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.
Every morning and afternoon, my mother wore cotton gloves to pick us up and drop us off. My new school friends would ask me why she was wearing gloves and if they sat next to me during mass, they’d know why. My mother was raised in Taiwan, where her parents had built a glass wall around her grand piano as a reminder that her grueling practice sessions, several hours a day, were first priority. And it eventually paid off. She was accepted into a prestigious music conservatory to study classical piano near Tokyo. After her graduation, she had great promise to become a renowned concert pianist, embarking on many performances that supported this vision. My Irish Australian father (now her ex-husband), who deliberately reserves compliments about her, recently described her to me as being “talented” when they first met in Japan. Mastering the piano was a source of pride for my mother, a delicate but disciplined art that requires finesse between keys, fingers, foot, and pedal. Classical…
