What I am getting to is this: I've been feeling my ancestors rattling within my own bones. Over the past several months I've been feeling them in me, whispering, shouting, laughing, crying. Most loudly I hear my maternal grandmother. I hear the roar she stifled when she was alive. I hear her howling and moaning. I feel her rage. Her passion and love course through my body, whispering and shouting at me to do things different, to be different, to love my babies differently, to love my self enough.
She was a woman, who in life, never let us (my mother, me, my sister) feel good enough in who we were. Watching the relationship between my mother and her mother as I was growing up was heartbreaking to say the least. Then when my grandmother drew me in, stating how I was the daughter she always wanted... well you can imagine how that played out in my relationship with my own mother: not well.
I could paint a very ugly picture of this woman who birthed a dead son and then years later my mother. And we humans aren't that simple, are we? She was a complicated woman. She loved my mother so hard and deeply that it terrified her and that terror came out in hurtful ways. She looked to me with hope of being the woman she could have never been and the woman my mother had no interest (or really too much baggage) to ever be. She experienced her own heartbreaks and pains long before she even met my grandfather. She lived with the shame of not only having her first child die within her, but of then ending up a divoree at a time when divorce was unheard of. She felt pride in our Native American heritage, and yet it was something we rarely talked about. She was a kitchen witch and a stitch witch and could create anything for the home, and yet would declare she was not at all artistic. She was alive when Women's Sufferage was a happening, lived a few decades before television and witnessed the world changing faster and faster over her nine decades of life.
I could tell you much about her and really I know very little. I don't know what burned in her heart. I don't know what her passions were, what she gave up to be a mother and wife. I know nothing of her first husband and only learned she had been married before my grandfather (and of the stillbirth she had) after her death. There are a million questions left unanswered of who she truly was and who she could have been had time and circumstance and history been different.