A new ancestor

my daughter and the altar of motherhood

I made an ancestor altar last week to mark the tip into the colder months. Traditionally, this time of the year my Irish ancestors would have been celebrating Samhain. A holiday to honor those who came before you, to work consciously with the thinning of the veil, and to tend the Otherworld.

In the past I’ve made my altar with items from only my own ancestors. But for the past several years (including before my daughter’s conception) I’ve been creating the altar with items from both sides of her line.

It struck me, as I was gathering items and arranging them amid the amaranth cut from the garden, that creating a child is the deepest act of ancestral magic.

When you bring a baby into the world you literally combine two ancestral lines, like the mixing together of hawthorn and cinnamon.

In the cauldron of your body, you bring together two distinct histories, lineages, webs. You twine together two different threads and create…. an entirely new ancestor.

My daughter’s great-aunt on her father’s side was over as I was putting on the finishing touches. Later she texted to thank me for creating the altar. Commenting on its beauty, she wrote, “I hope when I die I get to be remembered on someone’s altar.”

And I told her, she would be. She would be honored on ours. Because she is Iona’s ancestor. And because she is my daughter’s ancestor, she is, very literally, mine as well.

As early as two weeks into a pregnancy, a mother and child begin to exchange DNA. This DNA stays in your body long after the child emerges into the world. Studies show that this DNA can still be present decades after birth—until the very end of your life. The blood of my daughter’s ancestors have now become a part of my blood too.

To be a mother is to become an altar for the ancestors. An altar where the ancestors meet, twine, and create an entirely new life. An altar where the making of an ancestor, the becoming and growing, is something you tend for the rest of your life.

As evening fell, I lit the fragrant beeswax candle on the mantle and pointed out pictures to my daughter. Her great-grandparents, and the great greats before them.

I realized, as I gazed over the black and white photographs, that even with all the work I’ve done to know my ancestors, to heal what they carried, to pass on the garnets amid the granite… that that work, that knowledge, is only half of what she carries.

My daughter is both of my line, and not. The light side of the moon, and the mysterious other.

Two trees grafted onto one another. She carries snaking lines of ancestry—some of which are a mystery to me, but that I now court with care, with honoring, with love. A mystery that is now a part of my own body as well.

So every night of this last mystical, grieving, liminal week I pick her up to look into the reflected light of the candle.

To touch the small dish of water collected from holy wells in England, the places of her own motherline.

To hold the pared apples from the tree outside our house. The hat woven from her great-grandmother’s hands. The photo of her father’s grandfather, standing on the plane that kept him alive during the war.

And I realize one day I’ll be on this altar as well.

One day she will.

One day we will all become ancestors.

And our bodies will merge once again with the deeper lineages of mammal, bacteria, earth.

One day we will become soil again, in the great altarbody of this Earth.