Editor’s note: This piece contains discussion and descriptions of childbirth, blood and other bodily and medical processes.
Image: ‘Rakka’, Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In the weeks leading up to my son’s first birthday, I flip through my mum’s copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake book, circa 1980. Mostly for my own enjoyment and nostalgia. I search for the perfect cake: something easy but memorable.
My son has started saying ‘der’ for dog, but I can’t find any dogs in the book. Reluctantly, I start Googling and find a simple pattern for a dog’s head. I bake two flat butter cakes and use one to cut out the ear shapes. After covering them in an inch of butter and icing sugar mixture, I arrange them, in dog-form, on a tray. Some parents post photos on Instagram of their children’s birthdays, with balloon garlands and three-tiered cakes that look like they should be for a wedding. I examine my cake-dog creation. I bought a whole packet of mint biscuits just so I could use one for the nose. To me, this seems excessive.
*
We saved his placenta in a plastic tub to bury under a tree. I didn’t get to see it after the birth. It was all so frantic—doctors and midwives suddenly appeared in the room. At first, they loitered on the periphery to see if they’d be needed, then their faces were hovering above mine and their hands were all over my body. The word ‘emergency’ was used. They dropped the bedhead to lie flat and pulled my baby from me. Sterilised hands reached into my vagina, and another pair pushed down hard on my stomach. He cried straight away and I felt instant relief and awe.
The placenta was pulled from me—a hot, sweet, soft form, passing, sliding. In the months leading up to his birth, I had wanted to see it. To inspect the organ that had grown inside me, allowing me to house and support a baby. When else would I get to see an organ that I’d grown, that had penetrated my insides and kept my baby alive? At the time of birth, the total surface area of the placenta is around 11 square metres.
Looking at the placenta was the furthest thing from my mind after he was born. I’d just wanted to hold my baby and breathe slow joyful mouthfuls of air. In the corner of the room, out of my field of vision, our midwife inspected the placenta to make sure it was intact. I told her to dispose of it. The trauma of birth had extinguished any sense of romance I’d had about the process. I wanted to distance myself from the gore and pain. But she insisted on keeping it, on honouring our wishes, pre-birth. She found a white tub, the kind used for 1kg yoghurts, put one of my ID stickers on the top and scooped it in. Years later, the lid is still fixed firmly but there’s a thin layer of dusty blood caked around the rim.
It is a criminal offence to bury ‘bodily remains’ anywhere, other than in a public cemetery.
However, a placenta is not considered ‘bodily remains’. A placenta is ‘human tissue’.
(Royal Women’s Hospital)
The foetus and placenta start off as one cell—the zygote. We have images of our son at this stage, but it feels odd to call that cell our son. Four images on an A4 piece of paper of cells multiplying at five-days old. They are given grades: AA, AB, BB, BC etc. Already we’re measuring our potential children against an arbitrary scale.
The placenta is the least studied and understood of all human organs. The word placenta comes from the Latin word for cake (placenta). In Greek plakóenta or plakoúnta is something flat or slab-like, and in German, it is mother cake, mutterkuchen. Something to be eaten, consumed, baked and celebrated: sticky, messy, flat, round, moist, filling.
We like to think of ourselves as impenetrable and unchanging but we are constantly being affected by our environment.
I read Eula Biss’s novel, On Immunity, about navigating the first year of her son’s life during the H1N1 pandemic and plotted the parallels between the first year of my son’s life and COVID-19. The restrictions, the isolation and the fear of allowing the virus in.
Research into COVID-19 transmission between mother and baby has shown that, while transmission can occur, the placenta not only forms a structural barrier to the virus, but an immunological one.
We like to think of ourselves as impenetrable and unchanging but we are constantly being affected by our environment. Biss notes that the cells that form the outer layer of the placenta for a human foetus bind to each other using a gene that originated, long ago, from a virus.
*
During the first winter of my son’s life, we lived near the bay in Naarm. I used to walk with him in the pram by the sea. With or without vaccination, writes Biss, the first years of a child’s life are a time of rapid education on immunity—all the runny noses and fevers of those years are the symptoms of a system learning the microbial lexicon. Sometimes the wind was so strong I could barely push against it. But I did, fighting an invisible battle. If he had been eligible for a vaccine against COVID, I wouldn’t have hesitated to book him in. He got used to seeing people in masks. When I carried him with me into shops he pulled my mask down and laughed thinking it was a game. He learned to smile at strangers by watching the curve of their eyes.
