I’ve been listening to podcasts a lot lately, mostly about the mind and our thoughts and how we work, and about science. The thinker in me, the cells in my brain love the stimulation. This morning as I made my tea and started my day, I listened to this one from Radiolab called Fetal Consequences. I can’t really stay away from a title like that, even if I know it might stir something up. And it did, but not in a bad way. More in an, “Okay, whoa!” kind of way.

The science, according to the show, is this: Fetal cells and maternal cells do not stay separate during gestation. In fact, fetal cells intermingle with maternal cells, and they remain in the mother’s body for decades, possibly an entire lifetime, after a baby is no longer in a mother’s womb. Even fetal cells from miscarriages, stillbirths, abortions. Even fetal cells from babies who are no longer here. Scientists studying what the role of these cells is in a mother’s body believe they can both help and hurt. Help in that they have been found in areas of women’s bodies who have an illness, say in the liver of someone with hepatitis. Hurt in that they may also contribute to auto immune conditions like arthritis.

I’ve been pregnant five times and I have one living biological child, my daughter, and my son grew in another womb. So my heart leaped at the thought that my babies’ cells remain inside me. I love that I carry a piece of those I’ve lost inside me and always will. It’s like when I learned years ago that all of our eggs are already in our tiny ovaries when we are growing inside our mothers’ wombs, so that for nine months of pregnancy we get to carry not only our children but also our grandchildren inside us.

For the part about how these cells might do harm? I’m not sure what to think, and the science is not conclusive about any of this. But I do have an auto immune condition, and I’ve always been intrigued to think that, in me, it happens to be located in that second chakra place close to my womb. It’s an emotional place for me, still marked by the faint vertical line that appeared on my lower belly during my last pregnancy, the line I was happy to see never quite faded completely after that pregnancy ended. A reminder that I carried them all, even if they are not all still here.

I wonder about my son’s birth mother, and what she carries of him, literally and emotionally, almost two years since his birth. What she may carry for the rest of her life. How he will remain in her.

How he has so quickly made his beautiful way into my heart, if not my cells.

I know there is still healing that remains. And I know that there is a way in which we never completely heal from the loss of a child. And that’s okay. In six and a half years since losing my daughter, and the losses before and since, I’ve learned not to force myself to be anywhere but where I am. I’ve learned that grief is cyclical and not linear, that it can be repetitive while it propels us forward even when it can feel like we are moving backwards. I’ve learned that I carry each of them inside me always, their essence, their spirit.

And now their cells.