Lil Placenta
My four year-old daughter held out the bright red slime she’d pilfered from my son’s Valentine’s Day goodie bag. “Look, it’s a placenta!”
Well, no, it was actually just slime. The placenta is more formidable. Heavier. A different kind of party favor. But at our house, we don’t use cute pseudonyms for things bodies do and are. Biology comes to the dinner table, and knows the fork from the spoon from the sex-iled knife.
One time, I transported my labor client’s freshly delivered placenta in a soft cooler bag, on ice, on the bus. Another rider shoved past me, pushing the cooler out of my hand.
“CAREFUL WITH MY PLACENTA,” I whisper-shouted (“my” in the loose sense). Because it’s New York City, the commuter– a guy– did not blink.
All the way uptown on the bus, I felt like I had a secret in the silver insulated bag, held by its too-small plastic handles– and I kind of did. But only as much of a secret as any of us have who cart around a heart all day. A brain. A wedge of sadness they just can’t swallow.
Now my daughter twirled through the apartment with the beginnings of a reproductive agenda, the red slime in a repurposed take-out container, like a misplaced sacrament. There used to be Lashevet’s babaganoush in there. From Eggplant to egg sustainer.
Generally, I don’t really do take out. It’s Home kitchen all the way, and green vegetable panacea. I’m very aware that these cheap plastic containers easily degrade. Claw their way into your food– your organs– your (in the loose sense) placenta. Yet manufacturers make these little containers the perfect size for future storage. A convenience slowly poisoning the planet, for the sake of transportable hummus.
When you order for 6+ hungry people (blended family, many appetites) the containers are fruitful and multiply. Once emptied, you can nest them in a planet-defying tower, like vertebrae without a body to hold up. But children can do anything with anything.
The four year old admired the shape-shifting organ of which she was now the only Keeper.
Little Rules, my 7 year-old, insisted, “That’s NOT a placenta, you can’t just keep calling it one!” His brain works like a deli meat slicer. “That’s like saying an elephant is a speck of dust.”
Little Pleasure refuted his argument by shaking her head until she fell over.
Little Rules felt the power of his first analogy and immediately upgraded, “That’s like calling a mouse a LION. It’s not a thing just because YOU SAID IT IS.”
Oh? Isn’t that what writers do?
Little Pleasure was not dissuaded, “It’s a placenta from mommy’s body. And you can’t touch it!”
Yes, I’d lost two of those glorious, multi-talented organs that support and maintain incipient life. The shared, indisputable arbiters of survival. Both to the hospital pathology bin. I didn’t touch either. One I never even viewed.
More adults have seen the neon slime elementary school kids love to fling and fake-sneeze with than have seen a placenta. Why?
Kids have more experience with slime than awareness of placentas. Why?
Most grown people don’t understand what’s so important about the placenta, either. You know how you only understand the architecture and function of a knee cap when something goes wrong with yours?
I have questions. Like:
Can’t we do better?
Can we remember that, once, we each needed a placenta? Like, wholly? And like, be a little kinder now, because we all still need something?
That we are made of layers, complicated layers? Some a tad slimy?
Can we consider that we’re temporary take-out containers, too. The biology that holds the transient mystery?
Also: did you know more than 900 species of slime mold occur globally, an indomitable force, isogamous organisms? Me neither. Little Rules told me that, with the gloppy red substance-- definitely not-placenta but still subjectively magical-- wobbling in his lap.
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Not sure what parts of your birth or the aftermath you want to talk about? Not sure what parts matter to you? Already missing your placenta, or forgetting what it meant to create and birth a human?
Come tell your birth story in a 1:1 private session with me, fully supported, in organic detail, and create a meaningful narrative record for yourself and your family. www.tellyourbirthstory.com
