She is not a hand-holder.
That is not a criticism. It is just true, just part of the particular shape of her love, which has always expressed itself more through presence than through contact, more through the practical thing done than the gesture made, more through having the right coat packed and the right soup on the stove than through the extended hand or the prolonged embrace. I knew this. I grew up knowing this. I am her daughter and I learned love from her particular way of giving it and I have some of her tendencies toward the practical expression and away from the demonstrative one.
But she held my hand at the airport.
The year I was going away for the first time, really going, the first independent going, not to a school or a program but just away, just a decision I had made about where I needed to be for a while. She drove me. She carried one of my bags. She stood with me in the departures hall in the way that parents stand in departures halls, slightly uncertain, the end of the practical having arrived and only the symbolic left, and she took my hand.
Not to stop me. She was not stopping me. She knew I was going and she wanted me to go, she had said so, had said it in the direct way she says things that she has decided and does not intend to revisit. She held my hand the way you hold something you are about to release. The way you hold it once, fully, before the letting go.
I have held her hand many times since then and it is always different and always the same thing.
The same fundamental act, the taking of someone’s hand, the whole of what that means, which is: I am here, you are here, there is this between us, whatever comes next there is this. She holds my hand differently now, more often, at the appointments and in the evenings and on the days when she is uncertain and my hand is something certain to hold. The direction of the holding has changed. I am the one who is solid. She is the one who holds.
It is still the same thing. Still the hand and the here and the whatever-comes-next, there is this.
There is always this.
