Mother of a Mother
The birth of us
At 31, my mom became pregnant with me. At 31, I became pregnant with my daughter. Like Russian dolls, we are three generations inside of each other.
While I was pregnant, I learned that as my daughter was growing so were her potential future children. When a baby girl grows in utero, her ovaries and all of her eggs are forming, too. Two generations are forming at once.
The choices, circumstances, and experiences of each generation have their reverberations.
Dear mom, can you tell me how this all goes?
A mother is born. I stare into my daughter’s dark blue eyes and wonder what it was like when my mom stared into mine.
I stress over my daughter’s runny noses and wonder what it was like for my mom to tend to mine. I read the books, I went to the appointments, and I checked the boxes — but nowhere was there a warning label that having a daughter would make you question what kind of one you were.
No one told me that once I became a mother, the relationship I had with mine would change — that I would question the kind of mother she was.
My mom wore a cheap perm with highlights. It was the early nineties. She was beautiful, but she was…
