Moms, babies, and interconnectedness
My friend jonathan_foster explores grief in his beautifully poetic and thought-provoking book, indigo: the color of grief. His exploration of his daughter’s tragic death leads him to ponder big ideas like family, presence, absence, love, loss, relationships, and God. Considering the relationship between moms and babies, he writes:
moms
and children
live in great overlap
the baby’s mind develops
in the womb
which means
mom’s experience informs
baby’s actual experience
the mom’s body receives
cells from the baby
which means
baby’s experience informs
mom’s actual experience
what is true with
mom and baby
is true with all of us
by gradation
In the context of pregnancy, Jonathan finds that a mom’s experiences overlap with her unborn child’s. This overlap can be seen in different ways: psychologically, socially, developmentally, and religiously. Medical science points to biological overlaps between moms and babies starting in pregnancy and continuing for months, years, or the remainder of a lifetime.
One striking example of overlapping experience helps babies fight off infections. In addition to nutrients and oxygen, moms pass antibodies to their babies throughout pregnancy. Antibodies are proteins the immune system uses to remember past infections and to fight off similar infections in the future. Since babies are born with immature immune systems that don’t make antibodies effectively, maternal antibodies provide an adaptive mechanism that helps protect them. Through maternal antibodies, moms share their experiences of past infections with their babies, supporting their vulnerable immune systems. A mom’s immunologic experience is protective as it overlaps with her baby’s current and future experience.
Jonathan points to another remarkable example of overlapping experience: some of a baby’s cells are carried into the mom’s body during pregnancy. These cells are found in most maternal organ systems and can last decades in a mom’s body. Many of these cells are unique because they can mature into different types of cells and provide a healing effect. They can help a mom’s heart heal after a heart attack, help her brain recover after injury, and even help prevent breast cancer. This process also benefits the baby because these cells help increase the maternal milk supply. A similar process occurs in the other direction when maternal cells are transferred to the baby during pregnancy and through nursing. Cells are shared between moms and their babies in both directions, expanding their overlapping existence.
These medically detailed examples fascinate me and serve as specifics from which we can generalize, finding other ways that experience overlaps between parent and their children, in communities, and worldwide. We can affirm with Jonathan that it “is true of all of us by gradation.”
For most people, experiential overlap is best seen in the family. I own logo-bearing coffee cups, shirts, and hats from five universities I did not attend but know well because of my daughters’ experiences there. I have a collection of medals from participating in races that I never would have run if not for my wife Linda’s love of the sport. Our girls grew up with a passion for Disney partly because Linda and I enjoyed going to Disney World before they were born.
Each family member’s experience overlaps with the others, creating a small network of shared experiences through which each person changes and is changed by others. Everyone in our family affects the family’s interests, activities, passions, and pain. We love board games, Disney, running, cooking, and other hobbies together (to varying degrees) because those interests developed out of the network of shared experiences rather than one person’s direction.
From an open and relational perspective, God is part of this network of experiential overlap. God is relational and experiences what we experience, including our joy, sadness, pride, embarrassment, anticipation, contentment, anxiety, fear, confusion, and calmness. John Cobb and David Ray Griffin said, “If God is responsive to us, then our joys and deeds affect the deity itself. However rapidly their worldly effects fade into the course of time, their importance is established in that they have mattered to the divine life.” 1 God’s response to our situation invites us to follow divine aspirations that lead to overall well-being. What we experience affects God, and God’s aspirations affect us, so God’s experience overlaps ours.
Open-relational parents embrace the great overlap when they are responsive to their children and listen before offering guidance. They experience what their children do and respond with aspirations for the future for each of them and the whole family. They tend to the family network of shared experiences, lovingly helping each member contribute and receive.
Like our relationship with God, children change their parents, who change them in return. It’s all a network of overlapping experiences.
Check out jonathan_foster on substack. He’s a graduate of the doctoral program at Northwind Theological Seminary (where I am studying) and a talented writer focusing on “the intersection of mimetic theory, open and relational theology, grief, and life.”
I highly recommend his book, indigo: the color of grief.
- John B Cobb Jr and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1976), 122. ↩︎
photo: pexels, pixabay
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