I’m imagining the song from Frozen where Elsa sings ‘Do you want to build a Snow man’.
Except in my mind, its not the snow, but she’s playing in one of those play parks but the
climbing frame isn’t a climbing frame, its your DNA, and Elsa’s a building a human, so instead
she sings, ’Do you want to build an Epigenome?’ DNA the musical, isn’t probably going to be
hitting the cinemas any time soon, but as it turns out, its been hitting you forever.
Because like the snow padded on to the double helix DNA code, or ‘genome’ with mittened
hands of your creator the epigenome is yet another complexity responsible for creating ‘us’.
The Epigenome are the instructions that decide what genes get turned on and what gets turned
off. Kind of like selecting channels with a remote. Except you don’t hold the remote. Your
mother does. And in some cases, even your grandmother. And she gets to select the channel.
No wonder I used to love watching Burke’s Backyard. I don’t even garden. But my epigenetic
preset powered that compulsive urge to buy plants, only to kill them at a later stage. Plant killing
I guess is the epigene I’ll be handing to my grandchildren. That, and vagina jokes. I’m not sure
how I feel about the idea of previous generations, and in particular the hardships of women
being carried through until now. Great. Now I not only can’t escape my own trauma, I have to
live through the trauma of previous generations. And all this time you thought you had free will.
No, you’ve been prefabbed in the factory of your family dysfunction. Thats right. Violent
alcoholic sociopaths still get a say on who you are, how you behave even how you think. This all
gets passed on through conception and pregnancy. My mother was pregnant at 19. Perhaps
thats why as the child of a child bride I’ve never grown up. Bloody hell I smoked weed when I
was pregnant with my eldest daughter. My hippy pot head friends said ‘its cool, its really safe.
It’s good for the nausea’. Awesome. It certainly answers the question why a girl who doesn’t
smoke pot ever has some of the bizarre thinking of a stoner. I can’t wait to meet my grandchild
one day and apologise. No wonder humanity is doomed. We’ve all been carrying around our
poison eggs, suffering the emotional consequences of traumas we never experienced, and
consequently fucking up generations to come. It’s kind of a ‘Fuck them up Forwards’ approach.
According to epigenetics women are the most powerful transmitters as they have the conception
and gestational time to do some serious work on your DNA. Finally there is proof that the
oppression of women was bad for the whole of society. Because guess what patriarchal
oppressor? You got the pain of the oppression of half the human race smashed right on top of
your DNA too. The rapes, the beatings, the lack of opportunity, the low self esteem. Your
grandfather may have delivered suffering with his bullock whip, but you got it back, a generation
or two later, straight down the line. Just like he got his. Kind of like putting arsenic in your
human smoothie. Epigenetics makes sense of why your family history sits on you. Why you’re
scared to love. Or why you like dancing nude on a full moon with a tea cosy on your head.
(Doesn’t everyone?) In some cases I guess this would mean you get coded by people you have
never met. Kind of a drag if you come from one of those families that don’t tell you anything. I
guess this makes adoption even more complex, in that you’re carrying genetic stories of people
you have never met. Men do have some role though. They get to deliver their epigenetic
changes through their sperm at conception, and while stressed sperm can cause changes, it
doesn’t seem to be as powerful as the mother oven. Thats right. Women really do rule the
world. As it turns out we decide who you are. For better and for worse. So you should all be a lot
nicer to us. And you should start 2 generations ago. Forget counselling, its pointless. Damage is
done. We need to start investing in some serious time travel. Or else I guess we could just drop
the mother blame and get our shit together ‘BEFORE’ se have kids?