How much of me existed before I did?

I don't spend much time looking in the mirror trying to figure out which parts of my face belong to which parent. I've been told I look like my dad, but I've also been told I look like my mom. At some point, that became confusing enough that I stopped trying to see it myself. Maybe I have his eyes or her smile. Maybe there are pieces of people I never met hiding somewhere in my face. Genetics makes that possible, which is strange to think about. I am made from biological information that existed long before I did, shuffled and rearranged until it eventually became this particular version of a person. But when I wonder how much of me existed before I did, my face is probably the least interesting part.

I think I love like my mother. She takes care of people and pours herself into them, sometimes until there isn't much left for herself. I recognize that in me. I recognize her in the way I argue, too. My mom will keep talking when she feels misunderstood because she needs the other person to understand what she means. My dad is different. He will try for a while, but eventually he becomes quiet. He sits with his thoughts and feelings before he wants to continue. I somehow became a mizture of both. There are times when I will explain and explain because being misunderstood feels unbearable, and then there are times when I have nothing left ot say and need to disappear into my own head for a while. Forgiveness feels different. I think I had to learn that more on my own, although even there, I probably resemble my mother more than I realize.

The funnt thing about inheritance is that we usually talk about it as though it is something stored inside DNA. Eye color, hair, height, certain diseases. But families pass down so much that will never appear on a genetic test. Sometimes inheritance looks like Christmas Eve. We celebrated the eves in my family, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. Christmas meant huge gift exchanges, pozole, tamales, champurrado, music, grandparents and cousins. New Year's was louder. There were fireworkd, more pozole, more tamales, more music, and I remember being awake until six in the morning at a New Year's party once. Affection wasn't always something that needed to be announced. Sometimes it was eating together, cooking together, or making sure everybody had a plate. Maybe that is why, when I imagine myself old, I still imagine myself cooking for people.

My mother's family came from Zacatecas, Mexico. My grandparents had thirteen children, which still sounds ridiculous every time I say. Thirteen. They could have had hobbies. They could have saved for a television. Instead, apparently, they had children. Somehow, they also brought every single one of them to the United States. I didn't understand how extraordinary that was when I was younger. I grew up in an agricultural community surrounded by other children of immigrants, so certain stories felt ordinary because everybody seemed to have some version of one. As I got older, I realized how many families had been split across borders. Some people had siblings in another country. Some had one parent here and another somewhere else. Some had family members who simply never got the same opportunity. My mom had all of her siblings here, and that feels like a blessing I inherited without doing anything to deserve it.

My grandmother stayed home and raised the children while my grandfather dedicated his life to working in the fields. One of my memories of him is his little red truck with strawberries piled in the back. It happened so long ago that somtimes the memory feels like something I made up. After my grandmother died, he stayed in the United States for a handful of years, until eventually I think he realized there was nothing requiring him to spend the rest of his life working the way he always had. He had a ranch waiting for him in Zacatecas, so he went home. He took care of his cattle and retired.

My mom grew up differently than I did. She was one of the younger children, so almost everything belonged to somebody before it belonged to her. Clothes were hand-me-downs. There weren't shopping trips or piles of new things. Her older siblings helped raise the younger ones. School existed, but survival had a way of becoming more urgent. She went to school in the same area where I would eventually grow up, but she never finished high school. My dad didn't either. He grew up surrounded by sisters as the only boy in his family, joined the Mexican military for the benefits and later went into agricultural work. His family eventually settled near the border, while he moved into Arizona and followed agricultural work between Arizona and California. Eventually, that work brought him to the same place as my mother, and that's how they met. Sometimes I think it's strange that my existence can be traced through things as enormous as migration and things as ordinary as where crops happened to need workers.

