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My Mother’s Dreams Slipped Through My Sweaty Fingers
We have a condition that forges both a bond — and a rift
I had memorized the exact words leading up to the “sign of peace,” a ritualistic tradition in a Catholic mass where you turn to your neighbors and shake their hands. I did that so I could anticipate it, wringing out my drenched palms on the sides of my school uniform. But small interruptions or the priest’s unnatural pauses would throw me off my game. It was a tortuous feedback loop; the more I anticipated it, the more my hands would drip. It was a medical condition known as hyperhidrosis. And I inherited it from my mother.
In what would have been my first year of elementary school, I migrated from Japan to Australia (with a very limited vocabulary). My sister and I had entered in the middle of the school year, which made enrollments from public schools close to home nearly impossible. But we were accepted into a private elementary school 30 minutes away. To ease assimilation, we were thrown into an English as a Second Language (ESL) program, accompanied by only one other student out of the entire school, and then subsequently baptized under the Catholic faith. Australia’s dominant ancestry is largely made up of English and Irish, which meant a lot of the private schools had Catholic or Christian affiliations.
