Placenta Tree

The February air is biting and soundless as I stand in the front yard with my elderly corgi. Beyond the driveway the jarring thwack of a shovel rings through the cold expanse of air. In her own yard, my neighbor Jana digs the frozen ground, breasts leaking and swollen under her purple sweatshirt. She is nine days postpartum and planting her placenta tree. The sapling is a yellow magnolia, its tender roots wrapped lovingly around her afterbirth, swaddled deep under cold mounds of dark, rich soil. As I idle on the lawn, I wonder about other placenta trees: How many might there be, roots forever entwined with earth and flesh? What fruit might they bear? I imagine crimson pods suspended from delicate branches, secrets stirring under parchment skin in the glow of moonlight. 

My own placenta went out with the biowaste at the hospital four years ago, snapped into a plastic box and wheeled down sterile hallways to be incinerated with other bits and ends of strange flesh. It would never be used to create art or nourish canary-yellow flower buds. Watching Jana plant her magnolia this morning, I feel a sudden sense of grief for that unrecognized loss, and with it, the desire to know more about the organ that nourished life in me for nine months, only to be destroyed without ceremony or recognition.  

Before becoming pregnant, I did not contemplate the existence of my placenta, nor did I consider it during the long, dark weeks that it slowly stretched and manifested itself within me. It was only on the afternoon my son was born that I first acknowledged it, as I held my baby on my chest, peering into his face, while the midwives squeezed and kneaded my belly, coaxing my womb to release the afterbirth.  

In the moments following his birth, down between my legs, my midwife held up something that looked as though it had washed up on the beach from the depths of the ocean. A nest of kelp. A sea-pod with a deep red hue seen nowhere else in nature. “Would you like a placenta tour?” she asked. She held two gloved hands within it, as though about to don a shirt, then slipped her hand through a hole in the side, the size of my newborn’s head.

The spring that Jana planted her tree, I began to read about the placenta: how it starts growing the moment a pregnancy is conceived, filtering blood between mother and baby, delivering nutrients and removing waste, preventing the mother’s body from attacking the fetus as a foreign object. I read about the surge of progesterone in early pregnancy, and the uncommon but powerful side effects it can cause before the placenta fully develops at 12 weeks, when hormones are still regulated only by the mother’s body. Side effects that can even, rarely, include psychosis.

I felt a shock of recognition.

I became conscious of my pregnancy over Thanksgiving weekend, aware of something shifting within me. But the joy I had anticipated was usurped by a sense of invasion and haunting, by the presence of another being slowly infiltrating my own. 

During those early weeks, I felt I was being colonized, as though someone had taken over and locked me away, deep within myself. Whoever was in charge now was not me, and we had no contact with one another. My baby was growing from the size of a seed to a berry, to a grape, to a plum. But his presence within me felt boundless, uncontained, and overwhelming. 

The new person I had become─she, I, we─dwelt in dark and murky places, adrift in the pull of strange waves. My nostrils were raw with sensitivity, and my stomach turned like a shovel of mud throughout the day. I slept thirteen hours a night, and on my lunch breaks at work, backed my car against a hedgerow of laurels and slept in the backseat. Steel gray sky wrapped the windows and winter rain pelted the metal roof. Strange thoughts floated through the darkness of my mind, pulling me further from myself and further into the frightening disorientation that threatened to swallow me. 

One winter morning, when my mind felt as bleak and dead as the world outside, I went to the zoo, intending to sit in the tropical bird house. Maybe there I could somehow absorb the warmth, color, and life that had deserted me. Instead, I found myself standing in the cold outside the Komodo Dragon’s exhibit. Motionless but alive, she could have been a statue, her vitality confirmed only by the subtle shift of an eyeball or flick of a tongue. I gazed into her eyes but could detect no warmth or emotion behind those two blinking marbles, no indication of a soul. And in that absence, I felt a kinship.

