I look at my hands, and I see her hands.

I’m not sure when this happened. Like plump sultanas, the skin over my knuckle joints has ripened and wrinkled. My juice runs close to the surface, shadowed veins raised. Stretched over the structures, my skin has a delicate criss-cross texture, like expensive leather, that the freckles don’t hide.

It’s just exactly the way I remember her hands.

And the body is much the same. I love my body – its power and its competence and its sex appeal. I love the things it allows me to do, and the pleasure. But, like having double vision I can see my mother’s body, overlaid upon my own in the mirror, and it’s the same. We are one and the same.

I see her and myself at the same time through my judgemental 12-year-old eyes, remembering my vicious judgements, my hot proxy shame. Did she really think it was OK to bare that doughy midriff, marked as it was by motherhood? Yes, I do.

The hands, though, I love them and fear them. Now, thirty years later, my mother’s hands are little gnarled. Bony with skin gone papery and desperately soft despite all the hard things they have handled. Still strong, durable, experienced. Holding those hands in mine or in my mind, I can feel the loss in advance.

Loss of her.

A glimpse to my own future and the hard things I too will handle, those things that I will not always be able to hold on to.