Defrosting the Placenta

Placenta Prints

The other week, we finally planted Cedar’s placenta. What? Yes. It’s been in our freezer wrapped in a bread bag for almost two and a half years. I had planned to plant it right after his birth, under a young tree or plant, to mark the occasion, to join a part of our bodies with the earth, then watch the plant grow bigger each year. But, as you might imagine, other things took priority right after he was born—like nursing and sleeping and recovering from surgery-- and so it has sat, frozen in waiting.

Our friend, Amy, who was at the birth, gave us a small lilac plant in the weeks that followed. We’d wanted something that puts out fragrant blossoms in the spring around late March, when Cedar was born. Lilacs bloom a bit later, more like the end of April, but whatever, that’s close enough. Matthew and I both love their scent.

The lilac was tiny and we weren’t sure it would make it, so we kept it in a pot on our deck and watered it for the last two years, while the placenta receded further into the back of our freezer. (Is that a flank steak? A block of raspberries?) Then last week, since we were sticking around all day doing house projects, and it was a beautiful, sunny, early fall day, it struck me as the perfect opportunity to plant it. By now, I didn’t need the planting to be done on some particularly auspicious day—like Cedar’s first, second, or third birthday. At this point I just wanted it out of our freezer and the lilac in the ground before it died without ever even having the chance to flower.

A giant cedar tree had come down about a year ago, opening up a big exposed hole between our yard and the neighbors’, so we had a perfect spot for the lilac which may eventually grow quite large. First I let the placenta defrost--just a bit-- in the sink. Somehow it struck me that it should not be rock hard frozen, that I wanted to see its juices touch the soft dirt. Then I began to dig the hole. Matthew helped me make it deeper, then cut out some roots and filled it with homemade compost. Cedar then dropped in a couple small trowel’s full of fertilizer (his usual job when helping me plant flowers), and I cut open the bread bag, gently shaking loose the placenta while trying not to touch it.

Despite the fact that you may already think I’m weird for keeping it in the first place, I was not exactly eager to touch or smell the placenta. Still partially frozen, I didn’t readily detect any odor—and nor did I sniff it to try to locate one. Yet the blood had begun to seep onto the plastic and the hard, dark red mass was indeed revealing itself for what it was: a bodily organ. This is why the hospital was required to label it ‘hazardous waste’ when they gave it to me, sealed in a white plastic bucket. And this is why the whole process struck me as both slightly disgusting yet profoundly cool.

After I dropped the placenta into the hole, Matthew shook the root-bound lilac out of its pot and shoveled more dirt around its edges. How strange, I thought, that I could still see and touch the actual blood of my body, blood of our birth. I go through each day now so tightly bound to my son, 24-7, in touch with his rhythms, listening for his calls, responding to his needs. We are as connected as ever, morning till night, eating the same foods, running the same errands, going on walks, playing in parks, befriending sets of mothers and sons. But the memory of Cedar’s actual birth has grown faint, usurped by the constant forward momentum of our lives, our growth, our balancing acts, lessons, and needs.

           

So now, two and a half years later, to spontaneously decide to unfreeze, unwrap, touch and plant the very organ that once physically connected us, that gave him life while he was in my womb, felt beautiful in a quiet and unassuming kind of way. It wasn’t an overwrought ritual. We were just planting another plant, something we’ve done all summer long. But in other ways, of course, this was a very special plant indeed.

My sister and her baby, Avery, a mere two months old, happened to be here to witness our planting and snap a few photos. She asked if we were going to explain to Cedar anything. “He won’t understand,” my husband shook his head. “Maybe, we’ll see,” I said, wanting to leave it up to the moment. In the end, all I said as I shook out the dark red form from the bag was, “This is very special fertilizer.” And then: “This is a lilac plant. It will grow purple flowers in the spring. It is Cedar’s special plant.” 

This felt like enough.

My First Garden

This is the first year I’ve planted my own garden. As a child, I helped my parents weed and water theirs, and over the years I’ve stuck my hands in dirt enough times to know that I like it, but for a variety of reasons (always traveling, living in apartments, or simply not motivated) I’ve never seen one through from start to finish, had the responsibility rest in my hands, or rather, in the hands of me and my partner.

Our garden is messy, experimental, and doesn’t get enough sun. Our garden is imperfect, as gardens should be. First, we cobbled together a raised bed with old mismatched boards and hauled in a bunch of dirt-- dirt which turned out to be filled with bark and too dense for most of the delicate roots of our greens to push through. For several months, I watered and hoped that the tiny shoots would grow, but they more or less stayed the same size until my husband finally replanted them in soil from our composted leaves. Within days, they were growing. Lesson learned.

