The legacy we come from...

So we're starting with looking at the legacy we are born into. 

Think about your family - you parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents... There's a reason shows like 'Who do you think you are?' are popular. Most of us don't actually know. 

We know the couple of generations around us - I mean, we  know our parents, and we probably know a bit about their upbringing with our grand-parents, but that's it. We don't actually know any more about our genealogy. 

My sister is a big fan of this and loves to go back and investigate different branches of our family tree, but it's not that easy for some. I want to illustrate what we’re looking at today, with a story from Grey’s Anatomy.  

**SPOILER ALERTS!!**

Jo, one of the doctors, was left on the steps of a fire station when she was a baby. She spent her childhood in and out of foster homes, and ended up living in her car. She then met Paul, someone who told her she was special and that he loved her. She fell immediately, married him and ended up in an extremely physically abusive marriage. She escaped, moved and had to change her name to protect herself. 

At the point where she’s got her life settled, got a wonderful set of friends and a wonderful new husband (Paul had since died), she decides to see if she can find her birth mother, to find out a bit about herself. The story continues with her finding out where she lives, and going to meet her. 

But it didn’t go well. It turns out that Jo was the result of her mother being raped and so every time she looked at the baby she saw the rapist’s face. So she left her at the fire station. 

That was a bit of a shocker - not only because you can literally see Jo’s confidence fade from the moment her mother starts talking. 

She starts to spiral into a very bad place, and her friends intervene to help her. The crux of the story comes when Meredith (Grey) has a heart-wrenching conversation with her. 

When discussing how she had imagined meeting her mother, versus how it actually happened, Jo says - 

‘She would say she was sorry and she would hold me until I felt safe but that's not ever going to happen because I never should have existed in the first place. Paul, everything he did to me. Everything he did to me before I escaped that was my birthright. That was my inheritance.’

Can you imagine having to bear the weight of that? The feeling that your life - with all its horribleness and pain - was all you were entitled to, all you were ever meant to have…

Meredith responds with these beautiful words… 

‘Violence isn’t your birthright or your inheritance. It’s something you survived... You've taken your darkest experiences that life gave you and you turned it around and turned it into light.’

And it was true - in the show Jo has overcome all her painful experiences and trained as a doctor, and really pushed through to be able to help others around her. She does amazing things like making sure a rape victim didn’t see any male doctors or staff as she went up for a vital operation - she literally lined the corridors with female staff. She even saved her ex-husband’s new fiance from going through the same horrible time she went through, when she noticed the signs that he was hurting her. 

Violence may have helped bring her into this world, but it did not define who she became. She was able to rise above it, and shine. 

When we look back into our families, we can see moments of gold - where we see how the ethics, morals and faith of our families gave us the foundations we now stand on. But we can also see the mistakes we can learn from. We can see addictions that may be prevalent and diseases that may be hereditary, so we can learn to stay clear of certain things, and make sure we ourselves are healthy. 

The legacy each of us is born into is completely different, but we have the capacity to decide what parts of it we embrace and what parts of it we change. The legacy we get passed down from the generations before us, forms the foundations that we step off towards to the future. 

And from a spiritual perspective the impact can be massive! But more about that tomorrow!

Tanya ♥