Leading from my baby or pinky finger took me back to my childhood – made of pinky promises, bike gangs with friends, movies like The Sandlot, My Girl, and Now and Then.
Being transported to that felt sense of innocence was so beautiful. Images from Anne Geddes photographs that could be purchased at our school’s scholastic day showed young boys and girls looking softly and sweetly towards each other clasping pinky fingers while walking down a hazy cobblestone street. They were young yet Anne always managed to make them look old timey.
The pink finger took me back to my love of Winnie the Pooh – having received many books as gifts from my childhood. I imagine Piglet as the pinky finger of the group and I believe Pooh would be the palm – never pointing, never leading, just holding space/ an opening for other finger personalities to join and walk their own direction.
At the age of 9 or 10, my parents had taken my sister and I to a dry dock storage for boats. I believe we were there to pick up or drop off our family boat for the season.
I have an image of my parents leaned in towards each other in disagreement over something. While my sister and I waited at the edge of the lot, I jumped up to hang from the metal gate. It was a rolling gate that slid open and closed on metal spools. Without paying much attention, my sister pushed the gate open and it rolled over my left pinky finger. I don’t remember feeling any pain – only the impulse to notify my parents because it was quite literally gushing blood. It had split the skin open just below the knuckle.
The feeling I remember most from that time was the long minutes I stood, looking up at my parents, holding my finger, hoping one of them would notice me. They were still in the middle of their argument and didn’t notice I was there until blood was really spewing. I held my pinky finger up and as my mother was about to shoo me away, she finally noticed and they took me to get stitched up.
The takeaway as a child was that although I had done nothing wrong and I was the injured one, it was me who had inconvenienced my parents that day.
As I write that, it seems my baby finger has had me pay attention to my throat – specifically the left side – it is starting to tighten or come online.
A thought I had was that I really need to honour and nurture my own inner child. How would I have handled that situation differently as the parent? Would I have been arguing with my spouse?
Would I have held my kids in my arms and prevented the incident altogether?
Gabor Maté says each sibling has a very different childhood, and I believe him when he describes that…
where rivers are born 