We also had to hack down a bunch of cedar and holly branches to let in more light, but our garden is still lucky to see a few good hours a day. In the main bed we planted lettuce, kale, chard, green onions, peas, beans, and zucchini. On our deck we planted tomatoes, basil, cucumbers and peppers in pots. I walk by other people’s gardens and see giant mature vegetables already begging to be eaten, whereas the peas and a few leaves of basil are the only thing we’ve been able to harvest so far. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to eat abundant greens throughout August and September, but for now, we’re still buying our veggies at the store.

Thankfully we are not relying on our harvest to eat or sell, but rather, our garden is a learning project, an excuse to go outside more often and watch dirt absorb water, turn into something rich and fertile, a ploy to get me to be more observant, to notice the speed and quality in which things grow, which direction the stems and leaves are reaching for sunlight, which soil is most thirsty and which is healthiest. And to notice my own distracted and aware states, the ebb and flow of my emotions, days where the watering is rushed or neglected, or days where I am a gentle, observant nurturer.

There’s also something so satisfying of course about gathering a bowl full of peas and cutting them up and putting them in my salad—from garden to stomach in minutes. There’s something so beautiful about being rooted enough in a home where I want to take the time to build and plant and cultivate. This is coming from someone who was wed to the transitory traveling life for years, someone who still longs on a regular basis to take off and live a life undistracted by too many emails or obligations, who has cultivated a love for being places where nobody knows my name.

But those longings belong more to the realm of fantasy right now. For an equally strong urge has taken hold-- the urge to stay in one place, to cultivate old friendships or new ones that have the potential to last a long time. It helps, of course, owning a home. I wonder if I didn’t, if the urge to root would be quite as strong, or if it’d be too easy to give in to the lure of someplace other, a different country, especially China which holds so many keys to my tongue and heart. A place where it is easy to stay in a state of awareness, because everything is vibrantly different and new— until it isn’t, and then you can leave.

What I love the most about traveling is the ease to which one can stay present and aware, open to unexpected encounters or invitations, meeting new people, stopping at the side of the road to take notice, as opposed to being caught up in a mind filled with anxiety about meetings or deadlines or careers or self image. When traveling, your job is to meet your own basic needs: food, shelter, water; running errands like going to the post office, bank, or market; writing letters or emails to keep ties to dear ones strong—and otherwise, to simply stay open to what the day will bring, whether you are feeling tired or energetic, whether you want to seek out another or wander alone.

I suppose I’m talking about the kind of traveling that one sinks into after you’ve been gone for weeks, or months. The kind of traveling where your destinations are only loosely plotted and where you have enough open-endedness to drift away from normal markers of time. Where you begin to forget what day it is, because it doesn’t really matter, and where you feel so utterly alive and in the moment that you wish that everyone could have this same kind of experience—risk letting go of tightly constricted tethers of your identity, risk losing old versions of yourself in order to discover new versions, a new sense of who you are emerging, transforming, changed.

As I write this, I am aware of how this longing for that kind of travel can also be a form of escapism. I’m aware of how most people think that such a lifestyle is okay for people in their twenties, but that people in their thirties or older should’ve gotten over those fantasies by now and commit to a more responsible life. And I am aware of how I still argue for either side—the longer it’s been since I’ve experienced that kind of travel, the more I remind myself that I would like to again—and hopefully in not too long. Yet the longer I was away—traveling, in China, for years apart from my family and friends and the Pacific Northwest where I was raised—the more I longed for a rooted community and home.

I am still learning how to commit myself to one place, one network of people and friends, my writing colleagues and students, my writing, my parents, my partner. And to commit means that it is not so easy to cut loose and go away. It means that I need to learn how to cultivate that same expansive awareness that I was shown while backpacking while on a walk in my own neighborhood, on a weekend camping trip, or in my own living room, in my heart and my mind. I am learning how to find balance, getting older as some might say—and yet, I don’t like feeling trapped in one possible vision of what is ‘realistic,’ never have. So I leave my heart open to the universe to bring what it will, to teach me what I need. I try to remain open to all the possibilities, to stay open to what my heart needs, and to beware of words like ‘should’—or at least to be aware of where they are coming from. You never know, you might still find me on a cheap flight to Hong Kong or a ferry to Alaska next summer. Or, more likely, you might find me here, in North Seattle, digging, watering and harvesting from a new crop of vegetables and weeds.