One Seafaring Dairy Cow

My coming into existence on this planet was no small feat. The attachment I hold is not only to my mother but to the hundreds of women in my ancestry who helped bring me here.

I think of my grandmothers and their mothers and mothers before them. I think of immigration and how my great-grandmother Christine traveled from Germany to America via Ellis Island with only a dairy cow in tow to marry a farmer. Someday they would have a son and I would call him grandpa.

I think of Helen, my grandmother’s small sister who died at 6-years-old of appendicitis and when I think of her I think of my great grandmother Willard. She withstood the loss of her young daughter and continued to bring up her seven other children.

I think of the picture of Willard and me when I was a newborn. Her weathered old arms held me in her wheelchair but those same arms had also held eight babies of her own. Those arms brought my grandmother into this world and named her Inez.

Inez is the glue that attaches me to all of them. She married my grandfather and attached us to the German immigrant woman who was his mother.

And most importantly, Inez raised one daughter among six other children on a farm in Missouri. Sonia, the youngest of her six children would become the kindest most beautiful woman I know, and every day I get to call that woman mom.

And when I think of all of these women, I think of me. I am the culmination of many wildly brave women and one seafaring dairy cow.

I think of how all of these women were me at some point in their lives. Once upon a time, they were all 26-years-old and they had no idea that their existence was wildly brave.

Today I remember that all of these women belong to me and that I belong to them. Because of them I too am wildly brave.