Winning the Race

All my life i have been different from everyone else. The reason is that I’m missing my left hand. When I was younger, my parents treated me like a normal kid. Except they didn’t want me to look different--not because they didn’t accept me the way I was, but because they didn’t want others to make fun of me. They wanted me to wear a prosthesis--a fake hand, which caused a lot of conflict between us because I never liked to wear one. It just isn’t me. It took a while but my parents finally agree that if I didn’t want to wear a prosthesis I didn’t have to. Now that they’ve gotten used to the idea, they prefer to see me without a fake hand.

When I was younger, my dad went to the library to see if he could find any books for children with handicaps. The only one he came up with was called “The One-Hander’s Book” by Veronica Washam. My favorite page was in the beginning where there was a definition from Webster’s Dictionary of a handicap. It said: “Handicap--a race or contest . . . in which in order to equalize chances of winning, an artificial disadvantage is imposed on a supposedly superior contestant.”