A mother's hands

MM note: My sister did a pastel reproduction of this photo. It remains one of my favorite pieces of art from her.

May 11, 2002

Gentle hands show a mother’s love

Old photograph recalls tender, loving moment

The little blond girl looks down, shyly, in profile, as if the hands on her cheeks were lifting her face to keep her from ducking entirely out of the camera’s view.

The hands have long fingers and a smoky topaz and gold ring on the ring finger.

The woman can’t be seen in the photo. But in other photos taken that same day, her face is young – younger than mine is now.

My mother held my face in her hands all those years ago, when I was only 3. We had played at the park and at the beach. In one photo, my mother eats licorice. In another, we swing together on the same swing. I squint my eyes shut to avoid the camera.

She doesn’t look at the camera either.

Instead, her long dark hair streams out loose. She rarely wore her hair so free.

My father took many photographs that day – mostly of me, playing at the park.

I used one of me dressed in my light blue dress hanging onto the green monkey bars as the basis for a painting I did once. My mother keeps it in her room. It’s the closest I came to looking at the camera all that day.

But out of all the photos, I like the one of my face in my mother’s hands the best. There’s something so tender and loving in the way she frames my face.

The long fingers have carefully sculpted nails and are lightly tanned. They remind me of my grandmother’s hands, and of mine, a little.

I can look at that photo, at that moment captured in time, and remember how much I was loved. I was such a little girl, and she was a young mother – not even 25.

Now I can relate to that photo differently, with three children of my own. I can hold their tiny faces in my hands and feel that love wash over me as it surely must have that day at the park when my mother held my face in her hands.

I wish there was another photo with her face in it, too, as she holds mine. In my mind I can see it, her forehead tipped to mine, both of us looking down, me at the ground, she at me.

But there isn’t, only her hands gently holding me, showing a mother’s love.