I remember when I first started wearing gloves. My mother gave me a “training” pair. I was hesitant, nervous, and shoving my knuckles into that small space felt so claustrophobic I began to cry.

“You’ll get used to it soon enough,” she said, but as my fingers began to feel dewy with the constant shelter and cramped in their newly restricted space, I only began to get used to collecting grievances. My new gloves were made of leather. They were squeaky and hot and a little-too-bulky, with some decorative rivets placed here and there that pulled the threads out of things as I folded laundry. My knuckles couldn’t bend as freely as they used to, and I had to relearn many tasks and forget I loved doing others. 

My mother, your grandmother, didn’t tolerate much of my complaining. Her gloves were medical gloves, the saunas of gloves, yet a glove with a stable source of income. She saw gloves as protective and practical after a life of wearing the least fashionable yet most respected gloves there are. They were flimsy, so they weren’t very useful in a snowstorm, but she worked in a hospital and shuffled into her shift with her hands stuffed in her pockets. Gloves were gloves, to her. No need to make a fuss.

Then, I met someone whose gloves were raggedy and it made me blush. This was in college. She walked into the cafeteria with such a bubbly, flirtatious energy that when she plopped herself next to my crush, I felt hot. The sight of her fraying seams, the sight of a raunchy painted fingernail poking through her fabric…It was like a spotlight, an invitation. And the boys at the table all gravitated toward her like moths. I felt so lonely in moments like that. My gloves felt burdensome, too concealing. Jealousy bloomed in my chest like a corpse flower, reeking of something rotten.

There was a time when I would spend late hours clicking my way through illicit galleries of women’s hands on the internet, “doing research.” I discovered fingers can be large and powerful just as they can be slender and small. Fingers can be wonderfully stubby and hairy and chubby and gnarled. But the gloves were the more difficult research. There were silks and sheers and sequins and it all made me shudder. Try as I might, it’s still difficult to accept that gloves come in all materials, too. 

I was so scared when you were born and they told me you were a girl. And I only became more frightened as I watched your fingers undulating like seaweed, soaking up the sunlight. You were wild and natural and carefree. You gnawed on your hands with reverence. And soon, it would be my responsibility to separate gum and thumb, to go against what is natural to keep you safe.

When you were eight, your gloves arrived in a cardboard box on the doorstep. It was sooner than I expected, sooner than I was preparing for. Yet, when I asked my mother about it, she didn’t even blink up at me from her charts. “You were six,” she said. “And some start even younger.”

I watched you open the box, just as my mother must’ve watched me. When you pulled out a pair of woolen mittens, we made eye contact. It’s like you already knew they weren’t going to suit you. There were no words to say except, “Put them on.” You cried for weeks after that, and I felt a wound open between us, like the cutting of another umbilical cord.  

Your gloves were itchy, scratchy, they made your knuckles red. Yet, they were also too soft. Glasses slipped out of your grasp. At least the mittens’ big pockets contained four of your fingers, together. I told myself that I was happy your fingers wouldn’t be splayed apart as mine were. I was relieved there was room for you to wiggle, at least. 

I should’ve expected you to hate them. You’re my daughter, after all. You hid them, forgot them, and I’d have to chase after you, waving them in your face. Each scolding returned us to that original wound. Each iteration made the gash wider. It was a sort of betrayal, I know. But I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t think there was anything else to do. And when you eventually started to listen, as broken horses do, I convinced myself it was better that way. You stopped complaining about wearing your mittens to school, and it made the mornings more pleasant. Then, time blurred in that way of the passing years, and I realized it had been ages since you took them off at home, resting their snowflake pattern by the banana bowl on the kitchen counter. It was strange to realize that you sometimes forgot to take them off before falling asleep. It was strange to witness your acclimatization. I hoped it meant that we could now regain some lost footing between us. And we did. Life assumed a steady rhythm. Things were normal. Things seemed good.

As a teenager, you began to decorate your room with pictures of colder climes. You started taping posters of the arctic and the Aurora Borealis on your wall in the scrapbook fashion of adolescence. I felt relieved, like you were beginning to discover your niche. Whenever I vacuumed your carpet, I’d look at those posters and try to prepare myself for what seemed inevitable. One day, you were going to leave me for somewhere farther north. One day, to visit you would mean to bundle up. To breathe frost. I would comfort myself, thinking of the future fires we’d warm ourselves around. The snow angels we’d create, feeling puffy and holy as children in our snowsuits and scarves. Bundling up would’ve been easier than this. 

I hope you’re safe out there. When I first heard the news, I pictured you and a group of others roaming through the redwoods as gloveless as five year olds and I thought, What Eden is this? Then, the same old fears and realities came fluttering back in. What is this group you’re with? How can you be sure to trust them? Most men are moths, but life taught me that there are always a few mosquitoes in the mix.

“It was founded by a group of sheer-gloved sisters. Who knows better than them how to stay safe?” 

“But, men are there?”

“Yes, Mom. They’re here to heal, too.”

“If there are men there, I won’t go.”

“Okay. Just sit on it for a while. Let’s talk again, soon.”

I remember those first phone calls clearly. You asked me to join you, and I couldn’t. I miss you so much, but I can’t. I’ve worn these gloves so long, I fear shedding the leather would slough my skin off. How could I possibly handle the world witnessing my hands, when I’ve avoided them for decades, now? Simply standing in the bathroom mirror with their pale bareness hanging limply at my sides makes me feel disembodied. 

“It’s a place to heal,” you say. You said it would take time before my palms were strong enough again to face the sun, rising up as if in praise or submission. It would take time to relearn old, forgotten movements. And even longer to do them with confidence and power, to weed out any sense of shame or panic. I believe you, I believe you, I really do. And I want to let you know I’m on my way. It may take years, but I’m on my way. If the fear were smaller, I’d be on my way now, watching the pines rush by through the train windows, watching the space shrink between us. If the fear was smaller, I’d already be walking with you, hand in gloveless hand.

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Karina Dove Escobar is a writer from a little Connecticut town on the shore of Long Island Sound. She is currently living on the bank of a very green river in Japan with her spouse and twin toddlers. Check out her other words in Planet Scumm, Grim & Gilded, The Rappahannock Review, and forthcoming from Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Blue Earth Review, NUNUM, and The Interpreter’s House.