Stories From My Motherline
“We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.”
Much of this paper comes from research I did in the fall of 2020 on my matrilineal ancestry. I have included excerpts from my journal as I sat in meditation several times thinking about my motherline.
This blog post is the first in a six-part series I’ll be doing that traces my personal journey through the MotherBLOOM program. To learn more about MotherBLOOM, click here.
I Am Susanna
I am the daughter of Barbara Jeffries, granddaughter of Beulah Rapp, great-granddaughter of Beulah Jagger, great-great-granddaughter of Mary Schreiner. The forces that have shaped my motherhood experience echo back generations, and I find solace and strength in the women of my Motherline. Our stories dance along the spiral of time; looping, intertwining, overlapping and creating a tapestry of womanhood and motherhood that defies a linear progression.
Safe...alone...colors, red and blue...pulsing...heartbeat THUMPTHUMPTHUMP but whose is it?
I have heard my own birth story many times. Inside my mother’s womb, I was in a breech position, with my legs down and head close to her heart. While not an ideal fetal position, vaginal delivery of a breech baby is possible. However, my mother’s doctor wasn’t comfortable with the risks and a cesarean section was scheduled for October 30, 1981. My mother’s 28th birthday was the day before...28 years later, I would be delivering my first son by cesarean section on my own birthday.
October 29th, 1953…October 30th, 1981…October 30th, 2009
My mother often professed exasperation at the fact that when they handed me to my father, he took me over to the window of the operating room to show me the city of Boston while she lay on the operating table being stitched up. He finally brought me over so she could see me. She recently sent me two of our very first pictures together - in the first, my father is holding me up to her as she kisses my cheek and in the second picture I am in her arms in the hospital bed. My mother included this note with the picture, “Me staring at you with adoration and amazement. You were only a couple of hours old. I like to think you were thinking, ‘I like this one’ as you stared back at me.”
Guilt...sadness...fear...confusion...despair...guilt...so much guilt...but it’s not my mother’s guilt anymore. She couldn’t breastfeed me and has spent her entire life feeling guilty about that, but I don’t think that guilt came from her. I think it came from her mother. Gaga left my mother when she was just a little girl, she left to go to V.I. to obtain divorce. Was there guilt there? Or did she feel empowered by making the decision to follow her heart instead of the constraints of society telling her that her only worth was in motherhood?
My Grandmother (Gaga)
My maternal grandmother was born on July 15, 1931 when her mother, Beulah Jagger, was only 22. Beulah died at home in 1946 after being ill for two years. Her daughter, my grandmother, was only 14 years old. My grandmother rarely talked about her mother. My grandmother, Beulah Mary Jagger, was named after her mother but she went by Bre. Of course, I knew her only as Gaga. Bre was raised as a Protestant in Westhampton Beach on Long Island. Two weeks after the death of her mother, Bre was sent to a girl’s boarding school. When she returned at the end of the term, her father had already remarried.
Bre was an intelligent woman; my mother told me she was the smartest woman my mother ever knew. She enrolled in college at Cornell University, which is where she met my grandfather, Kenneth MacKenzie. He was the teaching assistant in her Chemistry class. Bre never graduated from college; at the time she attended, career opportunities for women were limited and there was still an expectation that one would become a wife and then a mother.
My grandmother Bre was pregnant with my mom in 1953. This must have been a very bittersweet time for her. Being pregnant with her first child surely made her long for her own mother who had died seven years earlier. What was her mother’s pregnancy like? What did she want for her daughter? What kind of grandmother would she have been? My grandmother did not have the maternal figure to ask questions about birth, the care of an infant, motherhood.
My Mom
My mom, Barbara Ann Mackenzie was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1953, solidly in the middle of the Baby Boom.
