Berlin 2025
I’ve been reading Daniel Foor, Ancestral Medicine, and watching Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s course, Hospicing Modernity, on the Science and Nonduality website. That combination, and living for three weeks in a city not my home, has opened up a lot of thinking about my maternal line. The words “space of the mother” have been echoing in my mind for several months. That concept has expanded these weeks away from home, and I want to begin exploring some of what has shown up around those words, “space of the mother” – or perhaps “mothers” is a better way to access what I’m curious about here.
On Election Day 2024, on my way to lunch, I had a vision of thousands of women – all dressed in black, very fierce, with tiny feet and matching black shoes with chunky heels. They said to me, “We got this far. Now it’s up to you.” At that moment, I knew that Trump was going to win the election. I walked into a very left-leaning cafe for lunch and the first person I saw was proudly wearing a red MAGA hat.
I felt these women were my mother’s mother’s mothers … a sturdy line of women who had kept their families going through generations of poverty and danger as Jews on the edge of society in Eastern Europe. I know very little about these women before my maternal grandmother, who remains a source of strength and courage for me more than thirty years after her death. I named my first daughter in honor of her.
What was the thing that these women had “gotten this far” that was now up to me to move forward? And what does it mean to live with and possibly shift such a long-tendrilled, ancestral pattern that has helped people survive for so long? Were they saying that I should do as they did, or shift that thing they did somehow, or do something entirely new with the legacy they have bequeathed to me? I have felt these ten months – more than enough time to birth the thing – that the thing they had gotten this far needed to be both honored and shifted in some fundamental way.
The thing they had in abundance, and my mother and her mother passed down to me, was survival, persistence, doing whatever was required to keep yourself and those you love alive. Their work and faith and love had come down to me, the third generation in the United States, where we could imagine our children and their children will not only survive, but thrive. For a variety of reasons, those words and that rhyme no longer feel like enough.
I sense there is something else those ancient women are asking of me, though it is still foggy and just beyond what I can fully say out loud. It’s like that vision of divinity that guided the Jewish people through the wilderness from Egypt (a narrow place) to Israel (an expansive place they colonized and called their own).
I know, I know this is only one – and not the official – story of the Jewish people. But it is the one that has always appealed to me: the exiles’ story, the Diasporan story, the story that links my genes backwards and forwards in time with people imagining what is good not only for our people, but all people.
The tangled parts of my maternal line are deeper than I or any one person can individually solve. What I am calling “the space of the mother” is the things that are bigger and more complicated than me – or me and my mother and her mother – they are the things that have come down to me, in my blood and bones, at a cellular level, through all those years of survival.
I have spent years and years in therapy, learning to sit with all the fears associated with survival. I have inadvertently harmed my own children and other people when the weight of all this survival hits me and I go for days deep into the dark of depression and anxiety. I see this as a weight, but not a curse – a responsibility to honor complexity, a space of sitting quietly, where individual therapy opens out to what can only happen in a group, and see myself working with others to create that group, being accountable to something larger than myself, something I alone cannot figure out.
The last lesson my grandmother taught me was about being open to those things I do not yet know. She said, very near the end of her life, on one of our weekly phone calls, “As long as I can meet new people and learn new things, I feel completely alive.” Two weeks later, she called my mother and said she had “spoken to God and her rabbi” and was prepared to die.
The space of the mother(s) is a place of curiosity, of cells colliding and dividing before they have names and numbers assigned, a great big blob of becoming that speaks to us and urges us to be creative, freedom-seeking, and alive to what we do not yet know. Yes, those frightening old women in black dresses knew that to go on, again and again, we need to give up what we know – because the system is broken and causing harm – and go deeper into what has always been known but not yet to us.
Explore something that you feel has been bequeathed to you that you do not fully comprehend.
- Give that thing, whatever it is, time and space to be amorphous, protean, chaotic.
- Give words to the confusion and sit with those words and the parts of the knowing that are beyond words.
- Give voice to generations of yearning and not yet knowing in all the ways you can imagine giving voice to it – maybe that is drawing or dance; maybe it is telling your mothers’ stories; maybe it is telling a story from your own lived experience that you have not yet told.