Illustration by Alex Chen
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Our grandson was born at home in what his mother calls an accidental home birth. Over the course of two days in a labour that sped up and stalled, the hospital sent our daughter home twice. In the end, our little one was born on the bathroom floor.
After the dust settled and the firefighters had left and after the EMS team had gathered their equipment and after the attending midwives had examined, weighed and praised the new baby, the whole house seemed to exhale.
The windows were cast open to a warm early fall night bringing the sounds of the city inside. The baby had stopped crying, safely in the arms of his dad nesting on the king sized bed.
It was then that my daughter and I were invited back to the bathroom for what one of the midwives, called “a tour of the placenta.”
“Have you ever seen a placenta?” she asked. A perfectly reasonable question when posed to a young woman who had just given birth to her second child and the mother who had birthed her decades earlier. And yet both of us answered no. My children were born by cesarean. My daughter’s first baby had been born in the hospital, under strict COVID-19 quarantines. Tours of placentas must have seemed frivolous in the face of a global pandemic so she was equally unfamiliar.
My daughter sat gingerly on the toilet seat, I stood beside her while Hanan, the midwife, pulled a plastic bag marked “biohazard” closer.
Initially it looked like a prop from a gory film and we were told that midwives like to call it “the tree of life.” I admired the fanciful stretch it took to draw the connection. As she spread out a large disposable pad on the tiled floor and laid the bloody mess out, I struggled to see its beauty. But then she pulled back the membrane to reveal a network of arteries that resembled perfectly formed tree with branches. Hanan pointed out the arteries that had, until very recently sustained our tiny new boy.
The photos we snapped captured the wonder of this placenta. Afterward, even the squeamish were drawn to look more closely at the pictures, to consider the “afterbirth” and marvel at its ability to sustain life.
We learned that, midwives are able to whisk away the instruments used in the birth and the bags of trash created in the messy process of birthing a baby at home: gloves, pads, disposable this and that. But not the placenta. Despite its primary life-giving role, at the end of a home birth the attending midwives apologized that they couldn’t “deal with it.” By law, my daughter’s midwives were not permitted to take the placenta to manage its disposal.
So they tucked that globulus, miraculous thing into a clean plastic bag and held it out to me.
I had a vague awareness that some people bury the placenta in the backyard as my sister had done years before with the afterbirth of my nephew. Placental tissue is used for research and also for wound care but placenta donations are accepted by only a couple of Toronto area hospitals and typically only after a cesarean birth with pre-planned donation forms neatly completed.
Perhaps I looked bewildered, the shock of the evening beginning to show. One of the young women whispered: “apparently you can put it in your green bin.”
On that warm September night I knew I didn’t want to offer this piece of my daughter’s body that had fed my newly minted grandson to the ravenous racoons already rattling the garbage cans in the alley. So I popped that bag in the freezer.
Several weeks later my daughter and I walked that frozen bag of life into the forest. We found a verdant patch where the sun broke through the canopy above and dug a deep hole in the rich humus. Nestling the placenta inside we filled the hole with leaves and dirt. I found a large rock, the biggest I could lift, and dropped it on top, not as a marker to lead us back, but as a deterrent to nearby animals. My daughter and I were happy with the home we’d found for it and we laughed and held hands. There was a kind of magic in this small ritual we’d enacted.
And now it’s spring. Our little one continues to grow and spread joy. And so I’m wondering what’s growing above our tree of life in the forest, what new life is being fed by that rich and wondrous mass. I hope whatever grows there is putting down roots, drawing nourishment and reaching upward.
Kate Kostandoff lives in Port Hope, Ont.