Microchimerism

Content Warning: Themes of mental health and grief.

My mother was 20 years old when she gave birth to me. It was on a rainy day in the middle of December. I was told that while she was screaming from pain, biting the nurses and begging for the overcrowded room to be emptied, the rain was calmly dripping on the windows, just like the tears on her face.

It took eight hours of labor for me to breathe into the world, a number that still makes me gasp anytime I ask her about my birth story. Hours of excruciating pain that she’d then recall fading into nothing the moment it ended, like a pinch or a trace of a scar that you forgot the reason for.

“You’ve been a handful since the day you’ve been born,” she’d comment in a teasing voice and a sigh.

She was not the first person who held me, but I’d like to believe I got my first kiss from her. I asked her once about the whereabouts of my first picture, something I never wondered about before, but she moved without a second thought. It was in a suitcase stashed on the top of her closet, where my dad keeps things like our passports, birth certificates, different paper money from countries he visited and apparently the picture. The photo was a closeup, and by the scrunched eyebrows on my face, it seems like I was not too happy to be awake for it. I was not a beautiful baby, definitely grew into my features as I got older. My mom disagrees.

We are closer than most people I know. There is an empty space in every place I go where she’s not around. She opens the door for me, knowing before I utter a word that I am about to hand her my entire day, piece by piece. She finds solace in me whenever things get difficult with dad, “you’re my piece of this world,” she said once, after I hugged her for no reason other than the sudden urge to cry.

Yet, my anger usually collides with her because there is no one else. In arguments, she tends to forgive my other siblings faster. Some days, we stop speaking altogether. I stay in my room long enough for the nausea to settle in. Then, eventually, it becomes like nothing happened.

Outside her house, she is a psychology lecturer at a public university, a pioneer researcher in her field, a woman whose name strongly echoed through academic halls. On the faculty’s Facebook page, I’d find countless positive words from her students, praising her methods and attitude. I was obsessed with viewing her from the eyes of others. They would recall her brilliant case studies, innate drive to deconstruct conventional thinking, the compelling path of lectures, and her passion. The irrevocable passion in what she presented. They spoke of fiery eyes, a resilient voice and sharp awareness of potential. “If you take a class with her, you might fail, but you will not lose.”

As a token of her appreciation, on a board stapled to the wall, dozens of printed messages and pictures with her students were glued. While I was staring at her soft, proud smile in a photo with a graduate, I asked her once about something she mentioned before, why she considered teachers to be the scariest position in the world. She looked up from her desk and for a second, thought about her answer.

“They’re responsible for generations. When you’re a teacher, whether students believe it or not, they’re swayed by you and vice versa. One word or action can alter a person’s life. If you ever treated a student unfairly and they never forgave you..”

She didn’t finish.

My mom was not a religious person, but she was spiritual and believed in karma. My siblings and I were nurtured on a single principle: to do what we want as long as it’s not wrong or hurting others. Nothing is worth it, she’d remind me whenever I become spacy.

I didn’t become an attorney like my sister, or crafted a niche like my brother. I did things just because. Studied English because it was convenient. Met people and did not know how to utilize them. Lost opportunities because I couldn’t bet on myself. Nothing about me felt exceptional.

What scared me was not the fact that I might have disappointed her, but that she disappointed herself when she was not the one who discovered my long time mission of emptying myself from the inside out. I was 19 when a regular general doctor asked me during a check up if I ever forced myself to throw up. The look on her face told me that this was the last thing she expected. And I was always known for being a terrible liar.

After that, she prepared my meals herself and came into my room whenever she heard a noise that unsettled her, and I didn’t know how to talk about it or explain the reason why. It was just because. She was angry but patient. Until she wasn’t.

One night, as I was in bed contemplating pursuing a master’s degree and feeling a fever coming on, she barged into the room with tears welling in her eyes. My mother yelled and yelled and yelled until her voice became raspy and ran out of things to say. She walked over and I told her I might be getting sick. When she pressed her hand on my forehead, I noticed the other hand curled in a fist, and I wondered if she wanted to hit me.

I probably would’ve let her.

For a heartbeat, we stayed like this, her gaze scanning me like a researcher looking for a missing variable before the pioneer in her collapsed. She knelt to the floor, pulled me into her, and we both cried. I whispered that I hoped I’d die before her. Her grip on me tightened and her eyes grew offended. It was not the order of things, she replied, and made me promise to not repeat such things. I did, already feeling the hyperventilation waiting for me in ordinary moments, mourning the day I’d have to keep my word.

The night before my mother died, she sent me a research paper on cellular microchimerism. It took me two hours to go through it. It was the typical rigid, academic text that went into detail on fetal cells migrating into maternal tissues. She followed it with one message, saying that I was quite literally still beating inside her heart.