Before my mother learned to talk,
I was already there.
Not ME me, but the beginning of me.
It is not a metaphor.
It is biology.
My grandmother’s body
built my mother’s body
Which built my body.
Science has shown that
inside my mother’s growing body
within my grandmother’s womb
the eggs that would become me
were already forming.
Because when my grandmother
was pregnant with my mother,
she wasn’t carrying one life.
She was sustaining three generations of possibility.
Three bodies in one breath.
Three heartbeats in one body.
It is not a fantasy story,
but a scientific one.
And science says the body remembers.
What my grandmother ate.
How she slept.
What kept her up at night.
Pain she endured.
The love she survived on.
Those things didn’t disappear.
They didn’t stop with her.
They left marks. Not on skin, but on genes.
Maybe that’s why my strength feels deeply-rooted.
Why my resilience isn’t accidental, but inherited.
Women’s bodies pass down more than names.
Our bodies pass down instructions.
How to endure.
How to persist.
How to keep going.
Grandmother to mother to daughter
A womb inside a womb inside a womb.
So when I say I come from strong women,
I didn’t just come from them.
I was once held inside them.
Before I had a voice, and before I was ever born.
Their bodies were already making room for me.