FOUR GENERATIONS

My mom almost always boiled chicken. Rarely did she cook it in the oven. I’ve never asked her why. And not for a lack of curiosity. I suppose I just never wanted to make her feel bad.

I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember, protecting her feelings over my own. She’s not the only person I do this with. But I do believe she was the first.

I’m working on it. My therapist would call this creating boundaries.

I would call this tiring.

I’ve read that our mothers' eggs were formed as fetuses, while they were still inside our grandmothers. So, technically, our grandmothers carried us. As a child, my mother’s mother was the person who I felt understood me the most, and many times, the only one who did.

Stefania Sainato writes in an article on Motherly,

“According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), women are born with 1 to 2 million eggs, but only a fraction—roughly 400 to 500—will mature and be released during ovulation. The rest remain dormant, carrying the potential to shape future generations. This rare biological process doesn’t just connect us to our ancestors—it illustrates the complex web of continuity that sustains life. The egg that became you was formed in your grandmother’s womb, passed through your mother, and eventually became part of you. It’s a reminder that our lives are deeply intertwined with the choices and circumstances of those who came before us. [. . .] The connection between generations goes beyond biology. Through epigenetics, your grandmother’s experiences—her diet, environment, stress levels, and even her emotional state—may have shaped your mother and, in turn, you.” (Sainato, 2024)

I'm not sure how many girls grow up feeling closer to their grandmothers than they do their mothers. I’m not sure how many kids grow up remembering the specific ways their mothers cooked their meals. But I’ve always been an observer. My daughter is the same way.

I

Anytime we’re all in the same room, which is once, maybe twice, a year, my gram looks around and says, in her thick New England accent, “We’ve got four generations sitting right here.” A few minutes later, she looks around, takes a breath, and repeats the same sentence. This typically lasts for as long as our visit does.

At least, that’s how it was last summer, the last time we were all together. Over the phone recently, my mom told me, “Gram’s having trouble with words.”

I’ve noticed this in our past few visits. She can’t think of what word she needs, so she puts in a few that don’t fit. Or, she’ll start talking in sentences that don’t make any sense, just stringing words together.

“She’s becoming quieter, like her dad was,” my mom adds.

I’m not sure if my gram has Alzheimer’s or dementia. To be honest, I don’t know much about either. I know the general idea, like how one of those is a more severe form of the other. But I don’t feel a need to know much beyond that. One may conclude that my avoidance of knowing what’s really going on with my gram’s decline is a small picture of how I’m handling it as a whole. Maybe. But also, I don’t need to know because it doesn’t change her in my mind. It makes no difference to me what diagnosis a doctor may slap on her. I don’t see her any differently than I always have.

Growing up, my mom and I lived in Virginia, and my gram, Carol, lived in Massachusetts. It was about an eight-hour drive, one-hour plane ride. We saw her about 3-4 times a year. And for one week every summer, we vacationed in Wells Beach, Maine.

Until I was eight years old, my gram had the family beach house that my grandparents bought and vacationed at every summer when they had kids living at home. After she sold it, we continued the tradition every summer after, renting a house on the same street.

My mom, daughter, and I still do this. My gram doesn’t come anymore. It’s too much for her. But a few years ago, one of the last times she did come, we had just arrived in Wells for our week-long stay. There’s a road named Mile Road because it’s exactly one mile long. This road leads to a side street, Atlantic Ave., where we bounce around different beach house rentals each year. I was driving. Gram in the passenger seat. I rolled down all the windows to let in the salty air; the smelly aroma of the bay filled the car as we passed it. The breeze blew in through the windows, immediately turning my hair into Medusa’s snakes. I felt the nostalgia of the scene before it was spoken. “Ahh,” my gram breathed in deep. “It feels like coming home.”

A few days later, my gram and I were walking together on the beach. “Ya know,” she said. “Everybody has ‘specials’ in their lives. For me, you’ve always been that.”

