Handed

Hey, it's a non-pointless photo! Now the blog will turn into a pumpkin...

Anyway. What you see in the photo is something that's hung in my old bedroom here at my father's place since I was... oh, about three. It's a hand print in plaster of Paris, covered in gold spray paint which the plaster is slowly making its way through (that's why it looks a bit blotchy). It was a Sunday School project for Mother's Day if I remember right, and on the back there's a poem that has something to do with helping hands. I think. I didn't bother to take it off the wall to read it again when I took the picture.

The hand that made the print, you might have guessed, belonged to my three-year-old self, and it's very obvious that an adult helped me make that print. Obvious to me, anyway.

And why is it so obvious? Well, look at which hand made the print in the plaster. If I'd done it on my own initiative I never would have used that hand.

I'm a very left-handed person, in other words. It wouldn't have ever occurred to me -- especially three-year-old me -- to make a hand print with my right hand.

It's kind of a weird reminder to me of how much things have changed for left-handers even during my lifetime. Before I was born it was an all-too common thing to force children to use their right hands. Left-handedness wasn't allowed in school classes, and if you made the mistake of trying to write with your left hand you got your knuckles rapped with a ruler or (hard to believe that this ever happened, but I've heard from more than one person who suffered through it) had your left arm tied to your side to "remind" you to use your right. I'm not sure why left-handedness was seen as so wrong, at least in this country. I know that in other cultures the left hand may be seen as unclean (because people would generally use their left hands to clean themselves in the bathroom but their right hands to eat with, or so I've read), but the bias remained in western culture long after such reasons should have mattered. This article suggests that the rise of literacy and the difficulty of writing left-handed with a dip pen might be to blame. I suppose that's possible, but the reasoning there just doesn't seem to match the enthusiasm with which many teachers tried to prevent left-handedness.

Even for me things were a bit difficult, although not because I was told not to use my left hand. For me it was more the fact that I was part of the first generation (around here, anyway) that was allowed to write with whatever hand felt most natural. Being amongst the first meant that my teachers had no idea how to teach someone to write left-handed, and that meant that I was pretty much left on my own to figure it out. I don't know if it's different for left-handed kids nowadays, but to my mind it explains why lefties my age all seem to have slightly different methods of attack when it comes to writing. Some of us do the hook-handed thing, some of us tilt our papers in odd ways to get the right angle, and me... well, come to think of it I'm not sure what I do. Let me write something right now and check.

Well, allowing for being all self-conscious about it at the moment, it looks like I tilt the page a little bit but mostly just barge through. I guess that would account for all the smudginess of my school papers, eh? That only improved when I got old enough to look for my own school supplies, and smart enough to realise that some pens are much less prone to smudging that others. I still to this day won't use gel pens or roller pens, for example. Too many of those things are just evil.

One common lefty problem that I (thanks, mom and dad) never had to suffer through in school was the whole scissors issue, at least. I always had left-handed scissors, and as a result I didn't have to go through the fun of feeling like the most inept cutter in class. Parents, if your child is left-handed please please PLEASE take the time to find him or her some proper lefty scissors. It really does make all the difference in the world. Left-handed scissors are put together differently, you see, so a lefty can both see where she's cutting and not have the fun of trying not to force the blades apart as she cuts. That's what happens with right-handed scissors, by the way. Most lefties can learn to use right-handed scissors eventually, but it's not fair to a kid to have to start off that way. Oh, and don't be fooled by those scissors that say good for right or left hand. They aren't. They're just right-handed scissors built with grips that won't hurt the left hand. They still won't cut properly for lefties. Not a lot of people realise that, you know (unless they're left-handed and have tried to use them). In fact, years ago when I was taking some Early Childhood Development courses at the local college (looong story) I had to explain to the art teacher that the scissors she was fond of and was recommending to her students would be nothing but frustrating for any of the left-handed kids those students might end up trying to teach.

Um, yeah. I guess you can tell that I have a bit of a scissors thing.

Anyway, I've blathered enough just now that I'm not really in the mood to turn this into a novel and start in about life as a lefty. I've said stuff about that on the blog already, if you're interested (just use the search box at the top of the page to find it, assuming that you are interested), and I'll no doubt be saying more in the future. It's a big part of who I am and, to be honest, how I identify myself. Shut up. That's not weird. If you want weird, ask me sometime about how often I surreptitiously count the number of left-handed kids in the classes I see at the nature centre.

Now that -- admittedly -- can definitely hinge on weird.

Later, all.



*waves*
*with left hand, of course*