Entangled

I remember vividly the sensations of childbirth but none of the memories are as clear as this: the warm, slimy weight of my babies’ bodies against my skin in the instant after they entered the world.

Each time, something in me shifted. Actually, everything in me shifted. Do you know how the internal organs move around when you’re pregnant, to make room for the growing uterus and the baby inside? Your intestines shift up, your liver makes a home around breast level, and despite how hungry you might feel, your stomach has limited space as it gets squashed upwards, too. The bladder stays low, the bearer of unrelenting pressure from the changes occurring above.

It makes sense, then, that when everything comes back into place again, it’s a little bit different. Or a lot different. And it makes sense that life follows suit. Our bodies don’t pretend they didn’t just have a baby. They don’t rush to go back to the way things were. Why should we?

With each birth, each warm body placed on top of my belly instead of inside it, my view of the world changed. My view of myself changed. I gave birth, each time, to a new world.

I stopped believing only in things I could see. I stopped thinking that the world existed as I understood it; I came to terms with the notion that much, much more was going on than had ever occurred to me.

I want to say it’s because, who can grow a new human being in their belly and deny what kind of magic is present in the design of things? But the truth is that I didn’t become a mother and immediately open myself to the wonder of the Universe. Maybe a crack formed then, and opened slowly over the next few years.

It was an accidental introduction to quantum physics where I found, in the science, a more complete understanding of why I felt so thoroughly, irrevocably, impossibly changed by motherhood. It wasn’t just hormones and responsibility. It was science, of the sort that confused even Albert Einstein, the sort that still, no one fully understands.

What I found was that there are things going on that we cannot see, or feel, that the average mind can barely conceptualize. Life exists on a level that we experience—we see the trees outside, and we see a woman sitting on a park bench, and we see a cat curled up at our feet. But within all of that, things are happening at a subatomic level—which means smaller than, or within, an atom, which itself is already a million times smaller than the thickest hair on your head. I cannot even imagine how small that is; how do scientists even measure that; how do we know?

On a subatomic level, in what’s known as the quantum field, there is much going on. The smallest units of life—known as particles, which include protons, neutrons, electrons, and quarks—are at work. It’s within all this activity that particles can become entangled. An entangled particle happens, sometimes, when two particles physically interact. From that point on, an action taken on one of these entangled particles affects the other. Even when separated by immense distance, this happens faster than the speed of light. At least 10,000 times faster, in fact, and some say that perhaps it is instantaneous. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance,” probably because it just didn’t align with how he understood the world to be. It doesn’t align with how we understand the world now, either, but for me, it feels more romantic than spooky. It feels like, at some level, once we are connected to each other, we are always connected, that there is not a force of either man or nature that can part us, and in fact we were designed to be that way: the truest definition of “inseparable”.

When I was around twelve years old I attended camp for a week. It was a church camp, and—I’m really not joking—it was a program called “Pioneer Camp”, where we slept in covered wagons and cooked all our meals over a fire. We also took an overnight hiking and kayaking trip to a nearby state park to sleep under the stars. I cannot say what made me choose Pioneer Camp, as I was certainly not the type to forgo electricity and other creature comforts— nor was I too thrilled about attending church camp, for that matter. I quickly came to love it, though—the connection to nature felt so deep, and nature was the only place that I had ever felt the flimsiest glimpse of understanding about what God was. I discovered that I loved kayaking, too, the way the river kayaks enveloped my body and I felt not quite above the water, yet not quite in it, either. I found out that the camp was light on the religion and I began looking forward to the overnight trip. Until, the morning we left, I got my period. I was used to the crippling cramps, but I was not used to having to kayak down a river while they overtook my body. I was young, and embarrassed, so I told no one. By the time we set our sleeping bags down on the hard ground and I slithered in, I was in more pain, and felt more alone, than I had ever felt before. I lay there, unable to fall asleep, unsure of what to do.

It was about this time that my mom, who had been sleeping peacefully in her bed 40 miles away, woke my dad. Something was wrong with me, she said. I was okay, but something wasn’t right. She awaited a call from the camp, uneasy with uncertainty. The call never came, because I never told anyone—not a friend, or a camp counselor, no one. The one person I would have told, had she been there, was my mom. What I didn’t realize was, I didn’t need to. We are still entangled.

