I’ve spent my life as a right-hand dominant person. At least as far as the big stuff goes. I write and use silverware with my right hand. Interestingly though, anything I taught myself, I do left-handed. I can’t begin to swing a baseball bat righty. My husband’s grandfather told me I shovel snow left-handed. Basically, anything I do spontaneously feels correct on the left-hand side.
After I reconnected with my first family, I noticed my mom also does a fair number of things left-handed. When I asked her about it, she recounted that she had required thumb surgery on her right hand, so following that she began to rely on her left hand more frequently. I also learned, however, that one of my younger half-sisters, my uncle, and my maternal grandfather are/were lefties.
My adoptee brain has recently worked on processing this as another out-of-the-fog realization. My left-handedness was one more piece of my roots that was extinguished. Maybe not intentionally, but it did happen. When my oldest son was an infant, my husband and I took a trip to visit my grandparents to introduce their first great-grandchild to them. Our son was in a highchair at mealtime, and as I usually did, I set a spoon horizontally across the top edge of the tray. When my son reached for the spoon with his left hand, my grandfather snorted and commented, “Surely you aren’t going to let him be left-handed?!?” Without hesitation my husband responded, “Well maybe, we’ll see what he does. Why not?” My grandfather’s gruff response was, “Well it’s backward. No! It’s wrong.”
Had that been a message I’d heard earlier in life as well? Were my grandfather’s words about my son simply an echo of things that had been said when I was a child? When I spent my summers with them, did he utter the same disapproval of my occasional left-handed wrongness? I don’t remember. What I do know is that whether it was said out loud or not, even an inference of any perceived backwardness I might have displayed spoke to the place inside me that told me I didn’t belong. That type of dialogue simply echoed what the depths of my being wrestled with. I didn’t fit in. It was one more way that the truth of who I was, the way I was wired, was snuffed out. Piss on a fire long enough and it usually goes out. But maybe not all the way. Sometimes a lingering spark can be reignited. And now, when I catch myself doing something left-handed, I tend to smile a little and embrace the baby me who finally has permission to be all of who she is.