Ashley Audrain

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. . . .

We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. . . .

We knew so little then about each other, about the people we would be.

We’re all entitled to have certain expectations of each other and of ourselves. Motherhood is no different. We all expect to have, and to marry, and to be, good mothers.

We’d practiced this. We’d done the class. But I couldn’t find that sense of calm I’d been promised, the intuition that was supposed to kick in.

But then I would stare at Violet’s face in the stroller all the way home, wondering why she didn’t feel like the best thing that had ever happened to me.

The woman turned to me and we shared a look. Not a smile, but an acknowledgment that we had both morphed into a version of ourselves that didn’t feel as good as had been advertised.

Why did I think I would be any different than the mother I came from?

Those rare nights were like gifts to me, although she would never know it. I was desperate to know who she was before she became my mother.

I started to understand, during those sleepless nights replaying the things I’d overheard, that we are all grown from something. That we carry on the seed, and I was a part of her garden.