In the 1980s, my mother met my father when she went to him for a psychic reading. That foundation, initiated by wonder, met with love, fraught with stress, and followed by heartbreak, temporarily wrapped itself up in 2001 with his death, resulting from complications of emphysema. He was sixty-three; I was eleven. There was an almost certain guarantee that a child stemming from such nuance might move through the world perceiving things a bit differently. The weight of that difference coming most clearly into focus for me after I gave birth to my daughter.
My body and mind have spent years balancing the practical with the magical. Guided in the faith and mystery of something unseen, all while doing my best to stay grounded in the reality of the here and now. Layne Red- mond writes in her book When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm:
It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. 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.
When I was eight months pregnant with my daughter, an artist told me while she was offering me an energy reading that my daughter and I had done this before. While pregnancy was uncomfortable and motherhood a mystery, that much I could already feel. There are times now when she feels like my mother, like at some point in another life she was desperately trying to comb my hair, exhausted by the thought of sitting by my side until I wiggled my way to sleep, seething with frustration, overwhelmed with guilt, in utter awe of the magic of it all.
I look at my daughter and I see my mother. I see me. All of us, one by one, piece by piece. Quick and curious glimpses of inherited histories, inherited wounds. A familiar yet hazy hand-me-down of a memory. You can’t quite place why, but there’s a rhythm to it all. A privilege to the age and history that all of these mothers hold, spoken in a language I now understand with a different type of fluency. Anchored by my child, and shored by memory.
Jillian Guyette
Jillian Guyette is an American photographer from Rochester, New York. Raised in the Finger Lakes region by a psychic medium and a painter, she received a BFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2012. Her work is profoundly curious about women's familial relationships, and inherited histories.
