Saturday, 21 August 2010

• Please, Damn It, Stop Trying to Hold My Hand

  
  Nope, it has nothing to do with the fact that hand-holding is, as my mom used to call it, "the gateway to pregnancy"-- it has to do with the fact that my hands, not my thighs or belly or womanly hind-parts, are the part of my body of which I'm most ashamed.
  
  This warrants a brief description of my typing-mechanisms: they're not unusually large or small. In fact, a glance at them would reveal nothing out of the ordinary, other than my obvious affinity for lots and lots of silver rings. No, the backs of my hands are quite an unremarkable sight, but to touch them is to realize that in my conception, my mom must have genetically spliced me with some sort of reptile.
  
  For years, they've pissed me off, being the defiant little bastards they are:
  1) They appear to repel all sorts of moisture, which makes it awkward when I go swimming and my hands create little pockets of air around themselves.
  2) They soak up oil, sure, but so immediately that I could sell my hands as some sort of ultra-absorbent grease cleaner.
  3) They're just plain rough, and full of more creases than a crumpled up sheet of Saran Wrap.
  
  In my cruel middle and high school days, they were the subject of much ridicule (because clearly most kids' lives were so deeply uninteresting that they could find nothing better to do then call me "grandma hands," which, let's face it, is the mots creative nickname EVER.) Underst(h)andably, I was quite self-conscious of the apparent shriveled raisins that dangled from my wrists.
  
  One night when I skipped gleefully off to one of my first dates, I arrived at the movie theater, perky and, for one of the only times in my life, on time (clearly, my German half doesn't dictate my promptness). I sat down next to this boy, whose name I honestly can't recall, and employed my new, bulletproof date maneuver:
  
  I would hold my own hand for thirty minutes or so, just so it would reach normal-person-level warmth and moistness. Then, I held his, and to my delight, he didn't recoil and say, "Woah! Your hands are rough!" like most boys had.
  
  So for years I used this tactic, until late high school and college when my hands started to become much less of a ground-breaking social discussion. But while I'm not terribly self-conscious of my hands anymore, I certainly don't find them to be one of my loveliest attributes.
  
  Imagine my surprise when I spent time with a man this weekend, who, completely unprovoked, stroked the backs of my fingers and said, "You have interesting hands." In context, this statement didn't sound nearly as much like a "I'd like to chop off those hands of yours and keep them in a jar in my basement" proclamation as I just made it seem. Actually, it was one of the most surprising and romantic things I had ever heard. I suppose it just goes to show that no matter how much you hate certain parts of your body, there's always going to be someone who finds something to love about them.
  
  Have any of your boyfriends made you feel better about your body? What parts of your body do you dislike being touched or looked at?
  

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