Every March, we celebrate what is remarkable in women’s history. We are given names, dates, firsts. Women who cracked the world open. Women who made it possible to say before and after. It is a beautifully rich history, filled with moments that can be pointed to, studied, and celebrated. But there is more to this history, beyond what can be framed in a plaque or poster. This is what shapes our lives: what is repeated, what is modeled, and what becomes familiar over time.
On a sticky Thursday night in early March, I found myself sitting at my desk with my grandmother on speaker phone (and with a flurry of texts from my mother waiting for me afterwards). I had called in an attempt to understand what the women in my family learned from the women before them: how to love, how to labor, how to mother through the long haul.
“The things my mother taught me are the things I still preach,” my grandmother began. As one of nine children in a house that brimmed with noise and need, her understanding of care was shaped early and practically – there was a system to everything; a different chore for each day of the week, and the kind of responsibility you stepped into without asking whether you were ready. She learned to tend to others because there were always others to tend to – siblings to be bathed in the kitchen sink, hair to be detangled, cigarettes to be purchased from the gas station on the corner. My grandmother’s early life was a sequence of watch, do, repeat. Eventually, the responsibility fit her like a second skin.
She spoke of her mother as the “epitome of patience,” a model held against her father’s quick storms that sent chairs scraping and doors slamming. And with this patience came other kinds of instruction to deal with things as they came and “to keep the peace wherever possible.”Â
And keep the peace she did. I have always known my grandmother to smooth over what can be smoothed and carry what cannot. This is not a dramatic quality, but it shows up in the way she listens longer than most people would, in the way she absorbs tension before it spreads, and in the way she makes room for others even when it makes her life harder. What she inherited became the way she moved through her own life as our matriarch and, as we like to call her, our port in the storm.
An hour later, I hung up the phone to find what can only be described as a dissertation from my mother.Â
“I never questioned whether or not I was supported or loved – I felt like I was the luckiest girl around!” she wrote, before describing not a single moment but a way of growing up under my grandmother that made her certainty possible. A mother who was there – home, involved, attentive to school and sports and friendships – who knew her children’s lives closely and took interest in them. There were dinners at the table every night, extended family woven into everyday life, and a love that came to feel less like an event and more like a condition of living.Â
My mother has certainly taken this very structure and translated it into her own motherhood with remarkable intentionality. She writes that she, like my grandmother, chose to work from home and build her family “with the same general principles – family first, celebrate accomplishments, stay present and involved in my children’s lives, cook cook cook and share my interests with my kids.” In a word, accompaniment. My mother, my grandmother, and my great grandmother have walked through life beside the lives unfolding around them, matching stride through the daily and the difficult. Their lessons were not written down, but they endure nonetheless. They live on in repetition.
This is a quieter kind of history: not a series of breakthroughs but a passing of love and faithfulness hand-to-hand. Daughter to daughter, this braid weaves itself, enriches itself, and makes the louder moments possible. After all, we all owe our existence, and much more besides, to a woman.