When bebe slipped out of me, the doctors told me to keep pushing so that the placenta, an organ also known as the "after birth," would follow. I could feel it, warm and soft, leave my body. They knew that I wanted to take it home with us, so they had a bucket ready to go for it. They put it in a refrigerator somewhere until we figured out how to get it home. I had already researched placenta smoothie recipes, so I knew we had to get it home and into the freezer. Because there was meconium in the amniotic fluid when my water broke, we knew there would be some on the placenta to clean off. The nurses kept saying that it was sterile though and so it wouldn't be a problem if it was ingested.
Jason vowed to me that he would support my adventures. This one though, was a bit of a gross adventure to support. After bebe was born and we all snuggled for a while, Jason went home with the placenta to preserve it (and shower and smoke). In the abstract, this isn't a big deal. But hearing him tell the tale of preserving it, you'd think I gave him my lower intestines to put in the freezer. When he got back to the hospital room and told us why it took him so long to return, the abstract idea of eating my placenta became operationalized and very real.
"I walked home in the hot August heat, begrudgingly, with a bucket that held my son's home for the past 41 weeks. Once home, I had to rinse the placenta off. It was fucking gross. There was meconium and multiple blood clots that clung to the placenta. It had a giant vein, veins, running through it. It was grey. It was grayish purple and extra extra extra slimy. I felt I was washing off an eel I had caught in the Cheaspeake Bay that was trying to escape. Even though it was a slippery as an eel, when I was cleaning it in the kitchen sink and had it spread out, it was dome-ish like a sting ray. It kept slipping out of my hands, and it kept trying to slide down into the garbage disposal."
Three months after he put it into the freezer, I brought my placenta out to eat it.
To make a placenta smoothie put the following ingredients in your ninja:
1 cup Almond Milk
kale from farmers market
1 frozen banana
2 tablespoons of almond butter
1 scoop of vanilla Vega protein powder
Unwrap frozen placenta.
Cut placenta into serving sizes.
Cut placenta into cubes for future smoothies and store in sandwich ziplock bags. Add one serving of cubed placenta into ninja.
Blend. Blend well. Blend until there aren't any sinewy pieces left.
Drink. Swallow without chewing. Ignore that metallic taste in the back of your throat.