The birth of my mother was an unnatural and undoubtedly traumatic event for my grandmother. Her pubic hair was shaved and Twilight Sleep (a mixture of morphine for pain control and scopolamine for memory loss) was likely administered. While a popular drug at the time, it had harmful physical and psychological effects on both mother and baby. The description of a Twilight Sleep induced birth in Suzanne Arms book Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic & Birth illustrates how horrifying this experience must have been:
The drugs actually induced a kind of wild psychosis in many women, who fought nurses, scratched themselves, or tried to throw themselves out of the bed. For this reason, the side rails of hospital beds were kept up, heavy leather pads were put inside to protect women from bruising themselves on the metal rails, and women were physically tied down. Many women were shocked to find themselves covered with bruises when they awoke after the birth, with no memory of the cause. Others found themselves completely hoarse, having no recall that they had lost their voice from screaming. Many harbored doubts that the baby they were shown was really theirs.
My grandmother almost never discussed my mother’s birth.
In 1958, Bre had caught the eye of the dashing and handsome young veterinarian, Frank Rapp. She was a mother to two small girls at this time and was undoubtedly frustrated at the lack of opportunities for intelligent women like herself. No-fault divorce was still illegal in New York at the time, so when my grandmother decided to leave my grandfather to run off with Frank, she left my mother and my aunt and went to live in the Virgin Islands. She had to establish residency by living there for three months and in that time she had her one and only job waiting tables. After the divorce was granted, Bre converted to Judaism to marry Frank. They were wed in 1960.
My mother has no recollection of my grandmother’s conversion. She once asked her mother if the only reason Bre converted to Judaism was to marry Frank. My grandmother was offended at the question and insisted that she converted on her own. Bre was brought up Protestant but later expressed the opinion, “I never felt like I needed a mediator between me and God.” At her Bat Mitzvah, she took the Jewish name Yael bat Sarah. This pattern of finding spirituality later in life continued through my mother and myself.
My mom Barbara became a nurse and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah to work at the LDS Hospital in the mid-1970s. She met my dad, Bruce Heath while attending an art class; I love the story of how they met. My mom enrolled in the class because she hadn’t made any friends and was bored. But when she got to the class she was so nervous she hid in the coat closet. My dad arrived, handed her his coat and asked if she was the coat check girl. She fell madly in love. They were engaged a few years later. My parents were both Tolkein fans so when my dad proposed he got a stuffed teddy bear with a custom shirt that said “My name is Frodo, can you guess my purpose?” She immediately knew he was the “ring bear-er.”
They were married in 1978. My dad is wearing a cast in their wedding pictures because he broke his leg a few weeks earlier. He would spend the rest of their marriage joking that the only reason he got married was because of that broken leg; as in, that’s how my mom was able to “catch” him. They spent the first few years of marriage traveling. My dad got a job as an International Human Resources Consultant (that is what is on my birth certificate!) and they moved to Mauritania, a country in West Africa for two years. My mom always spoke highly of her time there, she loved living in Africa and has always regretted not being able to visit since their return. She learned to speak French (my dad already spoke it from his Mormon mission in France years earlier.) They moved back to Boston to start a family and in 1981 she became pregnant with me, her first born.
My grandmother Bre did not have a happy life. She suffered from depression for years, due in part, I suspect, to her unhappy marriage with my step-grandfather and various health issues. She’d received shock therapy for depression when my mother was young and then self-medicated with alcohol and cigarettes the rest of her life. She died by suicide in 1994, when I was twelve years old.
My mother suffered from the same depression that plagued her mother. She was admitted to an inpatient mental institution for suicidal thoughts when I was about four years old and then again when I was in second grade.
My parents divorced when I was 14 and the next few years were pretty tough on my mom. She and my dad shared joint custody, and in the weeks she was alone she would abuse prescription medication to numb the pain. She battled opioid addiction for years, and when I was 17 she was caught stealing pain meds from her patients as a nurse. She was fired, had her nursing license revoked and had to enroll in a rehabilitation program. I was sent to live full time with my dad and step-mother and my mom began her arduous journey of recovery.