We spent many afternoons in the aisles of our local supermarket. Like so many other people, I baked during lockdowns. Finding satisfaction in looking up recipes, shopping for ingredients and planning my weekend around cooking a batch of scrolls. I can’t remember which recipes I tried, I didn’t save any of them. I just searched for a new one each time, adding to the expansive collection of internet browser tabs open on my phone.
My mum keeps all her favourite recipes in a red hardback notebook. Next to each recipe she’s written who told it to her. Sometimes she’s asked them to write their recipe directly in. There are a few clippings and print outs but mostly the recipes are annotated in my mum’s familiar hand—swift and neat. The spine is held together with gaffer tape from so many uses and the pages are flecked with various batters. They have a distinct texture from all the ingredients they’ve absorbed.
On the outer layer of the blastocyst, the dividing ball of cells that becomes an embryo, exist trophoblast cells. After an embryo has implanted, these cells burrow into the uterine wall. Finger-like structures (placental villi) stretch out as the foetus grows. Extravillous cytotrophoblasts cells migrate along these hands and into the intervillous space where the gestational parent’s blood supply exists. By imitating the type of cells that typically line blood vessels, they invade and remodel spiral arteries to direct blood supply to the foetus. The spiral arteries in the uterus grow unrestricted due to these cell’s actions. By the end of the first trimester, the arteries are delivering large amounts of blood to the foetus. When a pregnancy is full-term, the gestational parent’s blood volume will increase by 40–50 per cent. During my partner’s pregnancy, with our second child, she suffers nosebleeds due to the amount of blood she is producing.
There is a metamorphosis that occurs within the womb. Cells change, they play tricks. The placenta does the dirty work, the back alley deals, so the foetus can survive. We keep the baby and throw away the placenta and its deceptions.
Siri Hustvedt captures this binary dilemma when writing about the US Supreme Court’s destruction of abortion rights, and the anti-abortion movement’s insistence on seeing the unborn person as complete, unchanging and fixed throughout pregnancy. There is no pregnancy and birth without a placenta, but its very existence as a between-organ must be suppressed in anti-abortion discourse because the complex placental-umbilical connection blurs the bodily borders the anti-abortion forces are desperate to maintain.
I recently heard an author describe the role of the placenta as a mediator against two warring sides—mother and baby. Placentas contain both foetal and maternal cells. They act as a barrier to keep bacteria out of the uterus and a gateway allowing antioxidants from the mother in. If I’d had a COVID vaccine during pregnancy perhaps some protection would have been passed onto him. The placenta stops foetal cells from making their way into the mother’s bloodstream—where they could be seen as intruders. In no other circumstance would the body allow these cells to grow uninterrupted, but the placenta makes this possible.
There is a metamorphosis that occurs within the womb. Cells change, they play tricks. The placenta does the dirty work, the back alley deals, so the foetus can survive.
I lost count of the immunisations I had while pregnant. My body produced antibodies which passed through the placenta to my baby. I wondered what level of dilution other substances had and why some passed through the placenta easily and others only partially.
Drug transfer through the placenta depends on physical properties of the placental membrane and on the pharmacological properties of the drug. A range of factors influence a drugs’ ability to cross the placenta: its molecular weight, lipid solubility (ability to divide between oil and water), degree of ionisation and if it’s protein bound. It seems like most drugs, to some extent, cross the placenta, but their levels vary.
Over a year since his birth and his/my(?) placenta still sits frozen in our garage. Our baby has grown and we’re not stuck in the haze of early parenthood. But the ceremonial weight of burying it is still too heavy for us to start the task. We can’t decide what to plant it under and are avoiding opening the lid. I can feel myself becoming defensive of its gnarly appearance. There was so much going on in the hours after I birthed: my baby was admitted to the special care nursery; I had surgery to repair an episiotomy and a spinal block was administered so I couldn’t walk; nurses came into my room to press on my stomach to see if my uterus was contracting back to its pre-pregnancy state, and my partner went to sleep on a hard vinyl chair next to our baby. The machines used to measure his vital signs went off every half an hour or more, jolting her awake. I lay immobilised in my room next to the packaged placenta, the post-birth high morphing into a syrupy depression.
