Susanne

Not that it was hard to, we had a pretty nice summer break, only a little busier than I would have liked.

• Not only did I hurt my ankle, I then re-hurt it again, and have had to wear a brace for the last two weeks. Two more weeks to go, and then I’ll hopefully be mobile again.
• I didn’t do most of the things I had planned to do, strangely enough. In the past two days since school started again I have been five times as productive as the weeks before.
• It seems that I really needed time off to get my energy back. Also, sleep. I can’t stress this enough, sleeping enough really makes a huge difference. Of course the last two days, the days when I needed to get up early again, I slept about two hours less than I need. By day two I was almost dozing off in the afternoon, also didn’t stop eating.
• My son earned his first two swim badges. He was really late for the first one, the one where you have to swim 25 meters to prove that you can swim, and after he aced that one (next to children half his age), we decided he should try for the next one, bronze, where you have to swim 200 meters in 15 minutes, jump of the 1 meter diving board, and pick up a ring from the bottom of the pool about two meters down. With a little training he aced that too! I’m very proud of him.
• My son and I also went to see about 60 of our relatives. The offspring of my father’s mother and her siblings. Sixty people, all related to us, and most of them we hadn’t met before. And the hotel, and the lake, and everything was gorgeous.

• My husband and son built a thing where we can store the wood for the stove.
• We went to IKEA, looked at kitchens, were totally overwhelmed, and got home with a desk and chair for our son. Finally, now that he is in fourth grade, our son has his own writing desk for doing his homework.
• We cooked a big dinner for my husband’s uncle and aunt, all Portuguese food. Everybody was totally impressed by it, and by the table setting and all. Nobody had known that we even own a tablecloth. (Unfortunately nobody took any pictures. The next picture is leftovers the day after.)

So now teaching has started again, I hope to settle into a comfortable rhythm in a week or two, and to be back here a bit more often. How was your summer?

I’ve been thinking about handedness a lot lately. One reason for this are my left-handed students, but the foremost reason is my left-handed husband.

When we met he told me that he was ambidextrous. I found that weird but charming. Weird because I hadn’t met anybody who is truly ambidextrous before (and I haven’t met anyone since either). He used different hands for different tasks. He wrote with his right hand, and used scissors too but he cuts bread with his left, stirs pots with his left, and many other things.

Then, a short time after we moved to this house, the house he grew up in, we found some old tapes from his father, and there was one where Saint Nicolaus had come to their house (it was really his uncle dressed up), and told him several things like not to lose his temper all the time, and to always use the spoon with his nice hand! Duh. My husband can’t even remember being told off for using his left hand. But that recording showed that he had been a lefty all along.

Now at the time when my husband was a child left-handed people were usually expected to change their handedness. Which can’t really be done. My husband recalls only one boy in his whole grade who wrote with his left hand. I’m seven years younger than him, and in my time in school there were only ever one or two children who were left-handed. And there still were tons of teachers who forced lefties to write with their right hand.

Ever since knowing that he is left-handed my husband has started to do even more things with his left hand than before. But the things that he didn’t change were the way he wrote, cutting with scissors, and playing guitar and bass. And that, the playing of guitar and bass, was the thing that kept him from changing over. Because he is a professional musician and music teacher. He can’t just switch hands when playing his instruments. It would take decades to come near the level he is playing at now.

Then a friend told him about the book about left-handed people who are acting as if they are right-handed. And we met a couple of people who had changed to writing with their left.

The book, and the people, suggested that using the wrong hand, especially for writing, might account for things that one might think to be character traits. The feeling of being awkward, and somewhat wrong, for example. Being slow in conversation, having trouble to explain one’s thoughts so that others can follow them, trouble remembering things, the feeling of having to be in two places at once, the feeling of everything being too hard, and a bit too much all the time.

Having to write with your wrong hand does things to your brain, muddles things, and makes them quite a bit harder.

And then I read about a study that said that professional musicians who are left-handed but play their instruments the traditional way, even an instrument like piano, are not doing worse than right-handed musicians doing the same. And that there is no real need to switch.

Mind you, I’d still tell every left-handed student of mine who wants to play guitar to get a leftie guitar because that’s easy. But I won’t switch my piano around (though I know people who have done so) because as a pianist you don’t usually bring your own instrument anywhere.

So my husband decided to leave his instruments alone (apart from the bongos which he switched and loved immediately) but he also decided to learn to write with his left hand. (And I also got him two pairs of left-handed scissors, and a pencil sharpener.)

And he says that writing with his left hand, while a bit awkward and unpracticed, feels great. He says he had an immediate feeling of flow, and ease, even though he has to learn how to write for a second time. Mind you, like most of us he isn’t really writing all that much by hand these days. Mostly he types. But still. He said he is feeling lighter, and more at ease, and the feeling of having to be in two places at once all the time just vanished.

So just by changing the hand he writes with my husband has become more lighthearted, and a bit happier, and less grumpy. Like magic.

Mind you, changing that is not easy. For weeks now he has been practicing writing every day. And often still, when he just wants to jot something down on the grocery list, he still uses his right without thinking. And writing is slow again for him, he has to think about it, how to form the letters and such. His first impulse was to write in mirror writing. But he is getting there. Day by day.

And I have to say, seeing his left-handed handwriting makes me totally happy. His writing is so different. Not cramped and small, all the letters pushed together but open, and big, and leaning towards the left. I really love it. And I especially treasure the card he wrote me for my birthday this year, which was the first card in his life that he wrote with his left hand from beginning to end.