Motherlines by Eve Morton
It was soon after Julie began nursing when she realized she could travel through time.
When Nathan was a week old, and her breasts ached with regularity ten times a day, she read about common nursing issues online. She’d been thinking her blinks into the past were dreams from sleep deprivation, or maybe even something serious like postpartum psychosis. But who had delusions or dreams about the American frontier? About prohibition? She was Canadian and she didn’t even like Clint Eastwood. Her vow to be cautious during her nursing sessions only yielded more and more strange locations and foreign time periods. These travels happened only when he was nursing, and only for those first short seconds when her milk letdown—but those seconds could contain numerous lifetimes. Numerous locations. And were many years removed from where Julie was now, stuck at home with a baby, with absolutely no help from a father.
She didn’t find much online. Only women complaining about policies that they had the right to complain about, and many who longed to give up the onerous task of breastfeeding for sleep, sleep, and more sleep. She left when too many people fought with one another in the comments, and too many ad companies capitalized on conflict and put formula ads down the side of blog articles.
She was at an utter loss for information, nothing but the babble of a young boy in her arms, when she remembered PubMed. After excluding psychosis, she found the tidbit of actual information she needed: breastfeeding triggered oxytocin. That was the “love” hormone, good for social bonding. But oxytocin was also more than just good for keeping Nathan alive; it was also tied to memory.
Something clicked in her brain. Something unleashed milk into her nursing bra. And suddenly, she was back on the frontier again.
A dusty room, the sound of horses outside. The smell of something bad. A baby. She was taking care of a baby in this vision, and she needed to change him. He smiled up at her, though he looked too skinny. She struggled with the cloth diaper and then struggled to get his bottom as clean as it should be. He was bright red, diaper rash. There was nothing to help him with.
Then she was back, taking care of Nathan. She lost a few more hours with him, playing and bathing. She checked multiple times to ensure he had no rash. He didn’t. He was perfect, at least in terms of medical standards and motherly love. When he finally fell asleep, she used her phone to Google more about frontier times. To find a diaper rash remedy. She wanted to be prepared when she had to visit that other baby, whom she called Nathan in her mind because she knew of no other name.
When she went under again on the next nursing session, she didn’t go to the frontier. She was in prohibition. A meeting room, filled with other women in dresses, wearing gloves and large hats. Some had infants clinging to their shoulders and waists, but not her. Someone else had her baby. Another son. A woman stood and gathered the attention of the crowd, speaking about the temperance movement.
“If we want to protect our children, especially our boys, we will not let that despised liquor get into the city. This is a civilization, after all. We will be civilized.”
Back with Nathan, Julie could still see the woman’s face from her travels. When he was asleep, she logged into her mother’s Ancestry account. She’d gotten Julie one of those DNA tests for Christmas that year. At the time, Julie had said a polite thank you and moved on. She wouldn’t have done the test, except for the fact that her mother had practically shoved the vial in her mouth after dinner. “But I’m pregnant,” she protested. “Won’t it throw off the results?”
“If anything,” her mother had said. “You’ll probably get more information. Since you’re beginning a family of your own, you need to know where you came from. The women you came from.”
The report had come by her baby shower. Now, months later, Julie poured over what she’d once readily ignored in favor of talking to any mother but her own at her shower.
Julie recognized the woman from her visions on a DNA relative’s genealogy page. Sarah Abernathy, a distant cousin on her maternal line. Sarah was a temperance leader during prohibition, the user wrote. So was her sister Mary. Both girls learned from their tough-minded mother and grandmother who had grown up on the American frontier.
Julie clicked back into the motherlines from which she descended, and which she understood to be travelling on now. When she exhausted what this amateur genealogist had found, she went to her DNA make-up. Mostly European, not shockingly, but she noted a small fragment of Scandinavian blood.
Vikings? She remembered seeing images of the Valkyries in high school, and longing to play Wagner in her early music career. She’d given that up to chase a guy instead. She’d given up all of it to get a good job when that man left her, and then to have this baby on her own.
But she was not on her own, not anymore. Nathan’s cries reminded her of that. The milk that soaked through her shirt reminded her of that. Julie understood, as sure as her own DNA, that she could travel as far back as her ancestors would let her. As she pressed Nathan to her nipple, she thought of nothing but women warriors, Valkyries, and her own monumental past.
