Legacy Emotions - Feeling the Pains of your Ancestors
The onset of Ancestry.com has allowed a new generation of people to really reach back and trace their personal history. I was not immune to the allure of this self-exploration. I’ve always been fascinated by history ({her}story). It was family lore that my paternal great-grandfather has written a family tree book outlining our branch of the Averys in America. My grandmother, in her 90’s, was the last surviving link to that group (although not her family), and we wouldn’t find her copies until after she had passed. Fortunately, a few years before, I had found a copy at the New England Genealogical Library in downtown Boston. As I held the slim volume in my hand, I realized Morris Avery, the author, has already done all of the work, yet I was hungry for the chase. So I turned to my grandmother’s father. A man, from the accounts I was told, who has a long American pedigree. One who also had been shunned by his birth family for choosing to marry my grandmother’s mother, an immigrant from Swedish. An immigrant who lied to her husband about her age for her whole life because she didn’t want to be older than him. She only gave birth to my grandmother but suffered from many, many miscarriages in what was told to be a bittersweet marriage.
His family tree had me searching in the Massachusetts Archives, located next to the JFK Library in Dorchester, across from where my husband and I lived. This research led me to deaths, births, and marriages of the direct line all occurring in the town of Truro, MA (way out on Cape Cod). This led back to Plymouth and the Mayflower. Expanding out then showed relatives all throughout New England during the founding and in the infancy of the country. Standouts included Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer. Intelligent women who were penalized for thinking and for gathering groups of women together for study in early Boston. Mary was ostracized and eventually hanged for having a stillborn premature baby and being thought a witch. Anne was ousted from Boston to yet unfounded Rhode Island for her progressive views on theology. After having 15 children, she eventually ended up being killed in a Native American massacre in what would become the Bronx.
I thought of these stories. These women who were at the mercy of their husbands for everything. The loss of freedom with each pregnancy. No control over one’s body. How they found hope and happiness in those circumstances.
And while we now may have more control over when we choose to get pregnant (or not), do those same feelings come down? How could they not? After generations of having it been done more or less the same, how does that show up in us as we try to do things differently?
I ask all these questions because I’ve felt it. I’ve felt the conditioning to do the “right” thing. To follow the “accepted” path, and when I deterred, the fear and the shame. Most notably, for me, was the despair.
After my son was born and what followed was a path from hospital to hospital, I realized that having another wasn’t a choice that I wanted to make. Sex returned to being frightening. Then one summer, an unexpected pregnancy scare. But why the scare? Again, I was married, had good jobs, already had one child, even had the extra bedroom in our new house. There were a lot of people praying for a lot less.
Yet, all I could feel was despair.
All that I had worked for to make a career while my son was a sick baby. The non-sleep, the being allocated to second class citizen because I was a mother - those feelings were mine. But there was something else, something older. The knowledge that more children meant giving up more. And that it was entirely one-sided.
They now have done research that all of a woman’s egg form as a four-month old fetus. So our lives begin in our maternal grandmother’s womb. It’s not so unbelievable to think that we could be picking up part of their being too. Their emotions and expectations.
Going back to the stories, every women may experience this differently. Some crave big families, and some want none. ALL ARE VALID. I am just observing that maybe, sometimes, the conditioning of our ancestors and their experience could be buried deep within us. And knowing that, would it change how we look at our choices?
