In the lingerie section of the iconic Macy’s in New York City’s Herald Square, I chose the largest dressing room to comfortably accommodate my own body and my mother’s. I was eight months pregnant and looking for post-partum sleepwear, something I could pack in my go-bag for the hospital that would be easy for breastfeeding. My mother was excited to join me on that shopping trip and installed herself in the dressing room, as she did when I was child, handing me garments to try on and hanging up those that I wasn’t interested in. Maybe because I was used to constantly undressing my pregnant body for doctors and medical assistants, my brazen willingness to strip out of my clothes stood in stark contrast to my mother’s modesty, characterized by the loose, oversized garments she favored that hid any suggestion of a shape beneath.

There was no hiding my shape. My five-foot-three-inch frame—which, when not pregnant, exists at about 125 pounds—had added over twenty pounds. Completely unsolicited, strangers often told me I “carried high,” the gained weight a sphere where my rib cage had been, now a pillow for my increasingly heavy breasts. 

“You look beautiful,” my mother said, in awe at the sight of the nearly naked pregnant woman in front of her. She caught me off guard with how forthcoming she was, this usually shy woman who demurred easily. I didn’t think much else of the comment then. Or rather, I silently refuted any pretense of beauty, offering an awkward “thanks” though I felt deep aversion to this compliment. I had vomited consistently for the first five months of my pregnancy and was constantly on edge that I would lose this baby, which came in the wake of numerous miscarriages the year before. I was an emotionally and physically uncomfortable pregnant person who, in the humidity of June in New York City, was impatient for my child to be in the world and out of my body. But I distinctly remember the way my mother looked upon my body as something completely foreign, yet worthy of admiration. 

With the distance of time, my mother’s compliment and the wonder with which she gazed at my pregnant body have remained with me. Mine was the first pregnant body she had been exposed to in such a way, the closest she had ever been to a naked, swollen belly carrying a baby inside. Yet there I was, her daughter, whom she had never carried in pregnancy.

* * *

I think a lot about biology, about DNA, about how my daughter’s and my genetic material will forever be intertwined. As my interest, maybe even obsession, in genetic relatives increases with time, I am awestruck by the concept of fetal microchimerism and the phenomenon that, while I gave half of my DNA to my daughter in utero, she also gifted me with her genetic material, through the placenta that we shared for the nine months that she lived inside me. Our enmeshed biology confounds me to tears. And alongside my complete veneration of the magic, and science, of bringing my first biological relative into the world, I grieve for the mother I lost at birth. Wondering if she missed me, I imagine my genetic material calling to her from deep within her body decades after I was born, reminding her that I lived inside of her for nine months. 

This curiosity spawns terror in me. No sooner is my daughter born than I imagine losing her. After delivering her in the maternity wing of St. Luke’s Hospital, a kind nurse suggests that I get some sleep and offers to take her to the nursery. I casually agree with the calm of a person handing a friend her coat to hold. But within minutes I’m hysterical. The moment the small bassinet is rolled out of my hospital room, I shake and cry to the point of wailing. My husband attempts to comfort me. “There are so many babies in the nursery. It’s totally normal to send her there so you can rest,” he assures. 

“So many babies?! That’s the problem! Her bracelet! It was loose! They’ll lose her!” I scream. As my husband carefully walks me, still swollen and unsteady from labor, down to the nursery to inspect our daughter’s identification bracelet, a life without her flashes before my eyes. It is unbearable to imagine living a life without my daughter. I feel pulled to her through our shared genetic material, and wonder how my first mother ever survived a single day knowing that her daughter lived a continent away. 

* * *

The longer I am a parent of the child whom I’ve birthed, the more questions I have about my relationship with my adoptive mother. In fact, before becoming a parent, I rarely used the words “biological” or “adoptive,” but here I am, inching closer to my fiftieth year on this planet, now reconsidering all the familial relationships I’ve known throughout my life.

I imagine my mother—my adoptive mother—before adopting me, before her own identity as mother. I imagine her struggle with infertility and wonder about the story I had long been told: “We couldn’t have children, so we decided to adopt.” So blasé. So seemingly simple. So lacking in detail of the emotional toll infertility has on a couple. I wonder if my mother felt broken in a world that burdens women with all the responsibility of reproduction yet shames them for reproducing in socially unsanctified ways.

I wonder if the mother who raised me ever thought about the mother who birthed me, if she ever imagined what it must be like to grow a child inside her own body knowing the whole time that she would give that child away. Did my adoptive mother understand that my first mother grew a secret inside her, one she strategically shared with her brothers, whom she thought strong enough to help her, but withheld from her own mother and sisters, whose shared sex would certainly transmit the social shame that an unmarried, pregnant woman carried with her in the 1970s?

* * *

My identity as mother began on July 3 when my daughter was born. This is an uncomplicated day for my husband, as he’ll forever tell our daughter that the nation’s fireworks are for her. But for me, this day is vexed. My daughter’s birthday marks my greatest gift and deepest responsibility. But her birthday also brought with it the unexpected recognition of my genetic material in another human. That day redirected the course of my entire life, casting all that came before in a new light, calling back to my first genetic severance 33 years before, and compelling me to constantly question all that mother can mean.