Ancestral Stories
When I teach about the postpartum time period I call it “the ancestors at the bedside.”
But when I lived it, I didn’t have that language yet. One of the most shocking things in the long list of “what I didn’t know until I had a baby” was that I would crave to know my birth mother, I’d miss her though I’ve never met her and desire to know the birthing people down my lineage.
I was adopted before I was born. My birth mother and adopted mother had the same OB but they were visiting him for different reasons; my birth mother for an unwanted pregnancy and my adopted mother for infertility. He helped strike a deal. My adopted parents paid for me and my birth mother’s prenatal care and birth and 3 days after I was born (a month late - it was the 70s y’all - and via cesarean) they got a baby. My parents never met my birth mother.
I was told I was adopted from the beginning. My family had a 2 part book, “The Adopted Family.” One part was for them and the other was a children's book they read to me that explained adoption. They read this book to me from as early as I can remember so I always knew. I was also raised in an environment where it was reflected back to me (mostly at church) how lucky I should consider myself. “What a blessing my adoption was.” So from a very young age I bought that at wholesale and closed off the parts of me that wanted to know my story and where and who I was from. I would long to know more but push those feelings down while telling myself to be more grateful for what I had and that I didn’t start my life in an orphanage like Annie, a fellow redhead adoptee.
Throughout the years, as the internet became a thing my adopted mother and I posted on some adoption sites looking for my lineage and for any blood relatives with no results. Once, my wild childhood best friend and I just showed up at the hospital I was born at and asked for my records saying I needed them for a doctor’s appointment. We were only inches from being handed them until the person who worked in the records department read I was adopted and said I wasn’t allowed to have copies of them. See, I’m from Mississippi and I don’t know the time I was born or my medical history because of backwards laws that protect the parent giving up the child for adoption. I personally feel that this is because MS is in the business of protecting “secrets” and lies founded on sexual shame. But that’s a whole other post for another time.
Years later, I was in labor with my oldest son, post date and in that veilless time of in between. It was a long labor and very difficult. One of the most difficult parts was that I was deeply desiring to be with my birth mother. I wanted her touch and hugs and physical and emotional support. I wanted her to hold me through contractions and I wanted to cry into her arms. Remember I have never met this person, she is a magical-thinking-unicorn-fantasy-mom in my head and I know no grounded truths about her. But this desire was so strong. It was bubbling up in me, not a new feeling, in fact a deeply buried unprocessed old feeling that had been unlocked and was taking center stage. It felt as though my body and this feeling were on a team, like they had planned this out together during the pregnancy...”Ok, once she loses the mucus plug that’s when we start creeping in. And then we just keep going until she hears you.” My body was in full support of this feeling, telling me “We aren't going anywhere until you look at this. We are not having this baby until this is acknowledged.” It worked. I heard it. I felt it.
Giving birth to and meeting my eldest son was the first time I had ever met a blood relative. I pushed for 8 hours. It was worth it.
I gave birth to my first kin. This experience set something in me on fire. These lessons from birth were whispered in the long slow still moments of postpartum. That is when they were integrated and woven. In my own early postpartum period is when I discovered postpartum doula work and found my calling. I also now had a desire for understanding my lineage. Something had awoken and my dreams were reflecting it too. I had visions of myself with a long line of naked redheads behind me going back back back back. I took the leap and spit in a bottle and mailed it off to one of the DNA sites to learn more. Seeing where I was from was weaving pieces of myself together for the first time but these pieces were so old, deep, remembered. I dug into the written stories, places and the histories of celtic origin. I was making a quilt of self out of scraps and spit and maps and books instead of stories told from a grandmother related to me.
Alongside this journey I also learned of the practice of decolonizing my postpartum work. As I set down things I had learned that were not mine I picked up the culturally appropriate practices that were grounded in my lineage. Suddenly the ancestors that had been at my postpartum bedside were walking with me daily, in dreams and waking. A painful realization came forward in all of this.
Knowing your own ancestry is a privilege.
Even as I piece things together, that still feels so isolating, it is all possible because of money and time and abilities that many people do not have.
I still crave for more daily. I still go to bed many nights hoping and asking my ancestors to visit in dreams. I still wish I had a relationship to a maternal line full of people that would tell me their stories of birth and postpartum. I think often of my personal postpartum story, not after I had my babies, but after I was born. I scratch the back of my brain to seek for answers to questions like “Did she hold me?” “Did we even snuggle?” “Was she taken care of after?” “Did she have someone to process with?” “How did we say goodbye?” “Was her mother kind to her?” “Was her mother taken care of after birth?” “And hers?” “And hers?” and so on.
How many of us even know to ask our families for their postpartum stories? We center birth stories as worth sharing but frequently those end with the baby arriving. What about after? It is possible that we all come from many recent generations of families that were severely undersupported and we carry that into our journeys now. We lay, days after birth, sipping broth on the bedside table, undersupported by our in-person communities, surrounded by our ancestors speaking through the veil to us “to please do it differently this time.” Are we ready to listen?