The New Yorker:

In my family, left-handedness meant the omnipotence of motherhood—but also the burdens it could bring.

By Megan Marshall

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without an exchange of gifts among my two grandmothers, mother, and aunt, featuring the trait they shared: all four were left-handed. Waiting for them under the tree in our sunny Pasadena living room might be left-handed oven mitts or can openers, kitchen gadgets too mundane to pass as gifts for righties, but treasures to the matriarchal quartet. I’ll never forget the crows of delight one Christmas morning as they unwrapped identical packages to find pairs of left-handed sewing scissors, the first designed and widely marketed not just with upside-down handles but with inverted blades to make cutting fabric easy.

All four of them sewed—my mother and her sister-in-law, to economize on dresses for themselves and their daughters. My maternal grandmother specialized in holiday-themed projects: red corduroy vests for the men of the family, embroidered table runners. My father’s mother had never taken to the sewing machine and instead knitted afghans and scarves. Left-handedness may have been the reason she never progressed beyond the basic garter stitch. Left-handed knitters, I would later learn, are sometimes forced to study themselves in the mirror to master more complicated stitches pictured in instruction manuals issued for the right-handed ninety per cent.

When I was young, in the nineteen-fifties, left-handedness meant the omnipotence of motherhood. Surely I would grow up to be a left-handed woman, too. Slowly, I began to realize that would never be. My right hand took over when I scribbled with crayons and when I learned to print letters in pencil at school. I had a new best friend who was left-handed—new because I’d been skipped into second grade in the middle of my first-grade year. Catherine lived up the street, and she was an ace at jacks. With her left hand, she bounced one of her father’s old golf balls on the cool concrete of the shaded front porch where we sat cross-legged facing each other, and swiftly scooped up the scuffed six-pointed stars, first one per bounce, then in sets of two and three, on up to the full grab of ten, just in time to catch the ball. I was mesmerized. She’d won before I could even take a turn.

Go to link