They say you can tell a mother’s story by looking at her hands.
I watched my own mama’s hands this morning as she stirred grits at the stove – those same hands that once braided my hair tight enough to last the week, that clapped the loudest at every school performance, that wiped away tears and sometimes caused them when I needed discipline. Her knuckles now tell tales of arthritis, but those hands still move with purpose, with memory, with love.
Black motherhood lives in hands.
Growing up in Texas, I learned early that our mothers’ hands weren’t just tools for nurturing – they were instruments of survival, of resistance, of creation. My grandmother’s hands picked cotton before they picked me up. My mother’s hands typed lesson plans and evaluations. My sister’s hands now hold grandkids that she happily passes back to her sons after an afternoon of babysitting.
“Our hands remember what our minds try to forget,” Big Mama would say, watching my mother heat that cast iron comb on the stove before pressing my hair on Sunday evenings. The kitchen transformed into a sacred space as she’d smooth my unruly curls with precision and care. The ritual felt ancient, passed down through bloodlines that stretched back to ancestors whose names I remember with the same precision I remember my sorority’s founders.
What is it about a mother’s touch that remains imprinted on our souls long after childhood? Science tells us that skin-to-skin contact releases oxytocin – the love hormone – creating bonds that shape our neural pathways. But any Black child knows there’s something deeper, something spiritual in the way a mother’s hands can transfer protection, wisdom, and strength through fingertips.
These hands multitask in ways that defy logic. They braid hair while quizzing spelling words. They cook Sunday dinner while balancing checkbooks. They soothe fevered foreheads while drafting work presentations. In Black households especially, mother’s hands rarely rest – moving from paid labor to emotional labor without pause, often caring for extended family and community children alongside their own.
“I wasn’t just raising you,” my mother told me recently. “I was preparing you for the woman you’d become, the mother you might be, the community you would serve.” Her hands, cupping my face as she spoke, felt like the most familiar geography – the valleys of her palms, the ridges of her fingerprints, the warmth that radiates only from a mother’s skin.
The pandemic brought new attention to the labor of mothers’ hands – suddenly visible as essential, though they’d always been. Black mothers, disproportionately represented in frontline healthcare, education, and service industries, extended their hands to heal, teach, and support while carrying the heaviest burdens of loss and worry home to their families.
Truly consider the duality of it all – the same hands that administer medicine, build structures, and serve communities gently cradling children’s faces. Black mothers have never had the luxury of separating their worker identity from their mother identity. Their hands tell the complete story.
This Mother’s Day, I find myself studying my own hands – wondering if they hold the same magic, the same strength as the maternal hands that shaped me. Though not a mother myself, I recognize their inheritance: the way my right thumb rubs nervously against my fingers when worried (Big Mama or Granny); how my palms cup around a coffee mug (my mother); the strength in my grip when I’m determined (generations of women who refused to let go).
The hands of Black mothers have always built what seemed impossible. They’ve turned meager ingredients into feasts, stretched paychecks beyond mathematics, and molded children into adults who could navigate hostile worlds. They’ve voted, protested, created, and sheltered. They’ve prayed when words failed, and worked when prayers needed reinforcing.
If you want to honor a Black mother this Mother’s Day, watch her hands. Notice how they move through the world – creating, protecting, building. Ask about the stories written in her palms. And then, most importantly, offer your hands in return – to lighten her load, to continue her work, to hold what she has always held.
Because we are all, in some way, being carried by the hands that hold us – even when we’re grown, even when we’re strong, even when we’re holding others. The imprint of our mothers’ hands remains, guiding us forward, showing us how to grip tightly what matters and when to open our palms and release.
