{"id":2267,"date":"2019-09-19T09:20:30","date_gmt":"2019-09-19T13:20:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=2267"},"modified":"2019-09-19T09:23:47","modified_gmt":"2019-09-19T13:23:47","slug":"post-1-one-bloodstream-two-inheritances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=2267","title":{"rendered":"Post #1 \u2014 One Bloodstream, Two Inheritances"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI am talking here about a kind of strength which can only be one woman\u2019s gift to another,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

the bloodstream of our inheritance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Until a strong line\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

of love,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

confirmation,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

and example\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

stretches from mother to daughter,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

from woman to woman across the generations,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

women will still be wandering in the wilderness.\u201d (246)<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My arrangement of the lines forces the reader to meditate on the importance of intergenerational love, confirmation, and example paved by a unified line of women throughout time. The breath also shifts the reader’s attention to the power of this intergenerational mothering line being a strong one \u2014 which is what spoke to me about the passage as a whole.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In my case, I’ve received the gift Rich describes here twofold. <\/span>Of Woman Born<\/span><\/i> helped me understand why, throughout most of my life, I\u2019ve considered having two moms to be a superpower. The inherited gift of strength, passed down to me from both of my parents, has allowed me to become my own hero. My mothers, both born in the 1950\u2019s, gifted me this strength after decades of struggling with the \u201cinstitutionalized heterosexuality\u201d (218) identified by Rich, coping with the reality of starting a unified life as religious queer women. My mothers both follow the paths of the \u201cunmothered\u201d (243) as described by Rich, having lived most of their lives without their own mothers. This path is one of pain turned fortitude, throughout their motherless process of coming out and building their own family, after the birth of my sibling in 1994. Thus, they carry with them both hardship and immense courage which stretches proudly from mother(s) to daughter. My line of generational inheritance may not be as refined as Rich describes, but it\u2019s just as unified and just as strong. This line comes from both of my mothers, and it’s for me to pass on to my daughters and their daughters.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My mothers treat their title as \u201cmother,\u201d fittingly, like most queens treat their crowns. If ever I refer to one of my parents by their name instead of \u201cmom\u201d or \u201cmommy,\u201d I know I\u2019ll be met with the same <\/span>do you know how hard I worked to become your mother?<\/span><\/i> that I know all too well, and have grown to love. The labor being described here is not that of pregnancy, suggested by Rich, but the labor of facing intolerance. This is a way in which Rich and I divert. In my poetic rewrite of the quote, the breath and spacing I chose pair bloodstream and inheritance, placing them in an unexpected juxtaposition; my inheritance has little to do with my bloodstream but it\u2019s still strong. I disagree with the notion that \u201cprobably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies.\u201d (225) Much of what runs through my inherited bloodstream is unknown; anonymous donor #138 may have given me wide brown eyes, but it was my mothers who taught me to see. They taught me to love through the greatest process of confirmation and example – greater than I could have imagined.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI am talking here about a kind of strength which can only be one woman\u2019s gift to another,\u00a0 the bloodstream of our inheritance.\u00a0 Until a strong line\u00a0 of love,\u00a0 confirmation,\u00a0 and example\u00a0 stretches from mother to daughter,\u00a0 from woman to woman across the generations,\u00a0 women will still be wandering in the wilderness.\u201d (246)   My […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,499,57,1],"tags":[433,480,449,397],"class_list":["post-2267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogpost-1","category-my-pen-is-a-machete","category-student-blogpost","category-uncategorized","tag-adrienne-rich","tag-identity","tag-motherhood","tag-queerness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2268,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267\/revisions\/2268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}