I remember being seven years old, my gram at our apartment for one of her visits. My mom always gave up her bed so my gram and I could have a sleepover. We would talk and laugh so late into the night that my mom would yell to us from the other room to quiet down. We would, for a few minutes at least. But then something else would send us into a fit of laughter, and my mom would scold us once again

II

My mom and I went shopping together a few months ago. She had driven the three and a half hours to visit me, and in the morning before she left, we ended up at the grocery store.

We reached the self-checkout line, and I remembered there was a case of water underneath the cart. My mom grabbed the handheld scanner, but the barcode was on the bottom of the package. When I tell you this woman practically lay on the ground to get that thing scanned, I’m not exaggerating. A man who was in line behind us offered to help. But my mom had it handled. Just like she always does.

“Thank you,” she said to the man after she had gotten back up. And then reached inside her purse. She handed him what can only be described as a miniature Jesus figure. One-inch Jesus was dressed in a white robe with a red sash across his front. I held my breath and stared at the man who had just received this strangely unique gift. He stared at it, at first looking a little puzzled. He thanked her and started walking out of the store.

A wave of embarrassment I knew well, having spent a lifetime watching my mom pass out Bible tracts to cashiers, clerks, strangers in public places, came rushing over me. But just as soon as it had, the man, now fifteen feet in front of us, turned around. “You know,” he yelled back to my mom. He was grinning from ear to ear. “That is pretty cool.”

On one of our Wells Beach summer vacations, my childhood friend was staying with us for a few days. She and I were out swimming in the ocean when we saw someone walking towards us from the beach a few hundred feet away. We went back and forth for several minutes trying to figure out whether it was my mom or my gram. The gait, the shape, the silhouette. It was indistinguishable.

III

My favorite picture taken of me is of my first time on Wells Beach. I was only a few months old. My gram is holding me. I’m wrapped in an afghan she crocheted.

I have a stack of old pictures stuffed in a kitchen drawer, and many of them were taken in Wells. There’s one of my mom running into the water as a toddler with her brother and sister. Another of her when she was seven, standing on the beach wearing a giant sombrero. Another of my young gram, so evenly tanned, sitting in a white and black polkadot bikini. (My family members like to tell how she used to cover herself in baby oil and “bake” all day in the sun.)

On my fridge, I have a picture of my daughter, taken when she was three. She’s running in the wet Wells sand, one arm above her head, and even though her body is angled facing the ocean, you can tell that she is smiling.

Whenever I come across these photos, it always feels like I’ve just opened a time capsule. Each of us in the same place, captured at different ages, different decades. Not much about Wells has changed as far back as I can remember. So much of us has.

There’s a tenderness that lives in me I’ve yet to mitigate in this lifetime, an ache I’ve yet to find a remedy for. My heart feels too big so much of the time. Only recently has my mom let me know she has so often felt the same. My gram used to say, “Life is shit and then you die.” But I know she was happy at times, too. I’ve researched generational trauma, but maybe not enough. Maybe there’s something there. I can’t be sure.

I was born two weeks late on the last morning of August. After a seventeen-hour labor, my mom was wheeled in for a C-section. When I think about my birth, I think about how maybe I wasn’t ready to be here. How maybe my soul knew something before my tiny body did, the anticipation of a life to come that would feel like swimming upstream.

But when I think about giving birth, I remember how empowered I felt. At noon on a Friday, a doctor performed an amniotomy to break my water. My active labor lasted 10 hours, though it felt like 10 days. As Pitocin (or as my mom calls it, The Devil) was pushed through my veins, my contractions intensified. My pelvis started to push her out before my brain told me it was time. The nurse said I wasn’t yet at 10 centimeters dilated, but my body knew. Three hours of pushing, of transforming into a half psycho/half goddess (sans epidural!), there she was.

They placed my Hazel Adelia on my chest, her seconds-old skin pressed to mine, her hair wet with fluid and blood. She latched onto my breast and ate for thirty minutes. She’s known exactly what she wants from the moment she entered this world.

IV

Last summer, I surprised Hazel with a hermit crab for her birthday. I kept him in a small box in my closet for a day, and presented him to her the morning she turned nine. She was so excited that she took her birthday money and bought two more at the pet store. We crafted a terrarium for them to live in with food, sand, and a water bowl, and placed them on the bookshelf in our living room.