Conversion
It was through her addiction recovery that my mom began a spiritual journey. As Rabbi Leah Novick writes in On The Wings of Shekhinah, “crisis often makes the individual more willing to reach out for the light and more conscious of its presence.” My mom had been raised in both Jewish and Protestant homes and felt a lot of ambivalence toward God and religion. She and my father had decided to raise us without religion, and it just wasn’t part of her life. But while in the rehabilitation house she read a short article about how the Lord’s prayer used in AA originated in Jewish prayer. She felt a need for religious connection as part of her sobriety, as well as a way to honor and connect with her mother Bre, who had died 5 years earlier.
She began studying Judaism and enrolled in a Jewish conversion class. It was while in conversion class she met Terry. She had felt sure after the divorce of my father that she would never know intimate love with a man again so it was a shock to her to find herself falling in love again. They began dating and married in August of 2012. So her conversion to Judaism was truly a rebirth, harkening in both sobriety and a new marriage. She took the Jewish name Beulah Chana bat Yael. Beulah is unusual for a Hebrew name but the Rabbi allowed it as a way to honor her mother and grandmother. (Chana was my step-grandfather’s mother’s Jewish name.)
In preparing for this paper, I was so intrigued by the idea that both my mother and grandmother experienced a call to convert to Judaism. I began researching the steps of conversion. Jewish conversion is not easy; you first meet with a Rabbi to discuss your intentions and enroll in a conversion class. There is an extended period of time for study (my mom studied for almost a year) and then you have to pass an interview. The final step in conversion is immersion in a pool of water, known as a mikveh, as a symbolic rebirth into Judaism. I remember attending my mother’s conversion mikveh when I was 20 years old, although I wasn’t allowed into the sacred bath water space.
I sat quietly one afternoon and imagined what it must have been like for both my mother and my grandmother:
She floats in the water, a peaceful smile on her face. She’s submerged three times, saying the ritual prayers. After her first immersion: “Barukh atah Adonay Eloheynu melekh ha-olam, asher kidshanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu al ha-t'vilah. Blessed are you, Eternal God, ruler of the universe, who sanctifies us through mitzvot and has enjoined us concerning immersion.” After her second immersion: “Barukh atah Adonay, Eloheynu melekh ha-olam, shehekheyanu, v'kiy'manu, v'higianu, la-z'man ha-zeh. Blessed is the Eternal, the God of all creation, who has blessed me with life, sustained me, and enabled me to reach this moment.” And the third immersion prayer is specific to Jewish conversion: “Sh'ma Yisrael, Adonay Eloheynu, Adonay ekhad. Hear O Israel, the Eternal our God, the Eternal is One.”
I see both my mother and my grandmother emerge dripping from the bath of living waters, even though I was not present at either conversion mikveh, even though they took place 40 years apart. They towel off with the help of the female attendant to their submersion and dress in simple, white clothes. Both my mother and my grandmother enter the sanctuary cleansed by the waters, rebirthed into a new life with new possibilities and responsibilities as a Jewish woman. Time truly is a spiral, a weaving and shifting experience.
In researching my Motherline I discovered that the root of my name is Shoshanah, a Hebrew word which means rose or lily. I am not Jewish and have no desire to become so, yet I’m pleased that I have this connection to the spiritual path of my mother and grandmother.
Motherline Patterns
My mother, grandmother and I share similar journeys through our lives. Depression plagues the women of my motherline, but we are slowly healing through the generations. It consumed my grandmother, almost took my mother and I have been able to manage it through medication. We all rejected the religious upbringing of our youth to find meaning in a different spiritual path; for my mother and grandmother that was conversion to Judaism while my spiritual journey lies in my yoga practice. And although we were each denied the power of a natural birthing experience with our children, my mother and I have both dedicated our careers to helping other women with birth. My mother spent years working as a labor and delivery nurse and helped thousands of women avoid cesarean sections, and I specialize in teaching prenatal yoga to give women the physical, emotional and energetic strength for natural childbirth. Throughout each of these experiences, we have each done our part to heal the generational trauma of our motherline.
