Olive’s Fire

A year after adopting my baby daughter, Olive, I took her to visit my hometown and the many relatives eager to meet her. Amid the chaos, I wanted just one thing: a photo of my daughter and her mother, with my mother and her mother. But I knew that creating this heirloom would mean wrangling two of the most willful women in my life: my resistant, camera-averse grandmother and my equally resistant, squirmy daughter.

Olive and her great-grandmother are not biologically related, and they have very different ethnic backgrounds and features. But when I first saw the photo, I was struck by their sameness—by the way their ferocity seemed to light them both from within. This makes them stunning in a fearsome way, and it can make loving them a fretful, exhausting job.

Yet they are biologically related, as we all are. We are all descended from a single woman, often known as Mitochondrial Eve, who lived relatively recently in human history. We can all be traced, through this unbroken mother-daughter chain, right back to her. In her day, there would have been nothing remarkable about her. But she had the luck, or perhaps the grit, or maybe the smarts, to survive in a very grim world. And she raised daughters who could survive in it, who raised more survivor-daughters.

I cannot help but imagine Eve as my grandmother, standing at that desperate moment in human history—bitching her way right through that volcanic eruption or plague or asteroid, not really caring if she ticked off the cavemen. Because that same inner fire that makes her tough to love also makes her tough.

Though Grandma has not faced near-extinction, she has faced a life that many people would not have survived. The poverty and abuse that characterized her early life have made her who she is. She has weathered adversity and raised her two daughters through it.

Science tells us that adversity changes not just our minds, but our very DNA. Our experiences express our genes, and we pass on this epigenetic legacy to the next generation. Women are particularly vulnerable when it comes to inheriting big challenges—depression, anxiety, and related health problems. But I also think we are the carriers of the fire that keeps people surviving through dark feelings and the world’s darkest days.

Olive’s fiery will may seem too large for her tiny self or for the little life she has lived thus far. But not when I consider the countless generations of struggle and hurt that have been passed on to her, flowing from mother to daughter, crashing down on her. To raise her, I can offer the burdens and joys of my own family’s legacy: my great-great-grandmother’s endless grief for the baby who died crossing to the New World, the instinctive midwifery skills my great-grandmother used to deliver my aunt unexpectedly, my grandmother’s rape, my years-long search for a daughter to call my own, that first failed adoption of a daughter I mothered only in my heart.

To that, we must add a whole birth family’s history—the parts we know and the bigger part that Olive’s birth mother will share with her only when they’re both old enough.

Finally, there is her own adversity. On her first day in this world, Olive said goodbye to her first mother and was given to a new stranger-mother. No one asked her permission. She was the most important member of this delicate, monumental family merger, and she never got a vote.

But Olive, like the women before her, is a survivor. Whether from her genes or from her family, she has inherited an old, deep power. I fear what our turbulent modern world holds for her and for all of us. It would be easy to allow this fear to consume me. But standing at this desperate moment in human history, Olive’s fire gives me hope and makes me strong.