Bird Pinkerton

And especially about the idea that even though pregnancy is one of the most common experiences on Earth, right?

This thing that...

we all participate in in order to be alive, pregnancy is still very mysterious.

It's mysterious in ways that are amazing and awe-inspiring, obviously, but also in ways that can hurt parents or at least confuse them.

And so the story that I was telling my mom is kind of this perfect example of a lot of the things I learned about pregnancy over the course of my reporting.

Like, it has got a wonder element, but it also has an element of just the frustrating reality that we are still very, very far from satisfying answers.

All right, so let's just start with the basics here.

This whole idea of my giving you my cells, right, it's actually a subset of something called chimerism, which you know what a chimera is, right?

Yes, I do.

You want to describe that for me?

Not exactly.

So a chimera is like a, it's the mythical creature from like Greek myth.

So you have like, it has like a lion head and like a snake tail and like a goat body.

Okay.

Like a griffin's a chimera, a sphinx, a manticore.

Right.

Let the record show that my mother did know what a chimera was and was unfairly put on the spot.

So that is a chimera in myth.

But to understand a chimera in biology and what it has to do with pregnancy, I reached out to Amy Boddy, who is a biologist at UC Santa Barbara.

And Amy says that in biology, the definition of chimera is a little bit broader than in myth.