Strange Fruit: The Rosy Afterlife of Two Placentas Buried in My Front Yard – Part One

*Welcome to my second post/stab at keeping up with the Fussy’s November NaBloPoMo bo-blog-nanza.

Two of the three placentas I generated while gestating are buried beneath the rose bushes in my front yard. Why?



a) I’m crazy about composting.
b) I have major attachment (or detachment?) issues.
c) I’m a brassy home-birthing freak of Mother Nature.
d) My triple Ziploc sealed placentas were rapidly defrosting in a cooler alongside cold cuts and juice boxes at a time when we had no freezer-fridge to stash them in. (Colossal food safety failure, I know. Join me in pointing the finger at my well-meaning hubster for this one. If not for him, I would have spaced it and left them behind to rot. Yuck.)
e) Burying them seemed like an out of the ordinary and fittingly bizarre way to christen our new house (and take a breather on a frenzied New Year’s Eve move-in day).
f) To pay a unique, unforgettable tribute to our youngest two children, who were both born in bed at home.

Pick an answer; They’re all true.

Well, except that I missed the entire placenta burying ceremony, which my husband drastically abridged and de-romanticized without asking me first, the one who manufactured both placentas in the first place. Basically, without meaning to, he stole my “moment” and turned it into an exercise in simply, unceremoniously dumping afterbirth biohazard.

After swigging a couple of Mike’s Hard Lemonades with my sister, my husband indifferently dug two holes, dumped my placentas into the hallowed out dirt and stuck two twiggy, pathetic looking, barely grown rose bushes on top. All while I slept on my side between unpacked boxes with my then 2-month-old daughter gulping away at my engorged breasts and my then 1-year-old son franticly twiddling my hair between his fingertips to fall asleep.



Yup, uninformed me Rip Van Winkled straight through the my husband’s deconstructionist take on a placenta ritual that I’d waited so long for, and eventually planned to soulfully detail in the pages of Mothering Magazine or another similar natural parenting periodical. (What? You don’t have any Brie to go with my whine?! Now I’m doubly disappointed.)

Before moving day, when we were still crammed into a sardine can of a third-floor apartment in the city/seashore, my placentas remained frozen stiff, sandwiched between a box of green tea mochi (crazy tasty Japanese ice cream balls encased in gooey rice flour) and a bag of shelled edamame (soy beans), awaiting their moment of crunchy-granola placenta glory.

Meanwhile, I daydreamed of finding a home big enough to house our family of five. It had to be small enough to be fairly affordable (c’mon, we’re talking Southern California 2003 here), far enough away from gang turf (again, c’mon, we’re talking Southern California here) and close enough to walk to an excellent kindergarten program (which we later passed up in favor of a private school we drive our son to every morning).

I had beef with my first placenta, the one that never made it beneath the now blossoming rose bushes in our front yard and probably ended up blended into an overpriced wrinkle cream. Instead, we buried a toy I can’t remember to honor our hospital-born first child, so he wouldn’t feel left out.

No, I don’t mean beef as in beef-placenta stew, which is an actual recipe, no kidding. My midwife sent me a recipe for placenta pate, again I kid you not.

Anyway, my first placenta, the one that accompanied my eldest son, The Maestro of Mouth, 5, was the subject of my multitudes of negative, depressed feelings at the time.

My first pregnancy was labeled high-risk the same day it was officially confirmed by the trusty gals at Planned Parenthood. It was a rocky nine months, marked by weeks and weeks of round-the-clock bed rest and constant worry that I might miscarry at any moment.

Many times I feared I’d flushed my budding baby down the toilet in a pool of blood and golf-ball sized clots. Paranoid, traumatic, volatile, unsupported and alone are the only words that come to mind when I look back on it. Maybe I’m not yet ready to rehash such an emotionally turbulent and physically trying chapter in my life.



During one of my half-dozen trips to the emergency room that pregnancy, a female doctor who seemed genuinely concerned told me I had a rare gestational condition called placenta abruptio (also sometimes called placental abruption). The condition can cause severe hemorrhaging, which often leads to the early termination of pregnancy and, in rare cases, maternal death. Medline Plus defines placenta abruption as “separation of the placenta (the organ that nourishes the fetus) from the site of uterine implantation before delivery of the fetus.”

Until I complete Part Two of this post (which will appear hopefully tomorrow if I’m the diligent NaBloPoMo-er that I hope to be) I leave you with my curiosity:

Where’s your placenta? If you gave birth in the hospital, do you ever wonder whether the staff disposed of it, shipped it off for medical research or hawked it to a comsmetic company? What’s the strangest placenta story you’ve ever heard? What do you think of women who do strange, creepy things with their afterbirth?