Hand Me Downs

A guest post today from my daughter, Beth-Alison Berggren.

When I was young, I loved my mother’s hands.

I loved my grandmother’s hands, too.

I can see them still.

Not perfectly, perhaps. Memory never hands us back what we ask for exactly. It softens edges. It changes the light. It leaves out what we wish we had noticed and saves, for reasons of its own, some small thing we didn’t know mattered.

But I remember their hands.

My grandmother’s hands busy with whatever needed doing.

My mother’s hands holding a book, a pen, a cup of tea. Reaching for something. Resting, briefly, in her lap.

I remember the shape of them. The veins. The knuckles. The way skin, after enough years, stops pretending it has nothing to say.

Those hands seemed beautiful to me.

Not beautiful in the way the world usually uses that word. Not smooth. Not young. Not untouched.

Beautiful because they were known to me.

Beautiful because they had done the work of living and loving.

As a girl, I never looked at my own hands and thought much about them. They were simply mine. Small, then larger. Useful. Obedient, mostly. They buttoned, carried, scribbled, waved, held on, let go.

I did not imagine that time was already moving through them.

I did not imagine that one day I would look down and find my mother there.

And my grandmother.

But now I do.

Sometimes I catch sight of my hands unexpectedly. In the morning light. On the steering wheel. Curled around a mug. Folded together while I am thinking.

And there they are.

The hands I loved before I knew I was loving my own future.

The same bones rising. The same veins making their small blue roads. The same loosening skin. The same quiet announcement:

You came from us.

And instead of turning away, instead of mourning what has changed, I feel a surprising pleasure.

Almost pride.

There are so many things we inherit without choosing them. A name. A story. A habit of speech. A way of worrying. A way of laughing. A silence. A strength.

And, sometimes, hands.

Hand-me-downs, we call the things passed along after someone else has used them. Clothes worn soft by another body. A chair polished by another’s weight. A recipe card stained by another cook.

But this hand-me-down came slowly.

Year by year.

Line by line.

Until one day I looked down and recognized what I had been given.

My mother’s hands.

My grandmother’s hands.

Now mine.

A note about this piece.  My daughter is not a writer.  In fact, she’ll tell you she hates writing, yet she offered to write this guest blog for me.  Let me give you some context.

When Beth-Alison started first grade and her brother was in third, I had, for the first time, the space to turn a guilty hobby into full-time work.  And I did.  I sat down at the 1956 Smith Corona portable typewriter that had been my high school graduation gift and wrote.  I had no mentor.  No contacts.  I didn’t even know another writer.  I just decided, at last, to treat my writing like a full-time job.  So that’s what Beth-Alison saw when she came home from school: me, laboring at my typewriter.  (It must have looked like labor to her, though to me it felt like the most blessed play.)  Day after day.  Year after year.  And though books did appear … eventually, she saw long labor and small reward.  So she made up her mind and told me so.  She would never be a writer.  In fact, she also told me she was pretty sure writing was the worst job in the world.

Her prediction about her future was accurate.  She did not grow up to be a writer.  She became a businesswoman.  She also became my rock.  A couple of times a week, she comes onto my computer and rescues me from whatever has overwhelmed me.  She designed my website and handles my postings and does the same for a few other writers, all while holding down a full-time job.  A job, incidentally, that involves extensive writing.  Yet she, who delivered this lovely piece, still says she’s not a writer.  She even says she hates writing.  How can that be?

Okay, my fellow writers, take a deep breath here.  Are you ready?

My wonderful daughter uses ChatGPT! 

I asked Beth-Alison how she created the blog you’ve just read, and here was her answer:  “What I did was write down my thoughts on what I wanted to convey, my feelings about it, and some context. Definitely not a well-written piece, more a stream of consciousness. I have a tool that, if I give it the right instructions, helps me say what I want to say easily.”

Yes, I know.  Sacrilege!  But this is the world we live in today, and I, for one, am delighted that this woman who hates to write had whatever help she needed to frame her very genuine thoughts and feelings into words.

Is AI creating problems for working writers?  Of course.  That the Authors Guild now provides “Human Authored” stickers for our books makes those problems clear.  And even before we were in competition with AI, a recent Guild survey found that the median book income for publishing writers was only a few thousand dollars a year. 

I’m a very old lady, but I believe ardently in living in the world I’ve been given, not grieving over the loss of some presumed golden age.  We have lots of work ahead to manage and direct and control this astounding new technology.  Profoundly challenging work.  In the meantime, though, I’ll hold my daughter’s AI-assisted words in my heart. 

How glad I am that she, who knew when she was very small that she hated writing, found so eloquent a way to make a gift of her thoughts!