I believe most of you who are here and a part of this journey are just as intrigued with what we are learning about women's bodies, the more science uncovers.
Women's bodies are just starting to undergo serious research, and with it, I'm finding moments of realizing how little we've gone our whole lives without knowing.
We were taught to manage our bodies. To track them, control them, apologize for them. We were rarely taught to be in awe of them.
Below are six things about the female body that, once you know them, are very hard to unknow.
1. Your grandmother carried you.
Before a girl is born, her ovaries already contain most of the eggs she will ever have. Which means: when your mother was a fetus growing inside your grandmother's womb, the egg that would one day become you was already forming inside her.
Three generations, present in a single body, at a single moment in time.
You were carried before you were conceived.
2. Your mother is still carrying pieces of you. And you, of her.
During pregnancy, cells from the baby cross the placenta and enter the mother's bloodstream. Scientists have found these cells decades later, in her brain, her heart, her lungs, her skin. The phenomenon is called fetal microchimerism.
It also goes the other way. Some of your mother's cells live inside you, too.
The bond you feel is not a metaphor. It is cellular. It is documented. It is permanent.
3. Pregnancy reshapes the brain. The changes can last for years.
MRI studies show that pregnancy remodels the regions of the brain involved in empathy, emotional awareness, and bonding. The shifts are visible. Measurable. Some of them never go back.
Mothers are not "different after kids" because they are tired. They are different because their brain has been reorganized to keep another life alive.
4. Breast milk is alive.
Not a metaphor. A living biological fluid containing immune cells, antibodies, hormones, and stem cells. Its composition changes from day to day, and even within a single feeding, in response to what the baby needs.
Some scientists call it one of the most complex biological fluids ever studied.
5. Your DNA carries an unbroken maternal line.
Mitochondrial DNA passes only from mother to child. Which means a small part of your genetic code traces back, unbroken, through your mother, to her mother, to her mother — for thousands of years.
Every woman who came before you, in a single line, is encoded inside your cells. Powering them. Keeping you alive.
6. Your menstrual blood forms crystals.
Researchers have observed hematoidin crystals in menstrual blood, formed as blood naturally breaks down. Tiny structures of color, geometry, and order produced by a body that the world has spent centuries calling unclean.
Your body is doing alchemy every month.
These are the facts that started Flower Girl, honestly. The realization that what catches a woman's blood should be worthy of what her body is making. That the materials touching her, in her most intimate hours, should match the intelligence of the body itself.
The Leakproof TENCEL Thong was built for that. Non-toxic from skin to base layer. No PFAS, no nanoparticles, not sprayed with toxic solvents Just clean materials, the way your body deserves.
If this piece moved something in you, share it with the women you carry, and the women who carried you.
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