TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy 4: Fetal Microchimerism and What Makes an Individual?
Hi, it’s Megan. This is today’s Notes from Dunfanaghy voice note for you.
So today I am thinking about — what am I thinking about? I’m thinking about — so quite often people come to the retreat or my work in general with questions around — people come at different stages.
They have questions around what their work is. So sometimes people come and they have this sense of — they feel like they have this sense of my work, but I can’t quite pin it down, or I can’t quite articulate it. I feel like I’m on the cusp of something. And what is that? Like, what is the work that only I can do? What’s my real work? I want to get clear on that.
And then other people come and they really are clear about what their real work is, but maybe they have the sense that they’re on the cusp of something new. They’re kind of peeling off a new layer and going deeper into their real work. Or they might know what their real work is, but they have so many different ideas, and their curiosity has taken them in so many different directions, that they feel like they need a way to kind of get this body of work out, or they need a way to contain it and structure it and think about it.
But, you know, quite often the question is about what is my work — which, of course, it is, because that’s what I talk about, that’s what my work is about. But we don’t actually — I mean, we do talk about work in the first couple of days of the retreat, but it’s a four-day retreat, and we don’t get deep into talking about work until the third day.
And the reason for that is because if we’re going to ask the question, what is the work that only I can do, what is the work that I am uniquely placed to do because of the experiences that I’ve had and the life that I’ve lived and what I’ve been born out of — we can’t begin to address the question of what is your real work until we have uncovered some of the stuff around, like, well, who are you, the person that this work is coming through? And what is the context that you have entered into the world and lived through?
You know, so what’s the family context and the cultural context — because none of us are really individuals. It’s a paradox — we are individuals, but also we are not at all individuals. We are a continuation of something, we’re an extension of something, the spark of aliveness has been passed on to us. And so our work is our own, but also it’s not really our own — it’s connected to this bigger thing. And so we have to get a sense of, well, who are we as an individual, and what are we an extension of?
And so with all of that in mind, I’ve been thinking today about a couple of things.
So I think with regularity about — there was a period of a few months in 1956 when half of my DNA was inside my mother’s body when she was a fetus inside the womb of my grandmother. And so for those few months in 1956, after all of her eggs had developed in her womb, but she’s still in utero — half of my DNA, plus my mother, plus my grandmother, all just, you know, moved around Derry and Donegal and Dunfanaghy like little nesting dolls.
And that kind of blows my mind. Like, whatever my grandmother was experiencing, whatever was happening in her body, was affecting the egg inside my mother’s body that would go on to turn into me, you know, whatever number of years later. Like, where are the boundaries of our body and someone else’s body? It’s just so fascinating to me.
And I think that — okay, so get this — the placenta, which is the only temporary organ, it’s this transient thing, it gets grown in the first trimester of pregnancy. And by the way, it’s also the only co-created organ. It’s not a maternal organ, it’s not a fetal organ, it’s a fetal-maternal organ. So the baby’s body and the mother’s body collaborate to grow a placenta.
And then it’s this threshold where all kinds of things are passed back and forth between the fetus and the mother’s body. And so, obviously, blood and nutrients and all kinds of things are passing across, but also cells are passing across the placenta. So from as early as a few weeks into pregnancy, fetal cells can pass into the mother’s body across the placenta, and vice versa — maternal cells can pass into the fetus.
And so there is this thing called fetal microchimerism, which talks about this process. And basically, so that happens during pregnancy. But after the baby is born, or after a pregnancy is lost, the fetus’s cells can remain in the mother’s body, and the mother’s cells can remain in the baby’s body.
So the term microchimerism, it comes from, you know, the chimera — which is the she-monster, she’s like part goat, part lion, part serpent. And we’re all kind of this — we’re part ourselves, but we’re also part other people. And it’s not just our mothers — stick with me on this.
So you’re in your mother’s womb, her cells can pass into your body, you can be born, some of her cells can remain in your body. And if those cells get integrated into tissue or organs, they can stay in your body for decades. And likewise, your cells can remain in her body after you’ve been born, and if they get integrated into tissue, they can stick around for a lifetime.
There was a study done in 2012 where they looked at the brains of 59 women, and in 63% of those brains they found Y chromosomes, which basically they attributed to the cells of these women’s sons. And the oldest woman in that study was 94 — I think they studied the brains after people died. So she was 94 years old, and some of her son’s cells were still in her brain.
And so that can happen. And so what that means is — let me get my head straight on this — so you can have your mother’s cells in your body, your mother can have your cells in her body, if your mother had some of her mother’s cells in her body from when she was in the womb.
So, you know, 1956, my grandmother is pregnant with my mother, this exchange of cells is happening across the placenta. And so some of my grandmother’s cells are passing into my mother’s body when she’s in the womb. It’s then possible that those cells remain in my mother’s body. And then when she is pregnant with me, some of my grandmother’s cells can be passed into my body. I hope you’re still with me on this — this is for the diehard.
And the other thing that can happen is, if you have older siblings who shared the same womb as you, then if their cells passed into your mother’s body when she was pregnant with them and stuck around, then when she was later pregnant with you, their cells can pass back across the placenta. And so, you know, I have two older brothers — it’s possible that some of their cells passed across the placenta from my mother’s body when she was pregnant with me, and have been integrated into tissue in my body. And I guess it’s possible that some of their cells have been passed on to my children.
So the whole thing is just wild. So our families — we’re related to our families, but also our families are in us and we are in them. We’re not just interconnected — in some small way, we are also made up of each other. We’re all a kind of giant chimera.
And so if we’re asking questions around, well, who am I and what is my work — it’s not as simple as just, all right, well, let me look at myself in isolation and myself as an individual. It’s way more complicated than that. And it leads me to the question of, like, well, what even is an individual? And it’s my work, but it’s also not just my work — it goes beyond me.
And so I don’t have any resolution here today. This is just something that I come back to and think about again and again.
You know, sometimes whenever I talk about understanding the various contexts that we have been formed in, and that our work has been seeded in, sometimes it can seem very much like, you know, it’s an environmental thing, or it’s kind of like a metaphorical thing — but it’s like a physical, biological thing as well. And that is endlessly fascinating to me.
So that’s what I have for you today. Thank you for listening. I hope it made some kind of sense and you stuck with me. I look forward to sharing more with you tomorrow.