Cursive

I've always had terrible penmanship.   I would look at other people’s handwriting, particularly in later years as an adult, and appreciate the consistency and smoothness.    It didn’t matter if their handwriting was flowery and large, boxy and small, print or cursive, it all looked better than my scratchy notes.   To me, other people's handwriting seemed to have a consistent style all their own.

My handwriting, on the other hand, was inconsistent, sprawling and ungainly.  Maybe it was because I didn’t like writing.  In part, this was because it hurt to write.   For years it was painful to write for more than a few minutes because my shoulder and neck would go into spasms from the spinal cord injury I have.   I think I tensed up when I would write because I was afraid it was going to hurt, which probably was half the problem and likely contributed to the problem.

My husband has been nice to write thank you notes for me.   Typing on the computer isn’t a problem and I’m fairly fast at it.   I would type up the words I’d want to put on the thank you notes and my husband would write them out for me.   That’s one of those things you don’t appreciate you’re getting when you marry your spouse—how many husbands would write out thank you notes for their wives?

Then my children went to school and started to learn how to write.   My daughter’s writing was arrested due to lack of sight and she took a detour into braille land.   I joined her on the journey and have been learning how to both read and write braille.

At my son’s Montessori school, students are taught cursive.  Cursive is faster to write and is a more fluid way to write as opposed to the stop and start strokes of print.   I looked at my handwriting and discovered I was doing a combination of print and cursive.   If my son was going to learn cursive, I’d see if I could pick it up as well and see if it made a difference in my handwriting.

My husband and I, over the next two years, had to look up how to write certain cursive letters, particularly capitals, and later on even asked my son how specific letters connected to other letters.  I wasn’t doing a lot of cursive writing, mostly because I don’t write very much in this digital day.   But I got practice over time.   For instance, I write my son a little note to go in his lunch box every day.

And I started noticing something: as I practiced cursive writing more, it became easier to write.   My arm didn’t get tired as much because I was more relaxed with my arm and hand.   And I started thinking my handwriting wasn’t so awful anymore.   Then, last week, something happened that I don’t think has ever happened in my life: someone said to me, “oh, you have such beautiful handwriting.”

The Big Boy Update:  My son and I did some origami tonight.   Math origami.   I asked him if he could take a square of paper colored on one side and white on the other and figure out how to fold it so that both sides had half in color and half white.   It’s called ISO Area Folding.   He figured out two ways pretty quickly.   Then he asked me how to fold a cootie catcher.   He’d never folded one before and was pretty excited to find out how easy it was to do.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter wanted to play Hangman tonight.   While I finished something downstairs she created a braille version on a piece of paper.   The game of guessing the letters and figuring out the word was mostly done in our heads, but she tracked all the missed letters and filled in boxes she’d made on the page as I guessed correct letters.   I had gotten the following five letters of a six letter word and couldn’t figure out what it was for a while.   Can you guess the word she gave me: EA _TER