From The Hands of Our Ancestors

Some of us know from the start what we want to be. Others discover it along the way — in a stranger’s unexpected question, a wrong turn down an unfamiliar road, or the calloused hands of those who came before us.

I discovered it at twenty-one, when a stranger’s question pulled scattered memories into place and set me on a course for the rest of my life. My boyfriend and I had spent the day snowboarding with friends at a Vermont ski resort. On the ride home, I sat in the back seat of a 1988 Chevy Blazer beside a man I’d met that morning, when he turned to me and asked, “So. What do you do?”

I always dreaded that question.

It was 1991, and most of my peers were close to graduating from college, engaged in a trade job, or working towards a career. I’d been working since I was eleven, when I began babysitting my two-year-old brother and a neighbor’s toddler during summer break so our mothers could work. Between the ages of 11 and 21, I’d worked as a babysitter, snow shoveler, restaurant server and bus person, hotel maid, front desk clerk, preschool aide, nanny, temp agency clerk, office staff, pieceworker, house cleaner, deli sandwich maker, grocery store clerk, personal caregiver, baker, janitor, house-painter, photo store print maker, barmaid, bartender, hostess, salesperson, and gardener. I could barely remember all the different jobs I’d had.

But I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I felt aimless. I looked at this stranger, who was completely oblivious to his question’s effect on me. Deflecting it, I said, “Uh. Ha-ha. Well. I guess I do a lot of things. What do you do?”

“I’m an occupational therapist,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Occupational therapists, we call ourselves OTs. We use meaningful occupation or activities to help rehabilitate people. I specialize in hand therapy.”

“Hand therapy? Like, therapy for your. Hands?”

“Yeah. You know, like say someone is a carpenter and they lose a finger in an accident. I help them with hand exercises and new strategies to get back to doing carpentry.”

I stared as he continued, “People usually don’t realize how important and complicated hands are, both physically and psychologically — until they can’t use them the way they always have!” Now, my eyes widened, and my whole body shifted in his direction. His face lit up. “Did you know that there are twenty-seven little bones in your hand and wrist?” I looked down at my right hand, palpating it with my left thumb and thinking about how much I had focused on hands as a child.

“Dude! Did you see that epic jump on that last run!” Another snowboarder shifted our conversation to the events of our fresh winter day. I went silent, my brain ticking away.

I thought, Occupational Therapy. This I totally get. Oh my. This is what I have to do.

Hands. If I could show you a picture of my father’s, you would see hands that can do seemingly impossible work. His hands, and his mother's, brothers’ and sisters’ hands descended from ocean navigators, wild crafters, basket weavers, net makers, knitters, carvers, bread bakers, builders, gardeners, fishermen and women, stonemasons, and doers of any other work necessary to survive on one of the harshest and, some would say, most barren islands off Eastern Canada — Newfoundland.

My father is from the last generation of our family raised with the sensations, patterns, and rhythms of the North Atlantic’s Labrador current — raised in close connection with weather, birds, animals, plants: all the natural world. He was the last to read those patterns and rhythms as most people today read the daily news. Standing at the front door of a little saltbox house overlooking the endless horizon of ocean and sky, he, just like his elders, could read the weather, the ocean, the birds’ behavior.

My father’s hands are as calloused as they are complicated. Layers of skin so thick, they once pulled a Thanksgiving turkey pan out of the oven without mitts. My brothers and I stood aghast. Dad barely noticed, mumbling in his Newfoundland brogue, “Jeez buy! That’s bloody hot!” He suffered zero burns from the incident.

I’d watched his hands fillet a fish as if it were soft butter.

Those hands built anything we needed — shelves, kitchen tables, bed frames, fences, and eventually a pulley system to help my mother independently rise from bed in her last months of life. Those same hands could do subtle things too: pluck the strings of a guitar and carve delicate wooden birds, toy trucks, jewelry boxes, and lampshades.

If my brothers or I got unruly, those hands would clip us on the back of the head and make us believe we’d been smacked with something much harder than a hand.

If Dad was upset, we might find his thick pointer finger inches from our face — causing us to freeze in place. But if one of us got a skinned knee, or had an epic bike fail, we felt those hands lift us, sensed their strength and surety, how loving and healing they could be.

His hands engulfed our small hands as we crossed the street, or when he brought one of our hands to his lips for a proud kiss.

I remember trying to wrap my fingers all the way around Dad’s big thumb, but not quite closing the gap between my pointer finger and my thumb. We often made-up games to test the strength of Dad’s hands: “I bet me and Peter are stronger than your pinky finger!” And he would amuse us by looping one end of a small rope around his pinky finger and letting us pull the other end, trying to uncurl his flexed pinky. We tried with all our might but couldn’t do it. As I grew, I took pride in how capable my own hands were becoming.

When he placed a hand on our shoulder, we could feel the weight of generations holding us — generations connected with nature’s power and purpose.

The day after I returned home from my Vermont snowboarding trip, I went straight to the library and researched occupational therapy. It was years before the dawn of the internet, and my more refined hands, resembling my mother’s and her mother’s, flipped through volumes of college reference books. My research revealed that even though women were still denied the right to vote, the American Occupational Therapy Association was founded in 1917 by a board of three men and three women. With equal voting rights! My upbringing with three brothers and a dominant father made something in me quiver with possibility.

I looked up colleges with occupational therapy departments. What if I wanted to be, as my father frequently joked, “edumacated”?

I sent away for, and filled out, exactly one application. I figured I didn’t have much of a chance. The cost of a college education was one obstacle. My high school transcript showing two summers of summer school to retake failed classes was another. My post–high school transcript was thin at best. I had taken random community college classes, though I'd done very well in them. Occupational therapy seemed like a long shot. I wrote a passionate and sincere letter and sent it with my application. I waited for the rejection letter.

By some grace, miracle, or accident, I was accepted into the program at Worcester State University in Massachusetts. It was there I discovered the joy of education and found that my life’s purpose would come from an unexpected source: making meaning of my childhood.

Meaning rarely arrives one day at our feet or in a grand "aha" moment. We create meaning from life's moments and memories, enriching the stories we pass on to future generations if we so choose.

Making meaning of our childhoods and our parenting journey often unfolds with memories of the most ordinary moments. A conversation in a car. A parent's hands — rough, tender, capable. Our children will come to know us through memories in the same way. Through the things we create, build, and do. Through the way we hold them, feed them, fold the laundry, tuck them in, wash the dishes, bring a coffee cup to our lips.

Our children will be shaped through the stories that our hands, and theirs, will come to tell.

In the back of that Chevy, I didn’t know it then, but all those years watching my father’s hands were teaching me something:

His hands told a story — a story of love and hardship, safety and fear, grit and grief. A story of how trauma and tenderness can coexist in the same gesture and the same person. A story written across generations, passed down in both what one does and doesn’t do and say. 

And like so many of us, I had to learn that healing begins not necessarily with what we do, but with how we show up. With what we choose to carry forward — and what we choose to lay down from our own doing.

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