My mother changed our circumstances. I think about that often.
When she was pregnant with me, my biological father was drinking, using drugs, and pursuing other women while she faced the responsibility of providing for her children. Later, she married a man who wanted to take care of his wife’s daughters. I grew up with a father who provided and cared about giving us a safe home.
Yet in my own marriages, I found myself carrying the responsibility for our home and children while the men I chose created chaos around us. I had grown up with an example of a man who took that responsibility seriously, and still, there I was, living something that felt strangely familiar.
My grandmother had lived her own version of it. Her husband’s drinking shaped the household, and he blamed her for harm he inflicted within the family. She carried my mother through that life. Years later, my mother carried me through hers.
I began wondering how far back familiarity could reach.
During my grandmother’s pregnancy, my mother’s developing body already contained the immature egg cell that would eventually contribute to my beginning. I find something deeply affecting about that connection. My grandmother was trying to get through her days, my mother was growing within her, and the cellular beginning of another generation was already present.
That fact became the beginning of a question for me. Could some part of what feels familiar develop that early? Could the body carry information about the conditions in which it began, with effects that reach into later life?
I have spent years trying to understand how families organize people around someone else’s script. That work became Forced Relational Conditioning, a paper now accepted for publication in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. My questions about the body grew alongside it and eventually became a new theoretical paper about cellular memory and tissue signaling.
Underneath the research is something very personal. I want to understand how my mother could change our home and still have her daughter grow into a familiar kind of marriage. I want to understand what makes a pattern continue, and what allows another way of living to become something we can sustain.
I think about the feeling of “I must,” too. The pull to marry, to have children, to reach the next stage and become whoever we believe we are supposed to become. Sometimes, looking back, life feels scripted. I wonder how our bodies and our histories come together to give that script its urgency.
These are questions I am developing into research. They also belong to the woman who lived those marriages and wanted something different for her children.
My mother made a different home possible for me. I keep returning to that effort with greater appreciation as I try to understand my own life. Now I am asking what helps change reach deeply enough that we can begin to feel at home within it.
My new paper, Layered Cellular Coding and the Tissue Signal Loop in Life Organization, is freely available as a preprint: