annoy me to the point of anger. I’d hear the clanking of pots and the sink running way longer than it should, and I’d wonder how it could take someone that long to wash a few dishes. Occasionally, she would do all of this while also on a long-distance call with her sisters back in Egypt, which consisted of arguing and then apologizing and then arguing again, abrupt hangups, and then long dialogue to herself out loud. But when I’d wake up, she’d offer me tea with milk and a plate of bread she had just made. Sometimes she would lie and tell me it was store-bought to hear my actual opinion, as if I hadn’t just heard the entire process from bed. Her hands would be covered in dough and puffed up and red from all the work she managed to do before any of us woke up.
It wasn’t until later in life that I discovered my mom’s passion for baking. There was a year we became fixated on scones. My mom made it her mission to bake a scone better than the one we would get from the cafe. It became an obsession, really. Every morning, my sister and I would try a new version, and she would analyze our faces after the first bite, hoping that this time we would say something like, “Yes, you finally did it. This one beats the cafe’s.” She eventually got there, and her scones replaced the cafe-bought ones.
She turned our kitchen into a cooking set, where she would record videos of her recipes that were only sent to her sisters. If you look at her camera roll now, you’d see endless overly zoomed-in videos of her explaining how to bake something new. One of my favorite hobbies is taking her phone and watching these clips.
I have this recurring dream for my mom, where she has her own bakery somewhere in Queens. Where she wears a beautiful apron, arranges all the flowers herself, and sells scones better than the ones we used to buy.
When I look at her hands now, I don’t get annoyed that she doesn’t moisturize as often as I tell her to. I see them as proof of something she loves, something she never had the time or space to fully explore because she was too busy raising three children. I see her need to feed us, especially after my dad passed away, as a way of protecting us, of filling voids she couldn’t fix with words. I see burn marks and rushed movements, her hands always working against time. She is always trying to do everything at once, and somehow still making sure we are taken care of. Everything she does begins and ends with us.