Hands.

The tears were building in the corners of his lids. He looked up at me from folded arms on the table with a hint of despair.

I covered my face with my hands, burying myself into a dark little space to see my thoughts more clearly. How can I communicate this? How do I teach this?

I glanced up only when I heard his whimper rising from the bench seat at the breakfast nook.

“Okay, we’re going to make sense of this together. But can you be patient with Mommy? Mommy is different too, and sometimes it takes longer for us to help each other when we do things differently.”

Ethan fidgeted and tucked his leg under, choosing to become distracted by a bird at the feeder than to offer a reply. He ground his pencil into his paper absent-mindedly, boring a hole in the corner. This was Ethan frustrated. No words, nothing to offer.

I slid into the bench next to him and he let out something between a grunt and a heavy sigh and scooted in, begrudgingly clumping his stack of paper together and sliding it along with him. I took a sheet from him and reached across the table for another pencil, careful to use the right hand.

“No bumping elbows today, okay? Mommy is going to be like you. We’re going to practice together.”

Ethan raised his eyebrows at me, and I found myself suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude that cursive had been dropped from the school curriculum. “Mommy, why did Jesus give us different hands?”

That’s not what he meant, of course. Our hands were alike. Hands that opened doors and lifted soup spoons to mouths and turned pages in books. We’d stood next to each other in the kitchen, him on the step stool, and scooped cookie dough out of bowls. He’d been paying closer attention than I thought when I would help him cut shapes while making art. Mommy always had her scissors; Ethan had his. He reached for the pencil cup and pulled out the longer pair and set it on the table next to his kid-friendly pair, turning them over in his hands.

“I can’t use these.”

“No, Ethan, those scissors are for me.”

I could see him trying to work it out. We both had hands, and yet it suddenly felt like neither of us did.

“Be careful, sweetie. These scissors have a pointy end, see?”

“Mommy, can you show me again?” He dropped the scissors to the side and picked up his pencil, watching me to see what I would do.

I picked up the pencil again and maneuvered it in my fingers a little, trying to replicate what I knew he had to learn how to do. He’d been sent home with a progress report from the teacher encouraging us to work with him on printing in his tablet. I’d been dreading it.

“Would you like Mommy tell you a secret, Ethan?”

A delighted grin swept across his face. The tears had retreated, never fallen. “Yes!”

“Mommy loves your hands.”

It was a foreign feeling, tracing the dashed circles and lines and curves and not having to twist my arm to see what I was doing. Each letter was painfully deliberate, mediocrity at its finest, but the end result didn’t matter. “Look at how I’m holding the pencil, Ethan. Do you see where my thumb is? It’s not wrapped around the pencil.”

Ethan, using his left hand as assistant, bent his right thumb back until it provided the right sort of counter-pressure to keep his pencil from wobbling. As soon as he started tracing a letter, he went white-knuckled trying to maintain his grip. “It’s okay, sweetie.”

He relaxed a little, enough to not crush the graphite as he had before. A few adjustments later and he had completed his lower-case “a” row and moved on to drawing triangles in the margin. A bouncy children’s tune started playing on the TV in the living room and Ethan’s pencil smacked against the table and rolled away while he slid underneath the table, crawling over my slippers and scrambling to his feet.

“You have ten minutes, Ethan!”

I began the next row – one long line, one backwards “c.”