At first, I was admittedly a bit creeped out. One night, I was lying on the couch and heard a scraping sound. I looked up to see one of the crabs crawling up to the top of the enclosure, long pointy legs through the air holes, trying to escape. I placed a book on top of the cage to assure they would stay put, and after a few weeks got used to the feeling of little creatures living inside my home.

A week later, on a post-dinner beach walk in Wells, we noticed hermit crabs in the tide pools after the tide had gone out. Their grayish brown forms looked much different from the colorful painted shelled crabs we had recently bought. In all my years on this beach, I’d only ever seen a handful of hermit crabs, and mostly only near the jetty. Here were dozens just hanging out in the open, covered only by a couple of inches of salty water. We watched them for a while, Hazel picking one up now and then to study it, and then placing it back. I instantly felt bad for enclosing the crabs we had back home.

A few months ago, I happened to glance in our tank and noticed one of our crabs, whom my daughter named Lenny, was completely out of his shell. Thankfully, she was at school. He was on his back and flailing his legs around.

To be honest, I had assumed these little beings would have lived maybe a couple of months at most. This was month seven.

I left him alone, went out to run a few errands, and when I came back home a couple of hours later, he was turned back over, completely sprawled out in the water dish, and not moving. I assumed he was dead.

I left him where he was for a few hours, and eventually, reached in and moved him to a dryer area inside the terrarium. After consulting the internet a little too late, I realized he may not be dead and possibly just molting.

Do not under any circumstances touch your crab when in this state. You could cause them further distress. I read out loud. Fuck. I said out loud. Though reading on, I discovered there was mixed advice. Some people of the online hermit crab expert community did mention that moving the crab to its own private enclosure would be the safest place to molt, if it was indeed molting.

The only way to tell if he was dead would be a fish-like smell, and the hermit crab experts said it may take a couple of days for that to show up. Ew. Thankfully, this was all happening on a four-day stretch when my daughter was sleeping at her dad’s house. I would only be seeing her when I picked her up for school each morning and from school each afternoon.

I grabbed a cardboard box out of our recycling pile, thoroughly taped up the bottom and sides, and filled it with some leftover hermit crab sand I had stored under the sink. I gave him his own water dish, added some food, and delicately scooped up a big pile of sand with Lenny balancing on top. I carefully transferred him into his new makeshift enclosure. He still hadn’t moved, so my doubt was growing.

Let me just say, I’m sorry that I’ve strung you so far along in this story and have seemingly built it up to give you a false sense of hope, because this story doesn’t have a happy ending. My whole reason for telling you this is to show you what it’s always been like for me living in this world—when anything looks like it may be falling apart, when it’s clear a relationship needs to change or end, and even when death is as blatantly obvious as a lifeless hermit crab, I tend to hold on. Even when I know deep down, it’s over.

I fear my daughter has this tendency too. One day last year, we were taking a walk in a Philly park. I had an old blanket in my car, and we decided to lay it out in the grass for a bit and have a picnic. Penn Treaty Park is often frequented by the unhoused, so when we got up to leave, I decided to fold up the old blanket and leave it on one of the park benches in case anyone needed it.

Hazel was a mess over us leaving this blanket. It was my torn-up old comforter, but she wailed as if I’d just thrown away her favorite stuffed animal. It was a pain I recognized deeply in her. The pain of letting (anything) go.

I stared at that damn hermit crab, Lenny, in his new little home for three days, willing his tiny legs to twitch. Eventually, I could smell the fish-like smell, and the reality of his demise was solidified. Lenny was gone. I buried his creepy little body behind our house at the tree line (which, to be honest, is technically our neighbor's property, but I covered the hole exactly as it had been and didn’t think they’d notice).

I cleaned off his shell so I could give it to Hazel. She handled it much better than I had. After school, we drove to a park. I pulled the car into the parking lot and turned to her in the back seat.

“I have to tell you something sad,” I said.

“What? What?” She was starting to slightly panic.

“Lenny has gone to hermit crab heaven.”