We had our baby in the midst of a pandemic. Hand sanitisers in all public places, I worried about how much of it he would ingest, knowing that, as Biss writes, the chemical triclosan can make its way into breastmilk and my son’s body. Now, when my son accompanies me to the supermarket I smother the trolley in the stuff. Anxiety gives way to practicality.
Some people turn their placentas into tablets to take post-birth. I Google ‘Placenta encapsulation Melbourne’ and only three results come up (all with 4.5 or higher star reviews). I don’t want to eat my placenta. But if there was peer-reviewed medical support for it, I probably would. The pills are large and full of light brown powder. I wonder how it would feel, to be nurtured by something you’ve grown inside your own body. The idea has enticing self-sufficiency to it.
Most art and writing to do with placentas is considered low-brow, disgusting and derivative. It’s hard to write about something that people are repulsed by. But it’s not only repulsion, it also suffers from patriarchal insignificance. It’s all together too female and messy to interest anyone.
33 Placenta Art ideas on Pinterest
Cosmic placenta art
Placenta Prints
First-class Placenta Art
Dried placenta art
To remove my placenta, I was given a shot of syntocinon in my thigh, a synthetic version of oxytocin which makes the muscles in the womb contract. Oxytocin is produced by the hypothalamus (located in the brain) and then released into the bloodstream by the pituitary gland. It’s often called the ‘love hormone’ or ‘cuddle hormone’ because it’s released when we feel love or sexual arousal. Strange that a hormone produced by a feeling of connection would also serve as a way of ridding the body of an organ.
It’s hard to write about something that people are repulsed by.
Our midwife pulled on my umbilical cord. This is where we became subjects and object—mother, baby and cake. This is where I became responsible for the organ in a plastic tub, like the other bags I had brought into the hospital with me—it would need to be carried out by its thin plastic handle. A lolly bag from my own body.
Method:
Placenta delivered by controlled cord traction
Ingredients:
Placenta/Membranes: Complete/ragged
Placenta complications: gritty
I’ve always been interested in the idea of the abject. Of those parts of ourselves we cast aside and distance ourselves from. Eula Biss: My pregnancy, like every pregnancy, had primed me for the understanding that my body was not mine alone and that its boundaries were more porous than I had ever been led to believe.
My mum kept all my baby teeth in a love-heart-shaped ceramic container with a fairy on top. She’d collect them after each visit from the tooth fairy. I found them a few years ago and was amazed at how light and delicate they were. Like shiny rice bubbles. When I was eighteen I took my wisdom teeth home after having them removed in day surgery. They were less appealing, bloodied stumps with broken roots jutting out. Thinking about these teeth brings on a tingling in my gums and an itch in my mouth, almost like my body is trying to coax them back in.
I relive elements of his birth almost every day: the deliriousness of surgery, the drugs making me warm and carefree despite being separated from my son; the midwife’s concerned expression as our baby began to make an odd sound when breathing in; holding him beneath my chin, amazed at him finally being here; and of waking up alone in the hospital room unable to walk by myself the next day. My birth was ‘normal’. As has happened so often in my life, medical experiences seem to scrape a new rawness into me. I need to relive it in words, in thin black lines that appear as I tap away in the dark: curved and straight, overlapping and disturbed.
It’s only when I talk to other people who have been through birth that I realise it’s not common to think about it every day. I find it hard to let go of the trauma though. I see a psychologist and talk through elements of the birth. She suggests we relive the physical nature of it and I end up self-consciously curled up in child’s pose on the floor.
At night when I can’t sleep I imagine taking my placenta out of the freezer in the garage, sitting with it and crying. My eyes tear up even though they are closed.
At night when I can’t sleep I imagine taking my placenta out of the freezer in the garage, sitting with it and crying.
My mother almost died giving birth to my brother. They told my dad to prepare to be a single parent and pumped litres of blood back into her. Her cervix wouldn’t open so my brother became trapped inside. His head and neck were pushed down with every contraction but unable to move out. At last, they cut him out. Not in the normal small-horizontal-c-section-kind of way, but in a hurried vertical slice down the middle of her body. Years later, she writes in a letter, that as she was healing, she couldn’t believe that the stitches stayed together. She kept waiting to burst open every time she coughed or laughed, like some kind of gruesome human fondant. I was too young to grasp the severity of this when it was occurring. But I do remember an overwhelming fear that I would lose her.
