Tender Loving Care

When I was ten, my mother sat me down at the kitchen table. A paring knife and a reddish-yellow apple on a paper plate lay in front of me. "Today, I'm going to teach you an important life lesson," she told me. She came up behind me, her arms around both sides of my body, and took the apple and the knife off the table. "Today, I am going to teach you how to slice an apple," she said.
I'd seen her do this countless times. She'd twirl it in one hand, effortlessly shaving off the skin with the knife she held in the other, and then cutting the flesh into twelve perfectly even pieces. Sometimes the slices would be arranged on a plate with a glob of peanut butter for my after school snack. Sometimes they'd be dropped into a Ziplock bag and placed lovingly under the ice pack in my lunch box. And then, at holidays, when the apples were bitter green and not for me, they'd be baked into a crust with brown sugar and served with vanilla ice cream. It had never occurred that someday I'd have to learn to slice my own apples. My mother did it so well. She dissected it quickly, precisely, and with little or no concern for the damage a paring knife could do to her lovely, manicured fingers were she to make one false move. I had little confidence that I would ever wield a knife with the same insouciance.
My mother put the apple in my left hand and the knife in my right. I flipped the blade over so that it faced away from me and touched it lightly to the skin. My mother took my hand and gently turned the blade to face me. "You always hold it so that it's facing you," she said.
"But what if I stab myself or cut off my fingers?" This was as a likelihood that I immediately wished I hadn't thought of. Images of me slicing off my thumb, blood everywhere, passing out, a trip to the emergency room immediately came to mind. I wouldn't be able to hold a pen without my thumb. My classmates would make fun of me. I'd drop out of school. I would never marry; no one would want me. My mother would be slicing my apples for the rest of my life—if I could ever bear to eat another apple. I'd be doomed to lead a lonely, thumbless existence.
"If you hold it like this, you won't," she explained, thoughtfully. "Because when you're pointing a knife at yourself, you'll be careful. You're aware that you could get cut. If you hold it away from you, it doesn't have the same effect. You'll get careless because you'll feel safe, and then BAM! you'll slice your finger clean off."
This did not reassure me. I turned and looked up at my mother's face. She was smiling. I was so terrified that I began smiling, too.
"Trust me, honey," she cooed as she put her hands around mine, moving them to make cuts in the apple in a slow, controlled way that made me less afraid. "There you go, you got it," she said as she removed her hands. I sliced the rest of the apple in the time it would've taken my mom to slice ten of them.
When I was done, I picked up a piece and bit into it. My mother did the same.
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