During the pandemic, when I was pregnant, but before I realised I was pregnant, I woke up one morning with a strong craving for chicken. At this point I had been vegetarian for maybe fifteen years. But I could not stop thinking about chicken. I felt ravenous for it; literally, bloodthirsty. By late afternoon I asked Pete to drive me to Marks and Spencer, where I bought one roasted chicken and some bread. When I got back to the house I left the bread in the bag, tore the plastic from the chicken, and ate nearly the entire thing; eating with my hands, standing up in the kitchen. A few days later I woke up feeling too morbidly depressed to get out of bed, with a nausea that floored me. Oh god, I thought. I’m pregnant.
I hated being pregnant. I had such extreme morning sickness that some days just keeping down one glass of water felt an insurmountable task. I was so tired; my brain was so foggy. The only thing I enjoyed was sitting in the bath, listening to Philip Glass and Vivaldi. But one thing that did help me get through my pregnancy, however, was the thought of eventually getting to see my placenta.
I remember looking up placentas sometime in my mid-twenties, being both horrified and compelled by the articulacy of their organness. I kept urging people I knew to look at photos of placentas. Why was nobody talking about this?! This enormous, veined, extra-terrestrial thing, nourishing our unborn children. I knew if ever I was pregnant I would want to keep mine. When in life are you afforded the opportunity to bring home one of your organs, to do with as you wish?
I brought it up with my midwife about midway through my pregnancy. She told me I just needed to make my wishes clear with the midwife delivering my baby, and bring something with me to take it home in. I brought a Tupperware container, something I used to store sandwiches.
I researched all the different things you can do with a placenta. There are of course ways of eating the placenta: you can remove small pieces of it and whizz it up in a smoothie, you can have it freeze dried and put into capsules. Eating the placenta has some (alleged) health benefits, such as reducing postpartum bleeding, improving mood blah blah. I was watching the television show Servant at the time, and there is a peculiarly luscious scene in which the recent father in the show bakes his wife’s placenta into opulent little pastries, for the guests at the baby’s baptism to unwittingly enjoy.
I did not want to eat my placenta. For a while I liked the idea of having a piece of it made into jewellery, but so far this is not a service I have seen. What I really wanted to do with my placenta was to study it. To marvel at it. To be repelled by it.
I had a horrible birth, which I will probably write about in a trauma-dumping Substack at some point, but I got to keep my placenta. I remember Pete holding it up, in the thin plastic paper they wrapped it in, like a cut of steak from the butchers. How it hung indecently over the sides of the Tupperware, ludicrously too big. I felt at that point, as much of a piece of meat as I am likely to ever feel. I was staying overnight in hospital with my baby while Pete was to go home, taking a slab of me with him.
I had to stay in hospital for a couple days, but when I got home the placenta was in the fridge, waiting for me. When I at last had the energy, I handed Pete the baby, took it out, and emptied it into the kitchen sink.
I’m not sure what I was expecting to feel, but whatever it was, I’m not sure I felt it. I just prodded it with my fingers for a bit, felt the weight of it in my hands. After a while Pete told me to throw it away, in the outside bin, which I did.