Microchimerism, Connection and Continuing Bonds

"Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship."

Robert Green

I am 47, and I have looked for connections to other people for my entire life.

I spent a lot of time alone as a child, my brother being nearly nine years older and leaving home when I was 10. Shy and bookish, with a stammer, I was aware that a lot of people found me strange. Nowadays, I would have been diagnosed as neurodivergent in primary school, but that wasn't a term that was ever used in 1980s Eastbourne.

It was in writing that I found connections. I am proud to say that I was the author of a published book, The Elves and the Fairies, at the age of 7 - my headteacher being my biggest fan; you might find a (the) rare first edition in my parents' loft. Not only did I write, I read. And I read. I was obsessed with the characters in books, which I read until they fell apart. So far, so normal for a burgeoning writer - although have you ever written out a whole Chalet School book in play form, complete with a cast list of Beverly Hills 90210 actors whose faces you cut out from the Radio Times? And did you ever walk around the block of your old hometown reading out the dialogue from your favourite book? If so, I'm sorry I never met you when I was 11, we might have stopped each other from bumping into post boxes.

I don't cut out Jason Priestley's face from magazines anymore, and I'm more likely to be found plugged into an Audible book than performing one to a captive audience of a few cats, but I have never lost my love of books. Later in life, this extended to a love of poetry. Fast forward a few academic qualifications and many life lessons later, and I was enrolled on the MA in Writing Poetry, a Poetry School and Newcastle University collaboration. By this time, I had two children. I had also experienced loss and trauma. Both catalysed my writing of a slew of poems about parenthood. It was such a profound experience that after the two years were over, I found myself applying for a practice-led PhD at York St John, which has seen me write a collection of poems on absence and attachment in the poetry of parenthood and a critical thesis on the subject, as well as adding a few lines and grey hairs. It was during my research that I read the journalist and mother Lucy Jones' amazing Matrescence, and heard the term 'microchimerism', changing everything that I thought I was writing about.

Without getting too science-y (mostly because I am terrible at the subject - they wouldn't even let me light a bunsen burner in Year 11), microchimerism is the neurobiological concept that during pregnancy, cells (so many they could stretch across the River Thames!) that are exchanged between the mother and baby remain in the bodies of both for decades. Not just decades, potentially forever, even if the baby has not been carried to term. Even if the baby has not been carried to term feels like a crucial concept to me. How often do we talk about death, as a society? Not enough, I would say. Pregnancy loss, in particular, is shrouded in silence, even though one in six pregnancies will end this way. As well as the reluctance to speak about it, there is a tendency for binary, essentialist thinking (here's me getting academic), such as: a woman is a mother only if they have a live child. This extends to cultural attitudes to stillbirth, abortion and giving up a child for adoption. We have no word in English for a bereaved mother. What I found in my research, including interviews, is that those who experience such a loss and still feel connected to their child have no outlet. What I found, again and again and again, is that people still do feel a connection , and that grief incorporates all types of loss, from miscarriage through to a transitions such as a child leaving home.

In the words of the remarkable Denise Riley, “You share in the death of your child, in that you approach it so closely that you sense that a part of you, too, has died that instant. At the same time, you feel that the spirit of the child has leaped into you. So you are both partly dead and yet more alive. You are cut down, and yet you burn with life.”

With microchimerism, we remain as attached to our mothers and grandmothers as we do to our children, and I found that this feeling of connection to the dead extends to those who have lost parents. My PhD has become all about this absence and attachment, in looking at how other poets create connections on the page and how I can do so in my own poetry. In the process, I have discovered the poetry of Victoria Chang, Anthony Joseph, Emily Berry, Liz Berry, Wendy Pratt, Carrie Etter, Erica Hesketh and so many others who write about continuing bonds with parents and children. I have found connections to these poets in my own poetry, writing glosas and golden shovels using their work.

Such connections never end, but a reader's attention has limits, so I'll end this with lines from a poem of mine published in Dust Poetry in 2025:

“Every year on this day

no-one else remembers,

I think about how old you are not.

Happy sweet sixteen.”

I am teaching a half-day workshop on microchimerism, loss and connection in poetry, using prompts to write poems in a range of forms and styles, from the golden shovel to the abecedarian, as part of the Poetry School September Sessions on 13th September 2026. Book your space