Many of you are familiar with my “Science of Witchcraft” work, and the epigenetic layer I talk about. But that research is never ending. There’s so much historical science to explore, and new discoveries made fairly regularly.
I've been doing some research lately into mitochondrial DNA. If you're not familiar: mitochondrial DNA is passed exclusively through the maternal line. Mother to child, every child. But only daughters pass it on. Sons carry their mother's mitochondrial DNA their entire lives and it ends there, with them, unduplicated into the next generation.
Which means my maternal line ends with me.
My mom had 2 sisters, only one of whom also had a daughter. But she never had kids. I have a son. And years later, I had a hysterectomy. And somewhere in the middle of reading about mitochondrial inheritance, the fact that it ends with me hit differently than it ever had before. Not as a loss I had already processed and filed away, but as something with new edges I hadn't felt yet. One that, in some small way, I’m still grieving.
The science of it is both humbling and staggering. Every mitochondrial DNA line currently alive traces back through an unbroken chain of mothers; thousands of generations of women who survived long enough to have daughters who survived long enough to do the same. That chain, in my specific case, doesn't continue past me. Whatever my maternal ancestors carried through plague and famine and war and whatever private losses we will never know the names of, it arrives here, in me, and stops.
I won't pretend that doesn't mean something.
But here is the paradox I keep sitting with: there is significant trauma on my mother's side of the family, as with many families. The kind that moves through generations quietly, shaping daughters in ways that take years to even recognize, let alone untangle. If I had a daughter I would also be passing that to her, not just my mitochondrial DNA but the patterns, the wounds, the inherited ways of moving through the world that I have spent years trying to understand and interrupt in myself.
Would I have wanted to continue the line if I had known all of this before my surgery? If we had made the decision to try for more children? I'm genuinely not sure. I think about it and I find myself at a place with no clear answer, just two truths sitting side by side. The grief of an ending. And the complicated relief of a cycle that will not be repeated.
That is not a paradox that resolves. It just becomes something you learn to hold.
I think a lot of us carry versions of this, not necessarily about lineage or children, but about the things we inherited that we never asked for. The question of what to do with what was handed to you. Whether to pass it forward or let it end here, with you, in whatever form that takes. The grief of what is lost in that ending, and the quiet, complicated freedom of it at the same time.
Healing generational trauma is, in a very real sense, a choice to be the last one. To absorb something that has been moving through your family for longer than you can fully trace, and make a conscious, deliberate, sometimes painful decision that it stops here.
That is not a small thing. It doesn't always feel like power. Sometimes it just feels like loss.
But it is both. And learning to let it be both, without forcing a resolution, might be the most honest thing any of us can do with it.
With love, Cerissa