This is for the matriarchs
Becoming a Matriarch author Helen Knott examines the legacy of motherhood and the different pathways parents lay for their children.
When I was a little girl, Mama would buy log home magazines, and we would lose ourselves in the construction of elaborate floor plans for our dream house.
My brothers and I claimed rooms in dozens of log homes that never existed. Little did we know that we, her children, were her ultimate blueprints for the future.
In his famous poem Harlem, American poet Langston Hughes asks, ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’
Those who came before us made sacrifices to give us all this room to dream
When I look back at the women I belong to, whose limitations arose from intergenerational trauma, gender-based restrictions and the racial prejudices of their time, I know that a dream deferred gets passed on to the children.
Those who came before us made sacrifices to give us all this room to dream.
Four women. Four generations. Four babies. I have one. He is a beautiful, well-rounded one. I have a son, and his name is Mathias.
I am the firstborn and only daughter of Shirley. I am the firstborn of the many granddaughters of Junie. I am the great-granddaughter of Nina.
I am here at this moment in time, standing at an intersection of dreams and prayers
I am a living memory of these women. I am their dreams and hopes bound in flesh and bone. I am here at this moment in time, standing at an intersection of dreams and prayers.
I am stepping into a place that these women cleared for me throughout many generations through seemingly small but deliberate and meaningful actions.
However, the clearing of space is not always gentle or peaceful.
Sometimes change is a quick and brutal flooding that carries away the things we thought we knew.
Sometimes we are stripped down to nothing and find ourselves in a foreign emotional landscape. Other times we cling to what we know and recreate the geography of our childhoods in different ways.
Sometimes change is a quick and brutal flooding that carries away the things we thought we knew
When we enter new territory, our own humanness becomes evident through the errors we make and the time that we spend lost. The women before me broke trail for me, but they also left barricades and pathways that led only in circles.
The maps and dreams of my mother and grandmother were half-formed, and I have inherited these patterns.
I have spent much of my life in circles. I have broken trail and grabbed my own mother’s hand to lead her to a space so that she could have her own dreams.
Since my early twenties, I have understood that a part of my purpose here is to heal the emotional wounds and behaviours that haven’t healed in the generations before me. I am consciously creating maps that will be inherited by my son.
Death has shaped me just as birth has
My time here is limited because just as we are brought into this world, we are called back into the spirit world. The two women who primarily raised me up are gone now.
Death has shaped me just as birth has.
Because they were, I am.
I write this in memory of the women who came before me.
I write this to honour their love, sacrifices and hardships.
I write this because their birth was my birth, and their death was my death.
This is a record of maps and dreams.
This is for the matriarchs.
This article was adapted from the introduction to Becoming a Matriarch.
An inspiring exploration of womanhood, grief, addiction and trauma from an Indigenous perspective
Memoir
Paperback
25 July 2024
ISBN 9780715655498
‘A masterpiece of grief and joy, loss and rediscovery, flight and return, and, above all, a paean to the beautiful, eternal and all-encompassing power of matriarchy’ Dr Gabor Maté, author of The Myth of Normal
All her life, Helen Knott has been surrounded by strong women. She has looked to the women in her family and the larger Indigenous community for guidance, absorbed their stories and admired their independence. But Helen’s path hasn’t been easy and when her mother and grandmother died within six months of each other, she drew upon lessons from her ancestors and the land to discover her inner power and refashion her future.
Exploring their struggles and her own with young motherhood, daughterhood, grief and sobriety, Knott offers an inspiring meditation on how we repair ourselves in the face of tragedy, trauma and injustice; on what it is to be a woman – and become a matriarch.
