On genetics, lineage and international women’s day

I am Ali. Daughter of Colleen, granddaughter of Ruth and Alvina, great grandaughter of Margaret, Helen, Bertha and Mary, great great grandaughter of Anastasia, Luisa, Lizzie, Emma, Helena. The mother of Paris. I come from a lineage of strong women. I am a strong woman. I carry both life and death in my womb.

When I was preparing this week’s blog post on ovulation and transplant, I wrote “All I know of birth is death.” I held these like they were opposites. Here’s what I know now: it’s not a spectrum, it’s a circle. The same energy it takes to be born is the energy it takes to die, and when tethered between the two something really holy is transmuted.

In my morning pages I’ve been sitting with and deconstructing this idea of Lilith. The way she ties in to so many of the wounds surfacing for me right now around having a mother and being a mother, the way my genetic lineage both soothes and stings.

Yesterday I went to the hospital expecting to get clearance for a new drug trial. I left with news of another genetic diagnosis, another missing enzyme. I laughed, because what are the odds. I spit fire, because that’s what I do when waves rock inside me. And then I sat with this idea of a genetic disease, something I was born with (or in this case something I was born without), and how it feels not unlike the deep, emotional work I’ve been doing surrounding lineage and family. How it seems to have appeared, or been diagnosed, at the exact moment I am becoming a mother for the second time, in a very different way, and my own mother who I’ve been tethered to for 25 years is moving away from me, and trying to understand this delicate balance of holding boundaries and cutting contact with various members of my extended family.

This genetic disease, something passed down through my familial line, as my own idea of what family means is shifting. As I have and am mothering children I have no genetic connection to, and how I loved and let go of the one who did. Paris’s birthday is on March 14, and yesterday marked the beginning of the end as our one week hospital stay which was his final days began. March 7 is also the day my cousin died 9 years ago, which forever changed the shape and texture of our family and my understanding of it. March 7, and 27, 25 years apart, were the days doctors told me I had a genetic disease, and tiny fractures were made in what I thought I knew.

So I’m sitting with this idea of what family means, and where we come from. The women that came before me, and the ones that will come after. The familial ties that bind, the ones that sever, the ones that exist beyond birth and death.

And that thing I wrote about Lilith: “You, the most beautiful erruption of water fire. Lava runs deep in our familial bones.”

My familial line has been severed into me, never to be forgotten. It aches with disease and lack. It swells with strength and pride.

Here is to strong women. May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them.