Kristina's May Note: We Carry Each Other (Literally)

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There's a scientific term I only recently learned: microchimerism.

It means that when you're pregnant, cells from your baby cross into your bloodstream and stay there. They migrate to your heart, your brain, your bones. And it goes both ways - your cells live on in your child's body too. Researchers have found evidence of these fetal cells in maternal tissues long after pregnancy, and one study detected them in 100% of samples taken from recently pregnant mothers.

So when people talk about motherhood changing you, they're not being poetic. It's a biological fact. You are, quite literally, no longer just yourself. You're made of each other.

I keep thinking about this - how we spend so much energy trying to "get our bodies back" after having kids, as though motherhood is something that happened to our bodies rather than being something our bodies did. As though there's a version of ourselves we're supposed to return to, and everything else is deviation. As though the goal is to erase the evidence and return to some pre-baby baseline where we were smaller, tighter, unmarked.

But our bodies didn't go anywhere. They just did something extraordinary.

For most of my life, I thought about my body the way I'd been taught to think about it - as something to control, to shrink, to perfect. Something that needed to look a certain way to have value. I spent years trying to make my body smaller, more acceptable. I measured my worth in numbers on a scale and the gap between my thighs. I thought that's what it meant to take care of myself.

And then I got pregnant. And my body grew a nervous system. Built bones from scratch. Created a heart that started beating without anyone telling it how. My body made eyes that could see and hands that could grasp, and a brain that could learn language and love and everything else that makes us human.

That's when everything shifted for me. I stopped seeing my body as a problem to solve and started seeing it for what it actually is: capable of magic I'll never fully understand. Not magic in some abstract, spiritual sense - magic as in actual biological miracles happening inside me right now. My body knew how to knit together another human being. It still knows how to heal a cut, fight off an infection, regulate temperature, convert food into energy, and apparently carry my child's cells in my bloodstream for the rest of my life.

We also inherit cells from our own mothers - cells contributed by all the pregnancies our mothers carried, including siblings we may never have met. Researchers call this "grandmaternal microchimerism." Which means we don't just carry our own children, we carry our mothers' histories too. We're all walking around with pieces of each other, across generations. We're not just connected - we're literally woven together.

My grandmother used to say something that I didn't fully understand until now: "Once you are a mom, all children are your children." I thought she meant it metaphorically - that motherhood opens your heart wider, that you start seeing every child as someone's baby, that your capacity for care expands beyond your own kids. And maybe she did mean it that way. But knowing what I know now about microchimerism, I wonder if she understood something deeper. That once you become a mother, the boundaries of "you" become porous. You carry pieces of other lives inside you. You are literally built to hold each other up.

So this Mother's Day, I'm thinking about all the things our bodies give - the cells, the nourishment, the late nights, the invisible labor, the love that lives in our bloodstreams long after our children have grown. I'm thinking about my grandmother and all the women who came before her, whose cells I carry even now. I'm thinking about the magic of being made of more than just yourself.

Happy Mother's Day to everyone who's ever grown a life, held a hand, or carried someone else's weight - in your arms, your heart, or as it turns out, your bloodstream. We're all holding each other up.

With love,

Kristina

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