Lefties-R-Us

Some people would consider my grandmother and me ambidextrous, but I know better. I am and she was left-handed. To my grandmother, I was not simply her youngest grandchild; I was a cause to be defended. “Don’t ever let anyone try to change you to being right-handed,” was a mantra I knew well before I entered kindergarten. My grandmother’s voice encourages me to this day to be who I am, even if that means being different from the crowd. This is an encouragement I hope to pass on to my left-handed daughter.

Our ability to use both hands developed out of the necessity of living in a right-handed world. Though that necessity didn’t become clear to me until I was in college, my grandmother was forced to face it at a much younger age. Children in my grandmother’s day were not supposed to be left-handed. I can only guess at the reasons for this. It may have been religion. Many tales are told of how the left hand is the hand of the devil—the sinister hand—those inclined to use it must be corrected of their evil ways. It may have been for conformity; perhaps, no child was supposed to be different from her peers. It may have been to ease the learning process. I remember many times when people have given up in the frustration of teaching me tasks of dexterity. Too often my mentors were overwhelmed in the frustration of trying to teach me “backwards,” and I would become too frustrated to insist that they continue. To avoided frustrating my professors in college I simply converted to learning right-handed.

I went to college to learned to be a dental hygienist, a profession requiring many hours of training in manual dexterity. The equipment was all right-handed and so were the professors. I found myself acquiescing to the encouragement of my instructor to “try it right-handed,” as I forced the voice of my grandmother to the sidelines of my mind. I saved my college professors the frustration experienced by the teachers that had come before them. The reward for this is the ability to appear ambidextrous—just like my grandmother.

My grandmother was a writer. She wrote poetry and was a prolific letter writer. By the time I knew her she was elderly and spent most of her time at her kitchen table. If she was not entertaining me, my siblings, or an occasional guest she was writing or crocheting—both of which she could do with either hand with equal ease.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that my grandmother, my youngest daughter, and

I –each of us left-handed--all share this love of writing. Science tells us that, as left-handers, we predominantly use the creative right side of the brain. We simply think different than our right-handed counterparts. It’s this difference that makes us unique individuals.

Will my daughter become ambidextrous? When I consider my self-esteem and the influences that have formed it over the years I am grateful for my grandmother’s teaching. Her voice within me has at times been strong and firm, at times has faded onto the sidelines of my consciousness, but it is always there. For my daughter, my hope is that my grandmother’s voice of uniqueness and of strength will connect across the lines of time and generations. Some conformity to the right-handed world is inevitable, but I will encourage her, as my grandmother encouraged me to embrace being different.