Blood of My Blood: A Botanical Gothic Memoir
About this series
The Blood of My Blood Series is a three-tiered botanical Gothic memoir tracing generations of an inheritance blanketed in shadows filled with sorrow across shifting prairies and vast peaks. Between blood-soaked Oklahoman clay and the golden fields of Nebraska, come with me to unlock my mother's green trunk—examining the fragments of my family's trauma and secrecy, while discovering the maternal sacrifice that flows through my bloodline like silent, deadly currents.
Stories
Her story hadn’t begun with her first breath; it anchored itself, deeply, within the continuous floods from the powerful storms that brewed long before our generations were ever imagined.
My mother, Jess, inherited trauma like a personal kind of family heirloom—rooted in red clay that cracked under extreme pressure, generations before her own body met its ultimate demise.
Life came for her time and time again, tearing violently at the delicate pieces of her soul, attempting to drag her innocence into the same cold abyss that swallowed so many daughters from our bloodline before her. It didn’t matter how far down the darkness tried to drag her, nor did it matter how persistent these shadows became; she always found her way back to us, wherever that may have been.
Her four children were not just a simple part of her world—we were the entirety of her everything. Every battle she fought and won was meant to shield us from growing the same thorns and bearing the same painful scars. She sacrificed her adult life striving to be the mother she knew we deserved, nurturing a sanctuary out of pure willpower and love.
Though she never got to hold most of her grandchildren, her love reaches through the veil, across the silent stretch of emptiness, quietly shaping their lives to this very day.
Distance, time, and even the grave are powerless against what she built through sheer courage and sacrifice. Her devotion has been passed across the generations that have followed, surrounding them still—a love so fierce, so absolute, that it remains just as deafening today as it ever was.
These are the chronicles of the floods she endured, the thorns she bore, and the wild roses that grew because her fierce heart refused to let the darkness prevail.