Once again this year, for the month of May, our parish is blessed to have the Travelling Statue of Our Lady of Fatima.

Happy Mother’s Day! For those whose mothers and grandmothers are still alive – love, cherish and thank them today. For those whose mothers have gone home to God, we pray for them at Mass. A special day to honor mothers is a part of every major civilization, culture and nation. The holiday, as we know it in the United States, is attributed to a woman named Anna Jarvis.

We know instinctively of the wonder, the miracle and the gift of mothers. Mothers are the first to know us, before anyone else. We begin our life within them; we are nurtured and taken care of by them from the second of our existence. They offer us to our family, the whole world, and the Church. They taught and nurtured us on the way, by offering wisdom, example and practical experience. They picked us up when we fell, cared for our scrapes and hurts and unconditionally loved us back when we strayed.

There is no one like a mother, no substitute for her place, no equal to her love and placement in our own personal formation. Mothering is an ongoing relationship of love and care.

Recently, I came across a very interesting article in the Smithsonian Magazine. The article was about mothers and their developing child as they share a common body. More and more as technology advances, we see how early and long lasting the individual cells of the mother and child mingle together. The mother’s cells slips into the body of her developing child and her child’s cells circled back into the mother through the umbilical cord, which forms early in the pregnancy (5-7 weeks). This process, called fetal-maternal microchimerism, turns both mother and child into chimeras embracing little pieces of each other.

Cells from children are knitted into the body and bones and brain of the mother. The child also carries cells from their Mom, and quite possibly from their maternal grandmother. You even harbor cells from your older siblings, which in turn your younger siblings just might have cells from you! This is something for all to think about!

These cellular threads tie families together in ways that scientists are just starting to discover. Here are a few instances of how cells from a child have woven themselves into a mother’s body:

• Fetal cells are sprinkled throughout a mother’s brain. A study of women who had died in their 30s to 90s found that over half of the women had male DNA (a snippet from the Y chromosome) in their brains, presumably from when their sons were in the womb. And some of these Y chromosome cells had apparently been there for decades: the oldest subject was 94, meaning that male DNA that transferred during gestation would have persisted for more than half a century.

• When an organ is injured especially the heart of the mother, fetal cells seem to flock to the site of injury and turn into several different types of specialized heart cells. Some of these cells may even start beating. So technically, a mother really does hold her children in her heart.

There are many other facts that scientists are discovering about pregnancy, and the unbelievable bond between the mother and child. Even if a woman does not carry her baby to term, she harbors her fetus’ cells forever. So every child ever conceived is still within the mother. That’s why a woman never forgets her pregnancies. The child; living, dead, or never born, is intimately connected with their mother.