My dad spoke Spanish and Portuguese before he learned English. I remember watching him learn Englush and hearing his accent change. Spanish was the language I grew up with because it was the language both of my parents shared. Later, when I became interested in Portuguese myself, it became something my dad and I could share too. He was also raised with machismo, with the idea that women were supposed to serve the men in their lives. They cooked, cleaned, maintained the home, and their opinions carried less weight. But my father had mostly daughters, and strangely, he didn't raise us to believe any of that.

Neither of my parents spent much time preparing me to find a husband. Of course, we heard the normal things about relationships and love, but when I remember what they really emphasized, it was school, careers, college, and independence. They wanted us to dream big and do more than they had been able to do. "Don't end up like us" was something I heard growing up, not because they thought their lives were worthless, but because they wanted their ceiling to become our floor. My mom has always said that she wanted us to have opportunities she never had. Neither of my parents went to college, so they raised their children with college almost presented as a given. They didn't teach me to find a man I could rely on. They taught me not to have to rely on one. If I eventually chose someone, they wanted me to choose someone who was as interested in building a life as I was.

There was something almost funny about that progresison. My grandparents' generation was trying to get thirteen children across a border and keep them fed. My parents' generation was trying to work and give their children opportunities they never had. Then I grew up with enough security to sit around and wonder who I am. Maybe that's one of the greatest things they gave me. I had the privilege of becoming curious.

That curiousity is one of the few things I have trouble tracing back to anybody. Nobody in my family loves books or science the way I do. I don't know where that part came from. I have always wanted to know things, although my curiousity isn't particularly organized. I can become interested inna disease and then a fictional character and then immigration and then some horrible tragedy in the news and then human behavio and then a microscopic thing happening inside a cell. I've realized that a lot of my curiousity begins with emotion. If something makes me sad, angry, agraid or confused, I want to understand it.

I want to understand diseases partly because there are people living inside those diagnoses. I want to understand immigration because there are families inside the statistics. I want to understand things like narcissism, abuse, manipulation, addiction, discrimination, poverty, displacement, gun violence, and injustice because none of those things happen in a vacuum. Something happens to another human being. I think empathy makes me nosy. I feel something, and then I need to know why. Maybe that's one of the parts that is entirely mine, although even saying that makes me wonder how sure I can really be.

Genetics is weird because inheritence isn't a photocopy. I received about half of my nuclear DNA from each parent, but I am not simply half of one person glued to half of another. When eggs and sperm are made, chromosomes are shuffled and pieces of DNA are exchanged, so the result is a genetic combination that did not exist before. I like thinking about it that way. The ingredients are old, but the arrangement is new. Genes aren't instructions for an inevitable life, either. Some have powerful and predictable effects, while others only change probabilities. Who we become comes from genetics tangled together with environemtn, developement, experiences, choices, and chance. I think that is what fascinates me most about inheritance: something can coem from before me without deciding what comes after me.

I think about that because there are things I am afraid I interited. My maternal grandfather has Alzheimer's disease, and there are few things about aging that frighten me more. Alzheimer's is a progressive disease of the brain. Over time, neurons become damaged and die, and the networks responsible for memory, language, reasoning and eventually basic functions begin to fail. There are genes tht can influence someone's risk of developing it, but most Alzheimer's does not follow a simple rule wher eone relative having the disease means everyone after them will have it. Some genetic variants increase risk without guaranteeing the disease, while rare families carry mutations that can directly cause certain forms of early-onset Alzheimer's.

I know all of that, and it still scares me. I'm afraid of forgetting people I love. I'm afraid of forgetting myself. I'm afraid of knowing there are memories inside my head right now that feel permanent but aren't promised to me. More than anything, I think I am afraid of deteriorating in front of the people who love me and forcing them, in some strange way, to lose me twice: once while I am still here, and then again when I am gone.

There are other things I hope not to inherit that have nothing to do with chromosomes. I don't want to inherit every relationship patterns I grew up around. I don't want children before marriage, and I don't want a relationship held together simple because two people have become good at enduring it. I inherited a strong belief in loyalty, and I don't want to lose that. I actually think loyalty can matter more than love sometimes because love is a feeling, and feelings move, while loyalty is a decision. But I am beginning to understand that even something beautiful can become ugly when taken too far. Loyalty can turn into endurance, and endurance can turn into self-abadonment. You can become so proud of staying that you forget to ask whether staying is still good for either of you.

