When I was a little girl, my Mother and I used to live near a cemetery.  To this day, I don’t know what intrigued us so much about the cemetery but, it never occurred to me as strange to want to spend our time there. We would climb the hill to its gated perimeters and spend hours walking paths that always seemed new to us despite having been there just days before.

It was one of those cemeteries that had evidently been there long before it’s surroundings and if you closed your eyes and stood very still, you could picture it’s original landscape, before the ravages of time took over and turned it into a lone piece of solitude among the concrete jungle of urban living.   It was the kind of cemetery that commanded respect because somehow it knew that it had been there far longer than any of us and would continue to do so for centuries to come.

Its large iron fence protected it from the world and I always remember the day that a teenage boy tried to climb over its locked gates; His foot ended up slipping on the late night dew and he was left hanging on the fence, with one of the rough iron spokes piercing through the side of his cheek.  The image of him hanging there was etched into my mind as it made the cover of the newspaper the next morning.  Many of the local residents were appalled at the idea of showing such grotesque reality in our little ideal world but, to me, I saw it as a sign of punishment that the cemetery had handed out for ever thinking that it’s walls could be penetrated by the arrogance of adolescent supremacy.  They never did end up having to bury that boy in the cemetery, as he was lucky enough to survive, but teenagers everywhere grew cautious of its boundaries.  For all the limits that they would test during their years in no man’s land, the cemetery came as a reminder that there are some lines that simply can’t be crossed.

What I remember most about the cemetery, was the generations of life that seemed to be buried together.  On any given day, you could trace the steps of an entire family name through the etched markings on their gravestones.  Anywhere from thirty to fifty graves would trace over a century worth of history among people bound by blood.  And perhaps that’s what made it so special to us…it gave us the ability to glimpse at a history that we ourselves did not possess.

My Mom was adopted when she was just a young girl.  It’s a story that would make your heart break and it’s also a story best told by my Mother.  Every history means something different to every person but some truths remain no matter what.  And the reality of our truth was that – as far as heritage goes – I would never know the biological roots of my Mother’s family.  I could read about it or research it or look it up online.  But I would never know it.  I would never be able to tell stories about it or frame pictures about it or share family resemblances in it.

What we did have though was an amazing bunch of adoptive family that I would always grow to know as my own.  From my earliest memories of childhood, they were the best family a girl could ask for…loving, accepting, unconditional.  But it still never changed the fact that during our annual family pictures…my Mom and I always looked different than the others.  And certainly not that similar hair or eye colour matters in any significant way…seeing those pictures did always act as a reminder; a reminder that even with the innocence and naivety of my youth, I knew that gravestones would never tell the tale of our lives and no one would ever walk through a cemetery to find our collective history beneath their feet.

There is more to it than that though.  If the past thirty-three years has taught me anything…it’s that you don’t need history in order to create it.  You don’t need your family tree to be a towering oak in order to be strong.  You simply need it to have roots.

Last Friday morning, my daughter was born.

Avery Victoria Smyth came into the world at 11:10am and in that moment…she began to change everything.  She began to make the roots stronger.  Victoria {also my own middle name} is the name of the fiercely strong and independent woman that adopted my mother and in doing so, gave us the opportunity to create a history all our own.  Avery has my ears and my lips, and from what I can tell…my ruthless stubborn streak!  More importantly though, when the time comes to try to tie back her beautiful hair and the long strands inevitably fall in her face…I get to tell her that no amount of restraint can tame the likes of her dark mane that has been passed down by generations of women before her.

Because while history may have its place in the world and in our lives…it is nothing in comparison to the story that we are about to tell.

Welcome to the story Baby Avery…