I had a dream that I was dancing. Fully in it — sweat, rhythm, hips. No choreography. Just my body remembering something true. I danced, I dropped to my knees, and all the gold I was wearing fell off.
Not just my everyday necklace. Big earrings. Heavy chains. Gold wrapped around me like it had always been there. And when it fell, it didn’t crash. It didn’t break. It just let go. Quietly. Like something in me was ready to shift.
Gold carries meaning in my family. It’s passed down from grandparent to grandchild. I have a necklace created of gold worn by the women before me. It holds memory, love, and history. So when the gold dropped in the dream, it didn’t feel like loss. It felt like a threshold. Like the protections that carried me this far were saying: now you carry it your way.
A few days later, I remembered something I learned years ago: when a pregnant person carries a fetus with ovaries, that fetus begins forming its own eggs. I was inside my mother while she was inside my grandmother. That’s not a metaphor. That’s biology. Three generations, nested in one body. And now — if I were carrying a child with ovaries — their eggs would be forming inside me.
I am seven generations in one body. I’m standing in the middle of a lineage that stretches far in both directions. Time folds here. It breathes.
My partner and I come from many backgrounds. Our baby carries all of it. As a mixed-race person, I used to feel pulled in too many directions — like I had to pick a side, prove I belonged. But pregnancy has brought me closer to something more real than neat answers. The truth is, I come from cedar smoke and laughter. I also come from genocide and silence. From resilience, from rupture. From prayers said in many languages. From forgetting, and from the longing to remember.
Pregnancy hasn’t made everything make sense but it’s made me listen closer. This child is shaped by my breath, my grief, my joy. They’re learning from the people who gather with me, the land I walk, the gaps I’m still naming. They’re not just multiracial — they’re multi-rooted. Already in relationship with the complexity of the world.
My body is slower now — not just tired, but attuned to something different. A slowness that feels unfamiliar, but true. I don’t know if it’s new or ancient — maybe this is how pregnant bodies have always moved. Listening. Sensing. Noticing the wind through the trees. Letting the sunlight rearrange me. Breathing as I soften. I want this child to feel that. To feel safe enough to grow. To feel the awe of where they come from, and the warmth of who they belong to. I want them to feel held. To know that being held is possible. That it’s not weakness to be tender. It’s wisdom.
My parents made that more possible. They worked hard. Paused when they could. Made brave choices. Carried burdens I may never fully understand. They handed me their version of the gold — worn, earned, and held with care. Now I get to ask a different kind of question: How do I carry it in a way that brings more softness, more space, more breath?
This feels like the ceremony of pregnancy. Not just hormonal shifts or body change. A re-mapping. During pregnancy, the brain sheds gray matter — neural pruning. Letting go of what’s no longer needed to make room for what’s next.
I can feel it. My brain is changing. The old protections — overgiving, overworking, staying on high alert — they’re loosening. They were like gold, passed down from those who came before me. Ancestral protection, wrapped around me. And now, like in the dream, they fall — not in loss, but in trust. Because I am the protection now. Because something in me is ready to carry this next life in a new way.
Some days I feel undone. Some days I feel remade. But this is the most embodied I’ve ever been. I’m letting my life speak. And it doesn’t speak in logic. It speaks in breath. In quiet. In the slow trust that comes when I stop pretending I know everything and just listen to what’s real.
Maybe the gold is still here. Just carried differently now.
Maybe the offering is this: to stay in rhythm. To let myself be changed. To pass on what was passed to me — with more space. With more care.
Maybe — that’s what it means to belong to a lineage.
