Whenever someone compliments my nose, I flick the tip of it with my thumb and smile, not so much because of their kindness but because my nose looks just like my mothers— sharp, defined, just the right size for my face. I think about her mother and her mother and the mother before that, passing down flared nostrils and bony bridges until they merged and became the central feature of my face. I think about how humans have the beautiful ability to resemble.
Animals certainly have their own version of such a thing, shark pups blossoming into identical copies of parents they will never see again and baby parrots lining their feathers with their father’s streaks. But the human ability to inherit like beads on a string is another sort of wonder. For how wonderful to see your eyebrows on your daughter, your knuckles on your son? How incredible it must be to watch your grandmother pass down what you thought was a scar?
The biology of our nature is nothing if not incessant, and yet it passes me by like the morning news. One day I am flipping through old albums and I catch a glimpse of my mother, wrapped in a sari and kissing my father on the cheek. I’m struck by her beauty– the arch of her cheek, the swell of her chin. I look in the mirror and pause, fingers on my face as I trace her features on my skin. How wonderful, to sit here and worry about the future when there is assurance that I will live on.
***
My mother loves flowers. She points out the hydrangeas and the chrysanthemums and those little yellow ones that bark like dogs, picking them off the stem and placing them in my palms. When I am young, she pulls them apart and shows me their parts, running her fingers over their pistils, their ovaries, the style. We both marvel that something so small can do exactly the same things that we can: make themselves all over again.
My mother may love flowers but the mother before her lived for them, sketching them in her leather bound notebook with a magnifying glass in her pocket and charcoal on the pads of her thumbs. My grandmother pressed daisies and grew alstroemeria, raising her daughters with petals in their hair and pollen in their lungs. She taught botany at the school down the street and I bet she was good at it too, her wallshouse always displaying her meticulous drawings of the begonia and the marigold and smelling of the rosewater in her tea. As such, my mother’s DNA spun with daffodils and marigolds, and she inherited the love for botany like it was the crease in her brow. I listen to her tell us about my grandmother and the notebook and the carnations, and how they last the longest when cut and bloom bright in a vase. We walk on the trails of Cincinnati, Ohio, and she plucks the leaves of the borages and stuffs them in her mouth, telling me that if I wanted to, I could too.
I do not know much about plants, despite the women in my life who grew alongside them, and there is a certain sadness associated with the idea that I cannot inherit everything from the wonders that came before me. My mother worships the Icelandic poppies like my grandmother would with fresh jasmine, and instead I walk to the local corner store, buying my mother discounted carnations for her birthday and hoping I’ve remembered right. I pray my daughter likes flowers, or maybe her daughter after that.
***
The first time that biology stops me in my tracks is when I read about DNA replication. Sitting at the dining table and splaying out my work, there's a picture in my textbook that catches my eye, wildly colorful and speckled in shine. Forty minutes later I have learned all there is to know about the complex procedure happening millions of times per minute within nearly every cell in my body. I am aghast as my eyes fly across the page, conceptualizing the DNA Helicase that takes me apart and the Ligase that puts me back together, all before dinnertime. I stare, transfixed, focusing my eyes to my hands on the pages as if I could somehow watch this play out in front of me. The nucleotides rush together in a swarm and hold hands like old friends and it is then I realize that my mother is snapping her fingers in front of my face like I’ve just gone off and not told her where. The movement of her fingers transfixes me, because I think they are the same ones that were just I’ve seen those before, placed upon my textbook and tracing the words on the page. My DNA may be replicating, but half of it is hers, reflecting in the veins of her hands and the lines on her palm.
There is DNA that just passes maternally; within the mitochondria lies genetic material, exclusively passed through kisses on foreheads, tuck-ins at night. I like to think that all the best of me is from those swirls of traits, nestled between harsh advice and that face she makes when I’m wearing something far too casual for the occasion. When I learn about this, I want to split myself open and see the evidence oflook at how much she has truly given me. I’d imagine I’d see my grandmother there, too, and the mother before that and the one before that, curled up at the center of my chest and breathing me whole.
***
It’s the night of my senior prom and I walk into my parent’s bedroom, giving my mother a little spin. She takes one look at me and breaks into a grin, the kind of grin that we know to mean that I’ve done something right. She places her palm on my shoulder and it goes up to my cheek. I lean into her, and she tells me I look beautiful. I smile, gesturing to the last piece of my getup: her diamond pendant. She unclasps it from her throat and drapes it across my collarbone, the two of us watching it glimmer. I tell her I’m glad I have a piece of her tonight. She strokes my cheek and says I always do, right here.
***
There are flowers blooming on the green today and I wish I could tell you what they were. They curl in the breeze and splay in the sun and I’m reminded of my grandmother, her scrawl peppered over the drawings in my bedroom and outlining the anatomy of the purple iris she drew for me all those years ago. I wonder where she got it from, this reverence. I think of how she used to pray not just for my mother and me, but also for the trees in our lawn and the plants on the sill. I think of the carnations on our dining room table and the soft smile of my mother that means that she’s happy.
There are fields of women who have been growing a secret garden in my veins and as I smell the flowers on the green, I cut my nose on a thorn. My mother’s nose, or maybe the mother before that, or maybe her mother or the one that came first. I bleed red with their love.
Sole Magazine