I handed her a small cardboard box in which I had placed his orange shell. She opened the lid and let out a sweet little aww. I suggested we make his shell into an art piece. I had some extra canvases at home, and we discussed her painting his name on one, glue-gunning his shell onto it, and hanging it up in her room. She seemed to like this idea.

We sat quietly for a moment, and then she said, “I really have to go to the bathroom.”

That evening, when we got home, I noticed her beloved Betta fish, Jupiter, was angled strangely at the bottom of the fish tank.

Oh god. I didn’t draw any attention to him. I wondered if the animals were conspiring against me. And then I wondered if I accidentally made this happen. A week or so prior, I randomly asked Hazel if she would be sad if the hermit crabs died. I was trying to emotionally prepare her for whenever that day would come, but had no idea it would be so soon. “Not really,” she said. “I’ll be way more sad if Jupiter dies.”

The next morning, when my alarm went off, I immediately went out to check on the fish. He was still in the same spot. Fuck. I grabbed a plastic fork and pushed him into his pineapple-shaped house in the corner of the tank. I didn’t want him to be seen by a certain sweet nine-year-old who most assuredly did not deserve to lose two pets in the same week. She came out for breakfast, and I contemplated not telling her but knew it was inevitable.

She sat down at the table. I pulled out the stool next to hers, sat down, and faced her. “Another sad thing happened,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Jupiter died.” This time she burst into tears. She laid her head in my lap and cried and cried. I rubbed her back, silently accepting that this was a pain I couldn’t fix.

Webster’s definition of autonomy is: The quality or state of being self-governing; especially: the right of self-government.

I’m not sure I ever felt a sense of that until I was in my late twenties. I know my daughter feels it now at nine years old. At nine years old, my mom was breaking up fights, a young peacemaker. And as a teenager, my gram was kicked out of her house for loving a boy who wasn’t Catholic.

We all share the same blood, all cut from the same cloth, yet our threads flow in such different directions, weave and tie in unique ways. Except.

Except when we’re hidden in a tiny beach town, standing at the edge of the Atlantic, toes buried in the sand. And instantly, if only for a moment, we are all exactly the same, with no need to figure out what has happened. No urgency to anticipate what comes next.

I sent my daughter’s dad a picture of her a few days ago.

“She looks like your mom here,” he responded.

“Yeah, I see so much of my mom in her,” I said back.

A few weeks ago, she fried her own breakfast in a skillet. She cracked an egg, flipped it, and took extra care to turn off the burner when she was finished. She got herself a plate, scooped her over-easy meal onto it, and had finished eating before I even came into the room.

My mom never formally taught me to cook, though I wouldn’t consider myself a bad one. She and I both make my gram’s lasagna now–a delicious recipe that always gets rave reviews. As a kid, at Thanksgiving, my mom always let me tear up bread for the stuffing and peel apples for the pie. She and my gram both make the best pies.

When I was in college, my mom used to send me her homemade loaves of bread. I remember as a little girl standing in the kitchen trying to talk over the particular hum of the breadmaker. I remember watching the dough puff up to the top, my mom hoping aloud it wouldn’t fall back down after it had risen. I remember the first warm slice, the soft texture on my tongue, the way the salty butter mixed with the sweetness of what she had, in my young mind, just magically created.

Whenever I opened my care packages, my mouth would immediately start to water. I knew a giant foil-covered loaf was in there waiting for me. I’d slice off the end, head down to the basement of my dorm, and pop it in the toaster. It didn’t quite taste as fresh as it always did those times when she pulled it hot out of the breadmaker in our kitchen. But when I closed my eyes and took that first bite, it felt like home

References

Merriam-Webster. (n.d., Definition 1). Autonomy. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved June 14, 2025, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/autonomy

Sainato, S. (2024, November 20). You started as an egg inside your grandmother—here's the mind-blowing science behind this generational bond. Motherly. https://www.mother.ly/health-wellness/its-science/grandmother-carried-you-in-her-womb/

Edye Renee Sawyer is a writer and editor who is based just outside of Philadelphia, PA, where she lives with her daughter. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in professional writing from New England College. Her work has been featured in Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine, and she is also the author of the self-published children’s book, "But, What If?"