Maybe this is a fantastical interpretation of what I have learned. I am no scientist. I am more instinctual than intellectual; I go by what I feel more than what I think. So maybe I’m warping what the science proves, but my interpretation aligns with my experience as both a mother and a daughter. The facts ring with a deep kind of mystery; the science feels like magic. Think of this scientific fact: the egg that would go on to form you was formed in your mother’s body when she was still in her mother’s body. Women form all of our eggs while we are still in the womb. None are formed after birth. In that way, a piece of you was created in your grandmother’s body at the same time it was created in your mom’s, but long before you ever began to take shape as a human fetus. So how can we deny that some things feel confusing and fantastical even when they are real, and true? The potential for each of us existed since before our parents were born. Right from the start, we’re all more entangled than we realize.

Once you start digging this deep you realize it’s true that nothing is quite as it seems. Did you know that what we experience as solid, like a table or a couch or a hand to hold, really isn’t? That the space between the atoms that make up these things is so great, that everything is more space than it is solid matter? If we all lost the space between our atoms, scientists say, all of humanity could fit inside an apple. You alone, with all your empty space removed, would be smaller than a single grain of salt.

We see a universe full of order and structure and it just doesn’t exist in the way we believe that it does. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle doesn’t sound very reliable, but it’s not Heisenberg who is uncertain, it’s the atoms around us. The principle says that atoms exist in more than one place until a conscious observer looks at them. What does this mean, I wonder? When I sleep at night, does my living room couch disappear because no one is observing it? Yet something restrains these atoms from their wanderlust, too. Once billions and trillions of atoms come together to create objects, they stop behaving in this transient way. They stay. Yet even the smartest of scientists don’t understand how this happens, or why.

How can any of this be? There is just so much that we don’t understand, even though we think we do.

When I first discovered all of this it made me sad— I felt like I was told that I had never really held my husband’s hand, and never would. That I would never actually give my kids a hug, that it was all just space reaching out to space. Mostly nothing to mostly nothing. Am I really not much more than a spec of dust, the kind you can see floating in the air when sunlight streams into a room? Did I never really feel my babies on my body, skin to skin, in the moments after they were born? Is nothing as permanent, as solid, as stable and reliable, as it seems? Are all of my senses deceiving me, all day, everyday?

It feels unfair, somehow, and heartbreaking. But still, there is no denying the sensations, regardless of the space between our atoms, of how it feels to have someone hold you in their arms. No science can debunk the feeling of waking up with two children curved like parentheses around my body, or the perfect pressure on my forehead when my husband places a tender kiss there. No measure of smallness negates how I feel when I stand on top of a mountain after having climbed it, or how significant I feel when someone looks me in my eyes and speaks kindness. As Einstein said, “I like to think that the moon is there, even if I am not looking at it.”

I imagine a quantum theorist reading this and shaking their head. Maybe I’m botching the science, misinterpreting the results, oversimplifying the strangely complicated. When I read about quantum theory my brain feels like it’s turning inside out, so I acknowledge that this could be true: Maybe I’ve got it all wrong.

Yet don’t we all? Our minds don’t understand what is really happening all around us, our senses lead us to the wrong conclusions. Regardless, it awakens in me a sense of mystery, the realization that the facts and data we grew up understanding to be truth don’t tell the complete story. There is more to be discovered. It no longer seems crazy to say that our interactions create between us an inseparability, a connection that no time, space, or distance can part.

Maybe the science can explain karma (yes, what you do comes back to you, because at a deep level you’ve done it to yourself). Maybe it explains why we crave a connection to nature (we are the trees; the trees are us) and maybe it explains compassion (what happens to you happens to me, too) and the reason that my mom woke in the night with the knowledge that I was in pain: we are connected, all the way down to our atoms.

Maybe all the divisiveness we’re experiencing right now is so painful because it’s a rejection of our truest nature, the deep, inseparable connectedness that lingers in the smallest deepest parts of each of us.

We are full of so much empty space, we all could just boil down to a few square inches, and if that’s the case, we’re all the same, we’re all mostly nothing. But it doesn’t change the fact that within that nothing, is everything.