In Her Hands

She has always drawn all over her hands;
In blue ink, and red ink, and with black sharpies.

I asked her so many times to please stop doing it.
My reasoning was simply that it looked dirty to me, to see her looking like that.

Tessa is my middle daughter.
She is fourteen, and from the time she was old enough to use them to stand, she has always dug her heels in, and done things her own way: Differently.
Maybe she knew something I didn’t know yet.
Maybe it’s the whole “middle child” thing.

She has always loved experimenting with anything she can get her hands on.
It just so happens that what she most often gets her hands on usually belongs to me.
As a child her room was full of various jars of sludge I didn’t dare open, and old shoe boxes stuffed with collections of mystery things.
I have lost many beauty products to these experiments.
If she is left alone in the bathroom too long, it is guaranteed she will come out wearing a multi-layered combination of every single one of my expensive creams.
She will deny it.
I will tell her that, by the smells I recognize, I know she is lying to me.

She used to cut all her clothes just to see how they would end up looking.
What I saw was a wardrobe that I had paid good money for that was clearly ruined now,
but I could tell that what she saw in the mirror as she examined her creations was the label “unique and free.”

Growing up I wasn’t allowed to draw on myself.
Good Christian girls didn’t mark their bodies or wear red nail polish, and that was just that.
Girls that did would end up incarcerated one day, obviously.

Nothing I have said over the years has ever stopped her drawing,
or the use of my facial creams.
It’s like the creation of something different, new, and exciting just has to come out of her.
I think she finds sameness and what is expected of her to be pretty suffocating.

Looking back, I realize that I tried to fight it,
tried to force her into the Tessa-shaped box I had made;
The one with unmarked skin and that cute little bob haircut that highlighted her face.
As the teen years have come, though, she has pressed hard against me at every turn,
bursting that box into splinters, and attempting to show me who she really is in a way that has often felt like rejection to me.

“Why can’t you just LISTEN?”
“Why can’t you just DO WHAT I SAY?”

I catch my own voice sounding like my mother’s when I was her age.

I remember my mom telling me she once realized she had tried to build that same kind of box for me, until she realized I didn’t fit in her box.
I fit perched up on top of it, wildly swinging my feet.

I was reminded of the time I sat in an oral surgeon’s office, and was surprised to see him enter, looking like he couldn’t possibly be older than 24.
When I asked about his extensive schooling, and commented that his parents must be so proud of all of his accomplishments, he got quiet, and confessed they had been upset he hadn’t chosen to take over the family donut shop, actually.

Because I knew how it felt to have someone try to fit me into their mold of me as a child,
I always swore I’d try to see my children as they were when I had them some day,
not just in the way I hoped and perceived.
But, I wasn’t doing this well at the moment.
I had forgotten being fourteen.
I was reminded to do better by two hands that I loved, constantly covered in ink.

What was this constant experimenter trying to tell me?
If I look past her cut clothes and smudged hands, what is it I truly see?

I see a girl that wants to stand out from the middle.

I see a girl I identify with, fighting to feel completely free.

The other night as we sat watching television, out of the corner of my eye I could see her next to me in the recliner holding a pen.
I immediately knew what she was doing.
I could tell she was again drawing something.
Having long given up on asking her to please stop marking on herself, I said nothing,
until a few minutes later she presented me with what she had been working on.

I was shocked at the beauty of what she showed me:
An intricately drawn duplication of some Henna art she had seen.
It looked almost professional;
A far cry from the smudged spider webs and random lettering that once used to be.

“Tessa! You DID THAT?!”
I held out my hand, and she placed hers in it for me to more clearly get a look at what she had done.

“That is INCREDIBLE! So beautiful! I’m impressed!”
She grinned.
For once she didn’t protest when I asked to take a photo.

I squinted at her then, holding her hand out proudly, my mind suddenly full of so many things:
Praise for her talent.
A different view of her pursuits.
Apologies for all the times I just hadn’t seen what could be.

I posted the photo of it on Facebook, and have since had multiple people messaging me, offering to pay her to do the same exact thing on their hands, or for their daughters.
One woman mentioned hiring her for a birthday party.

Maybe it’s not always a rebellion.
Maybe it’s them becoming a version of them that we just couldn’t yet see.

When Tessa went to bed that night I contemplated all the things I’ve hoped my girls would do or be, and how, instead, this life has been a lesson on the purpose behind individuality;
In letting some things rest in their hands where they belong.

My mom once told me that she sees each of my daughters as a different facet of my own personality, and those intricately inked hands had reminded me that there can be so much surprising beauty beyond what we can see through our own two eyes as parents that are so often shaded by expectations, and our own experience.

I think back on my own childhood, and on all the times I wished that someone would have seen talent, passion, and valuable characteristics nestled somewhere inside of the raw materials that were within me.

Not “bull-headed,”
but “assertive” instead.

Not “mouthy,”
but “self-confident.”

Not “the black sheep,”
but “one who stood out beautifully.”

It’s so hard to not try to force our children to be what we want them to be.
I hope that from now on I’ll use the image of her beautiful hands, though, to remind me to stand back more often,
to trust her more,
and to watch what she is busy becoming outside of me.

Mom Outnumbered

Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.