What to expect when you’re transforming

I’m not on TikTok, so I had to be told about pregnancy nose. Whereas in the 1960s, women sat down together and discovered the political underpinnings of their personal struggles, now we do things like congregate online and discover, via selfies, phenomena we were never told to expect in ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”

The same hormones that orchestrate a whole new placenta and get the blood flowing there also dilate blood vessels and produce fluid retention elsewhere. It can lead to a giant, unrecognizable nose. Perhaps we didn’t notice before because weight gain can, itself, reshape the face, but taken together on TikTok, it’s clear: pregnancy nose is a thing.

What about the more permanent effects of pregnancy? Our society tends to pathologize these, or rather, to focus on the pathologies that arise. But I wish someone had told me sooner about the coolest permanent change. It happens whether you carry the baby to term or suffer a miscarriage or abortion. It persists for decades, until you die.

You become a chimera.

 For as long as a little one and a mother share a body, they are exchanging cells. The fetal cells that circulate in a mother’s blood cross the blood-brain barrier (which is more permeable at that time) and stay in our brains. They don’t just accrete there like so much flotsam, either. They properly differentiate into neurons, colonize the heart and help it beat, and regenerate the liver. Sometimes when they reach a new organ, the baby’s cells fuse with the mothers’.

Studies often look for the clearest indication of this—cells with male chromosomes in women who have had sons—but you can also get those indirectly from an older male sibling, because your mother can pass them back to you in the womb.

The whole idea is just beautiful to me, that both my son and my brother quite literally live in me forever. I find meaning in it. And it makes me wonder what other magic is at work when we bring our ancestors to life, through birth.