Perhaps a learnt trauma, as she had lost her own mother when she was ten years old.
*
After he turned one, I took my son for his vaccinations. We were seen in the doctors’ car park underneath a gazebo. A collection of weathered toys were scattered around in an attempt to keep children occupied, or at the very least out of the way of the cars. A nurse and a doctor came outside to see us. The nurse held up a clear plastic cylinder with hundreds of tiny coloured balls inside. As she flipped it upside down the balls cascaded along a spiral to the base. They reminded me of hundreds and thousands. My son screamed as a needle was injected into both of his arms and both of his chubby thighs. It was over before the balls made it to the base of their cylinder. I held him against my chest while the asphalt beat its heat up at us. I counted the ten days it took for him to build up the antibodies and for the vaccine to be fully effective.
Eula Biss: Vaccination is a kind of domestication of a wild thing, in that it involves our ability to harness a virus and break it like a horse.
I think about what it is to know something but to never see it. To feel it pass over my body and to only imagine what it looks like. As I type this, my placenta sits about ten metres from me, but I won’t go and look at it. Sometimes I go to get something out of the freezer and accidentally pull it out, then hurriedly shove it back in, reminding myself to store food in the other draws away from it.
One of the major hospitals in Melbourne has a fact sheet on the dos and don’ts of taking your placenta home:
A placenta provides a perfect environment for germs to grow, which can be a threat to your health and other people around you.
Placentas for consumption should be treated just as you would fresh, raw meat.
My paternal grandmother didn’t really cook, unusual for the times, but each time she visited us she’d make a sponge cake. Two thin cakes separated by a thick layer of cream in the middle and topped with chocolate icing. Sometimes there were toothpicks inserted in the top so the cling wrap didn’t get stuck to the icing. I can remember the smell and taste of that sponge—soft, airy and sweet. She crashed her car once on our dirt road about two kilometres from our home. The car rolled down a hill. We saw her walking down the road to our house, sponge cake in hand. Only later when we found the car did we realise how serious it could have been.
In On Immunity, Biss references the work of Professor Paul Slovic, who studies the psychology of risk. Slovic uses the term Intuitive Toxicology to describe how the majority of people evaluate the risk of chemicals.
We assume that exposure to any amount of a harmful chemical will permanently contaminate our bodies. ‘Being contaminated,’ Slovic observes, ‘clearly has an all-or-none quality to it—like being alive or pregnant.’
Fear of contamination rests on the belief, widespread in our culture, as in others, that something can impart its essence to us on contact.
When I was trying to get pregnant I really hated the phrase, ‘you can’t be a little bit pregnant.’ Surely me, who had injected myself with hormones for weeks, had undertaken counselling, picked a sperm donor and had my eggs harvested, could, in fact, be a little bit pregnant. We haven’t caught COVID yet, but our lives have been deeply affected/infected by it.
I am getting more annoyed at the phrases ‘COVID normal’ and ‘living with COVID’. There’s a push to stop talking about it, to get out and live our lives. I am asked why I’m wearing a mask when sitting at my desk at work. I’m told by people in the creative community that they want content that doesn’t address the pandemic. Perhaps because it’s too universal, too depressing, too ‘now’, we’re not ready to examine it. We’re still in denial about its effect on us all. I think we’re still on hold, still waiting to do our living, to reflect and to bury our placentas.
*
My son doesn’t really enjoy the cake. What do we expect—he’s never eaten sugar. He puts some in his mouth, then screws up his face in repulsion and spits it out. I read that a lot of reactions to food at this age are to do with texture rather than taste. Most of the cake goes stale and hard in our fridge during the peak of summer. I force myself to eat it after dinner each night. I sit in my shorts under the fan and watch the tennis, while swallowing dense mouthfuls of butter icing. It’s smooth in some places and gritty with sugar in others. The richness of it, coupled with the warm air, makes me feel ill, but I feel an overwhelming dedication to ensure that it won’t be wasted.
This essay was a runner up in the 2022 KYD Creative Non-Fiction Essay Prize.