I dreamt of rats and bugs, dark basements of infestation. Constantly on the verge of vomiting, I never got the satisfaction. My husband enticed me with anything he could, begging me to eat. Rather than cravings, I had aversions to almost all food, except occasionally, when I felt the insistent need for a strange, hard-to-find item, like the pickled herring in cream that my father used to buy when I was a child, for the shiny silver pieces of fish he would pull from a squat glass jar.

I never told anyone what was happening. There was something terribly wrong with me, I believed─too wrong to describe, acknowledge, or share. Too wrong for a treatment to exist. Instead, I tried to deny it, even to myself. Sometimes I even pretended to myself that I was not pregnant. There was no one else here. It was just me.   

We told our families the news at Christmas, my favorite time of the year. But the excitement and warmth I had anticipated was absent. I felt only a deepening lean into my depression. No longer simply adrift, I was now submerged in the deepest crevasse of the ocean floor, wedged beneath a flat, gray rock, immobilized by a terrible apathy. I gazed at twinkle-lights and listened to Christmas choral music, hoping to conjure the familiar feelings of nostalgia and joy, but there was only that flat expanse of gray. The real me was shuttered away within a closet of my mind. I longed to visit her for just a few hours, to remember who I had been, but I had no access. 

When I told people about my pregnancy, I cringed at their exultation, both jealous of, and saddened by, the joy I wished I shared. I turned away from the subject of my pregnancy, or my baby, as one recoils from blinding sunlight. In the caverns of my mind a voice whispered, “You can still end this.”  

Near the end of my first trimester, my husband sent a bouquet of lilies to my office for Valentine’s Day. I dipped my nose into their pink and white mottled petals, steeling myself for the familiar wash of revulsion.

But there was no nausea, no caul of gray constraining my mind. To my astonishment, the heady smell of spring and sunlight filled my nose, and the unfamiliar arrival of happiness began to excoriate the darkness that had crouched within me. I cried for the first time in weeks and decided that if I had a daughter, I would name her Lily.  

Hope and joy returned during the following months, as my world began to thaw. Warmth and color came back to my life, like lost or forgotten possessions one stumbles upon.

I felt well enough to wonder briefly, what had happened to me during those months of darkness? But like a prisoner who accepts freedom in exchange for future complicit silence, I accepted my transformation without further question, attributing the shift to the end of my first trimester, and I did not look back. There was space now to acknowledge, and even connect, with the tiny being inside of me and to dream of their arrival. 

Moments before my son’s birth, my midwife said, “Just a few more contractions, and he’s out.”  Eager to meet my baby, I pushed him out before my husband had a chance to catch him. Wailing and pink, my son was placed on my chest. The thick red cord connecting us stretched taut across my belly. With a confusing sense of loss, I watched my husband cut through it, surprised when it didn’t hurt. How could the severing of our union not be painful after all this time? 

With that severing, my placenta’s part in our story was over. Now, four years later, I understand the warmth I felt toward that essential, nurturing organ when it was kneaded from my belly and pulled from me, red and textured in all its glory, and the awe and appreciation in my midwife’s eyes as she held it up before me. I can understand, too, the sense of loss I felt when my placenta was presented to me that day. Once fully formed at the end of my first trimester, my placenta enabled my son and me to exist at the same time; it contained him, releasing me from those weeks of darkness and fear. Had I known of this timeline, perhaps I would have been able to endure those weeks with more hope, to see my child as a being within me rather than a force that had overtaken me.

Jana’s placenta tree, the yellow magnolia, took two full years to bloom after being planted on that cold winter day. Leaves appeared begrudgingly in the spring, barely deigning to unfurl upon their branches. When the buds did appear, they were pale and shy, their reluctant petals like lips slightly parted. Jana sometimes laments that the tree is sickly, but I think back to the day it was planted─cradled in frozen soil on a silent morning─and marvel that life persists despite beginnings so cold and gray.