Austin says that he gets all the main benefits of div school because I come home and tell him all the best stuff—but I submit as evidence that time we were sitting on his couch and he kept not doing his homework so he could read mine (it was about gender among the ancient Greeks, and it was fascinating). So you should all go to div school, but here are the ideas that are lighting me up this week:

Mothers and Grandmothers

I’m in this class called “Encountering Motherhood: Sacred Histories,” and my professor is intensely motherly. She’s also quite hippy, which I associate that with motherliness, because my mom is also kind of a hippy. My professor wears long green velvet dresses, and the first day of class she assured us it was OK not to come because of family emergencies, and “family includes pets, I want to be clear. If your goldfish dies, and you’re very upset about that, I will absolutely understand.”

I love her.

Anyway, all of this to say: you have your mother’s cells in you. Via the umbilical cord and womb, huge colonies of cells produced in one body migrate to the other body. No one is really sure what the mother’s cells do in the baby’s body, but (BUT) the baby’s cells often attach themselves to a mother’s vital organs, especially if some of those organs are struggling. So, if a mother has heart disease the baby’s stem cells will go there. Women with heart disease are less likely to die if they have a baby. Women whose baby’s cells are in their brains are also less likely to have Alzheimer’s.

These cells are permanent, which means that you have your mother’s cells in you—but also probably your grandmothers and your older siblings. You are not just built from borrowed DNA, but from borrowed matter.

That’s the stuff that’s true and factual, the stuff you can publish in a scientific journal. Here’s the stuff that would pop up in a theology journal or in an HDS discussion (so possibly more true but less factual):

My professor says that this undermines the idea of individuality—we are not and cannot be complete individuals, because our very cells come from the outside. We are permeable in ways we did not know. She says “childbirth creates two people who are not only related but are literally part of one another.” We’re our mothers and our grandmothers and our siblings, we’re “enfolded communities,” a whole congregation unto ourselves.

My class had very mixed reactions to this. Most people were cool with the idea of their cells in their hypothetical children, but fewer were excited by the idea that they were carrying around their mothers with them. One of my friends is adopted, and she didn’t like the idea that parts of her came from someone she never even knew. Her mom wasn’t the person who gave birth to her.

Those responses totally make sense, but they weren’t mine.

Here’s what I was thinking about: a few years ago I started thinking a lot about intergenerational trauma. I noticed how daughters I knew often lived out the hurts of their mothers and grandmothers, and it freaked me out. I don’t want trauma to flow in the sap of family trees, and I don’t want my kids inheriting my anxiety, my depression, my perfectionism. I didn’t want them to have to spend years learning to like themselves. I don’t want that for them, and I don’t want that to be my fault, whether by nature or nurture.

But, at the same time, I come from amazing women, and I’m glad I was natured and nurtured by them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmas since I’ve been at Harvard. I’ve been thinking about how I get to have the kind of education that they didn’t have. I come from a lot of smart, strong-willed, curious women, a lot of who did not all get the kind of education they wanted. My great grandma Helen wrote in her journal, “Ever since I was a small girl, I felt I had a great date with destiny and a notebook and a pen. I am magnetically drawn to a pen and a clean sheet of paper.”

That grandma never got to go to college, and I’ve got to go three times over now. I’ve had eight years filled with clean sheets of paper and pens. Because I believe in an afterlife, and I believe that family bonds stretch the eternities, I hope they know it’s happening and get to be part of it somehow. I hope that they get to learn with me.

And, also, I like the thought that when I hear my mom’s voice in my head saying, “Be kind, not nice” or “How would you decorate this restaurant?” it’s in part because she’s actually there inside me.

I have no idea if these cells that pass through the umbilical cord have anything to do with any of these things (because, you know, no one really knows what’s going on with these cells), but I think our souls and bodies interact in ways that are complicated, ways that we don’t understand. Like, there’s that thing where transplant survivors find themselves taking on the traits of the people who’s organs they’ve inherited, which has given rise to cellular memory theory, the idea that memories can be stored in organs and cells that aren’t the brain. If so, maybe there is a part of us that retains the memories of previous generations, the origin of the cells in the first place. Cells that store curiosity and grit and love for beauty, but also maybe trauma and anxiety.

I wonder what this means for my theology, which says spirits are matter, only more refined than body-matter, and that both are important parts of what it means to be me. What does it mean in this context that significant parts of my physical self are, in fact, not me, but the people who came before me? My theology also says that when we rise after death, we will receive our bodies again. I don’t know how this idea of cells interacts with these parts of my theology, but I wonder how my body and spirit interplay. I wonder if we will still have our mothers and grandmothers in our bodies when we get them back.

I hope so. I like the idea of carrying them around with me.

My grandma, mom, and me. Oldest daughter, oldest daughter, and oldest daughter.