By: Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero
On Mother’s Day, we turn toward one of the most intimate mysteries of life: the way the past lives inside us.
Inside nearly every cell of the body is DNA, a living language written in four chemical letters. Adenine. Thymine. Cytosine. Guanine. Four letters, arranged in countless patterns, carrying instructions for bodies, traits, growth, repair, vulnerability, resilience, and possibility. In this way, DNA feels almost like an organic digital language. It is code, alive and breathing. It is information held in flesh. It is memory with a heartbeat.
We often think of inheritance as something visible. A mother’s eyes. A father’s hands. A grandmother’s laugh. The shape of a face repeated across generations. Yet inheritance goes deeper than what can be seen. We carry histories inside us. Some are written in our genes. Some are shaped by the environment around those genes. Some come through the emotional weather of the homes that raised us. Some arrive through story, silence, touch, fear, tenderness, and the lessons no one ever said out loud.
Epigenetics gives us a powerful way to understand this. Our DNA sequence may remain the same, while life experience can influence how certain genes are expressed. Stress, safety, hunger, trauma, care, love, exposure, and environment can all leave impressions on the body. The science is complex, and we should approach it with humility. Still, the spiritual insight is clear. Life listens. The body remembers. The past does not simply disappear because a new generation is born. We are echoes of those who came before us.
We are the songs and the wounds, the courage and the fear, the laughter and the grief, the recipes and the rituals, the habits and the silences. We are what survived. Somewhere in us is the strength of people who crossed oceans, endured loss, worked through exhaustion, protected children, buried dreams, began again, and carried life forward without knowing what their descendants would one day become. Some of what they gave us was beautiful. Some of it was heavy. Most of it was mixed. That is where responsibility begins.
If we are written by the past, then part of our work is to become conscious editors of what continues. We may not choose the first draft of our inheritance. We may not choose the trauma that shaped our families, the fear that entered our homes, the shame that traveled through generations, or the silence that taught us how to survive. Yet with awareness, care, community, and courage, we can begin to change what gets passed on. We can learn the old code and decide where it needs healing.
We can notice the anxiety that has moved through a family line and choose to meet it with breath. We can notice the anger that became normal and choose another kind of strength. We can notice the shame around bodies, feelings, money, identity, or grief and choose to speak with more tenderness. We can notice the silence that once protected someone and decide that the next generation deserves language. This is how hope becomes encoded.
Hope is not only passed through childbirth. Hope is passed through nurture. Through the adult who listens. Through the auntie who remembers your favorite food. Through the teacher who sees the child no one else understands. Through the neighbor who becomes family. Through the elder who blesses without controlling. Through the friend who stays. Through the chosen parent who helps a young person believe they are worthy of love. Motherhood, in its deepest sense, is the work of helping life become.
Some mothers do this through the body. They carry, birth, nurse, feed, protect, and raise. Some do this through adoption, fostering, teaching, mentoring, friendship, caregiving, ministry, justice work, and presence. Some become mothers without ever being called mother. Some save lives by offering steadiness at the right moment. Some mother communities. Some mother movements. Some mother the frightened parts of us until we are strong enough to live.
Blood matters, and nurture matters. Biology matters, and chosen love matters. Mother’s Day becomes wider and more honest when we make room for all of it.
For some, this day is filled with gratitude. For others, it carries grief, absence, longing, estrangement, infertility, loss, or complicated memory. A real celebration of motherhood must be tender enough to hold every story in the room. Some of us were mothered well. Some of us had to search for mothering elsewhere. Some of us are still learning how to mother ourselves. And perhaps that, too, is part of the work.
To mother ourselves is to become gentle with the parts of us that inherited fear. It is to stop speaking to ourselves in the voice of old shame. It is to feed what was hungry, protect what was vulnerable, and listen to what was silenced. It is to become, in our own inner life, the kind of presence we needed.
DNA tells us that life continues through pattern. Epigenetics reminds us that life responds to experience. Family systems show us that emotions, anxieties, and ways of relating can move through generations. Motherhood teaches us that love can also move through generations, sometimes through blood, sometimes through choice, sometimes through one act of care that changes the direction of a life. We are living code. We are inherited memory. We are also possibility.
So on this Mother’s Day, we honor all who helped life continue. We honor those who gave us bodies, those who gave us shelter, those who gave us language, those who gave us courage, those who gave us a second chance at belonging. We honor the mothers of blood and the mothers of choice, the grandmothers, aunties, mentors, teachers, friends, elders, fathers who mothered, siblings who mothered, communities that mothered, and all who became a safe place for someone else to grow.
May we receive what was life-giving. May we heal what was harmful. May we understand the code we carry. May we write hope into the future, through our children, through our communities, through our tenderness, through our courage, and through the way we become a mothering presence in the world. Because somewhere, a future generation is already listening. And what we become now may teach them how to live.