Lefties Of The World Unite

I think I had a notepad that said, “Lefties of the world Unite!” when I was a little girl.   Or maybe it was a t-shirt, I can’t remember.   My cousin and I turned out to be left-handed when none of our four parents were.    Seeing as we had educators and scientists raising us, they were understandably interested “why”, or if there actually was a why in the first place.   Maybe it was a “why not?”

The subject was deemed important.   Research was done, articles were published and notepads were printed up.    I remember the notepads my cousin and I got for Christmas one year.    Those notepads are long gone, but my parents did something interesting: they both were into clipping articles from the myriad periodicals they read.   They would take articles on all different subjects they were interested in and sort them them into manila folders so they could find them later.  They did this for years and years.   I remember folders all over the basement floor as my dad would go through months of periodicals, sorting and cataloging them.

Today my mother brought over a manila folders labeled, “Handedness” and gave it to me. It was all the articles she and my father had cut and saved over the years.   This was way before the internet.   This was even before personal computers.   This was old school scissors and the printed word.

The articles ranged from the late 1980’s all the way back to January 1976, just before I turned six-years-old.   I was already left-hand dominant by six which must have sparked the folder and article collection.

I haven’t had a chance to read any of the articles yet.  I wonder if they’re still relevant today or if they’ve been superseded with newer research on why it is we left-handed people get ink on our hands when we write?

The Big Boy Update:   My son had a hard time at OT today.   At the end when I came inside to pick him up we got into a conversation that his therapist ended up facilitating.   It carried over into the car ride home.   My son has a hard time with conflict and he’s been saying, “I hate my life.  I want to die” lately.    This isn’t depression or a want for suicide—he’s too young to really understand the depths of the concepts at seven.   But it does mean he’s upset or unhappy and he’s heard words to use that he thinks describe how he feels.    On the way home today he explained in more detail to me about how he feels.   He told me, “Reese is mainly the thing that makes my life horrible.   School, my sister…sometimes myself.   And Lilah at school.   She laughed at me.  Whitaker punches me.   I try not to cry and tell him to go home.   Whit is really nice, he’s the least of the things I don’t like.   Wait, there’s one more thing: my parents.  My parents are the second biggest thing.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter told my son the other day, “Greyson, I’m going to give you a lesson.   If someone doesn’t want to do something and you want them to do it, you cannot make them do it.”