Bent: Daughterhood Recalled Through Skin and Bone

Mama tells me stories. Some, I make her tell me again and again. Like the one where she was three years old and rolled her neighbor’s pool balls, slick and shiny, down the buckled sidewalk of 24th Street. I like to imagine those balls, wild and free, careening down the steep hill to the rocky shores of Lake Superior below. Some of Mama’s stories are so real they grow inside me, like a baby.

Fetuses can hear sounds in utero at eighteen weeks. The noise is bent, distorted through liquid, skin, and bone. Still, research shows that a baby will remember and prefer her mother’s voice over all others. One study recorded mothers speaking, then linked those recordings to sensors in baby bottles. When a baby sucked hard enough, she heard her mother, but when she sucked more softly, she heard a stranger. All of the babies sucked hard enough to hear their mothers. A mother’s voice, researchers say, is like a neural fingerprint in her child’s brain. We are still learning how much is passed down thr…