Your story began long before you were born
When your mother was still an embryo in your grandmother's womb, the eggs she would one day carry were already forming in her ovaries. That means you were physically present in your grandmother's body before your mother was even born.
Modern epigenetics shows: stress, nutrition, the conditions of a life — all of it leaves biological marks that can be passed to the next generations through the egg cells. You carry within you not only genes, but the lived experience of every woman in your line.
We are, quite literally, the continuation of a long female line. The way you treat yourself today is woven into that thread. And there is something more — the continuity of genetic material flows through the woman: mitochondrial DNA is passed only through the egg cell, from mother to daughter.
Sources
- Heard E, Martienssen RA. Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Myths and Mechanisms. Cell, 2014; 157(1):95–109. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.02.045
- Skinner MK. Endocrine disruptor induction of epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of disease. Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology, 2014; 398(1–2):4–12. doi: 10.1016/j.mce.2014.07.019
- White YAR, Woods DC, Takai Y et al. Oocyte formation by mitotically active germ cells purified from ovaries of reproductive-age women. Nature Medicine, 2012; 18(3):413–21. doi: 10.1038/nm.2669