“We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother. We all share the blood of the first mother. We are truly children of one blood.”
― Layne Redmond, When The Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm
Is it true? That the egg that carried you, carried me too?
It can’t be a coincidence, that your mother’s life was taken around the same age cancer took yours.
That your loss manifested into the sickness in your mind at 14.
Could that long line of hurt be the culprit for the sickness in my womb?
Giving me away, but never really leaving.
I’m a part of you, just as I am a part of the woman you named me after.
My motivation, my reason.
Healing isn’t for the faint of heart.
Just as life began and ended in you, it begins with me, too.
— Teresa Johnson