Over twelve years ago I was pregnant with you, and today I celebrate your due date.
On Easter Sunday 2006 we announced to our families that we were happily expecting our second child. I didn’t even really know you existed.
I would talk to my belly all day long. In the car. At work. In the shower.
I loved walking around in those early weeks of pregnancy. I had a giant smile I couldn’t hide. I felt like I was gliding through life. I secretly got to take you everywhere I went. I didn’t have to share you. Only daddy and I knew you were real. It was like floating on a cloud.
And then, in a horrible twist of fate, I had a miscarriage.
Ironically, on a day celebrating new life.
The day we told everyone we were pregnant.
Easter Sunday.
I went to the hospital that night so they could do an ultrasound and check on you.
And then I found out, I was pregnant with twins.
Your brother was fine. But you were not.
It was so difficult to mourn you, because I was still pregnant. I didn’t go through hormonal changes, as I was still pregnant with a healthy baby. So we didn’t share all the details far and wide. I was rather cautious about the health of the rest of my pregnancy.
But on today and everyday. I wanted to send you a special message of unending love.
I miss you everyday. I love the small messages you send me. I hope you realize I still carry you wherever I go. When my bare feet are tickled by the grass, I pray you can feel it. When I hear a special song that makes me smile, I hope you smile too. When I decorate for Christmas, I think of you. When I celebrate your brother’s birthday, I wonder what you’d be like and what your interests would be. When a snowflake melts on my nose, I feel your warmth.
I love you with my whole heart Taylor Baillie. I’m grateful I got to be your mom, even though I never really got to meet your body, just your soul.
During pregnancy, fetal cells migrate out of the womb and into a mother’s heart, liver, lung, kidney, brain, and more. They could shape moms’ health for a lifetime, Katherine J. Wu reported in 2024: https://theatln.tc/qozjIdje
The presence of these cells, known as microchimerism, is thought to affect every person who has carried an embryo, even if briefly, and anyone who has ever inhabited a womb. The cross-generational transfers are bidirectional—as fetal cells cross the placenta into maternal tissues, a small number of maternal cells migrate into fetal tissues, where they can persist into adulthood.
Genetic swaps, then, might occur several times throughout a life. Some researchers believe that people may be miniature mosaics of many of their relatives, via chains of pregnancy: their older siblings, perhaps, or their maternal grandmother, or any aunts and uncles their grandmother might have conceived before their mother was born. “It’s like you carry your entire family inside of you,” Francisco Úbeda de Torres, an evolutionary biologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, told Wu.
Some scientists have argued that cells so sparse and inconsistent couldn’t possibly have meaningful effects. Even among microchimerism researchers, hypotheses about what these cells do—if anything at all—remain “highly controversial,” Sing Sing Way, an immunologist and a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told Wu. But many experts contend that microchimeric cells aren’t just passive passengers. They are genetically distinct entities. And they might hold sway over many aspects of health: our susceptibility to infectious or autoimmune disease, the success of pregnancies, maybe even behavior.
If these cells turn out to be as important as some scientists believe they are, they might be one of the most underappreciated architects of human life, Wu writes.
The Lefty Writer 