Maybe that is another inheritance I am learning to edit. I want security, loyalty and financial stability. I want someone who wants to build a protect a life with me. But more than any of things, I think I want stability in the quieter sense of the world. I want to be content. When I imagine myself very old, I don't picture an impressive woman. I picture a woman at home, reading in her living room or outside somewhere, maybe with a fire going nearby. There are books everywhere and stories she has written that she may or may not ever publish. She keeps them anyway. There are dogs, cats, birds, fish, and probably a few animals wandering around that technically don't belong to her but have figured out she's an easy target.

She gardens, makes ceramics, and has scrapbooks filled with decades of people. She cooks, and her facorite recipes are saved somewhere because feeding people never stopped being one of the ways she says I love you. She has a husband who also learned to love a quiet and simple life. They're empty nesters, and the house is peaceful until it isn't, because the children and grandchildren come over and bring the good kind of chaos with them. I already know I will be an absolute nightmare of a grandmother. I'll let the grandchildren make a disaster while they're eating, get filthy outside, and somehow bath time will make the bathroom wetter than the children. There will probably be animals involved where animals should not be involved. Eventually everyone will go home, and the house will become quiet again.

I don't imagine myself working very much by then, and that feels significant considering where I come from. So much of my family's story is work: fields, migration, military service, raising children, raising siblings, providing, suriving, getting by, and creating something slightly better for whoever came next. Maybe the privilege they were trying to give me wasn't simply the opportunity to work a different kind of job. Maybe the privilege they were trying to give me wasn't simply the opportunity to work a different kind of job. Maybe it was the possibility that one day I wouldn't have to spend my entire life surviving.

There is another kind of inheritance I have been thinking about lately, though: the things that might have always belonged to me but that I abadoned for a while. When I was younger, I cared too much about what other people found interesting about me. I would exaggerate the parts that received attention and dim the parts that didn't. I edited myself according to my audience without reakizing that was what I was doing. I think I spent years confusing being liked with being known.

Now I'm trying something different. I'm letting myself love things even when nobody else understands why I care about them. I'm letting myself be interested in something without determining whether it makes me interesting. I'm letting myself read what I want, learn what I want, write things nobody asked me to write and care deeply about things that other people might walk right past. Something interesting happens when you do that: people sort themselves out. When you stop changing yourself to make everyone comfortable, some people become more interested in you and others become less. Some leave, some stay, and some recognize you better than they ever could when you were giving them the edited version. I used to think losing people meant I had done something wrong. Now I think sometimes it just means the filter is working.

So how much of me existed before I did? A lot, probably. Parts of me existed in Zacatecas before I knew what Zacatecas was. Parts of me existed in fields in Mexico, Arizona and California. Parts of me were sitting in a little red truck full of strawberries. Parts of me existed in thirteen children sharing clothes, in older siblings raising younger ones, in a mother who wanted her daughters to have opportunities she never had, and in a father who was taught women should depend on men and somehow raised his daughters to do the opposite.

Some of me is written into DNA, and some of me was taught at a dinner table. Some of me was passed down through Spanish, food, work, Catholicism, migration, arguments, silence, loyalty, and the ways people in my family learned to love. Some of it I want to keep, some of it scares me, and some of it ends with me. Then there are the pieces that I think were mine all along. Maybe becoming yourself isn't creating an entirely new person. Maybe it's sorting through everything that reached you before you were old enough to choose, keeping what feels like home, questioning what hurts, changing what needs changing, forgiving some of it and refusing some of it. Maybe it's also finding all the little pieces of yourself you once put away because somebody else wasn't interested in them. I don't know exactly how much of me existed before I did.