It's Lucian's 3 month birthday today!
Three months since my sweet beam of sunlight came earthside. Three months since the most excruciating day of my entire life! But I'm so blessed that that day ended with my arms full of my most magnificent creation, and our little family finally began!
I can't believe it's already been a quarter of a year.
We are honoring this day by burying Lucian's placenta.
I often call it MY placenta, because I grew it and it was attached to me, and I also birthed it… but it really is my son's counterpart, HIS organ, his lifeline, his DNA.
The placenta is truly the most incredible organ because it's made so quickly and so thoroughly. It creates an entire new human being. It helps a baby become the summation of all its human parts. And we really don't revere this piece of flesh and blood enough!
While pregnant, I had anticipated doing something with my placenta, but I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do. I just always knew I was gonna keep it. Fortunately, the hospital that I gave birth at let me take it home (some hospitals don't!) without any hesitation. But it was covered in meconium. So I was advised - and I agreed - that it was best not to consume it in any fashion, but I still wanted to give it back to the earth. So my sister took it home the night they were born, and put it in my freezer.
It is a sacred piece of Lucian, and I wish we could wait until he is old enough to understand all about it, but Kevin told me that we can't keep it forever. So I decided that after three months, we would do a ceremony and bury it. So we are giving his placenta back to Mother Earth so that it can decompose and become new life again, in a new way.
And we've planted a shrub over top of it. I really wish that I would have thought more about this, but my mom brain has been quite scattered and I did not prepare. Also, this time of year, it is hard to know if I would have been able to find the perfect specimen. So I went and got a plant from my most cherished garden center. Unfortunately it's not a native variety, but it's a “Spice Baby” viburnum, so it's a bit fitting. And we got three rocks to put around it, representing our Holy Trinity: mother, father, child. And this little spot in our little woods, in Lucian's first garden, will be his placenta's resting place for forevermore.
I do just want to note the journey of his placenta because it's a great story. I was planning on having him at home, and obviously that didn't come to fruition. But the hospital that I had him was very respectful of many of my wishes. It's really sad to me that Lucian didn't get any of the benefits of the stem cells and extra blood from a delay in cord clamping. They cut it immediately as he came out because he was covered in meconium, and hospital policy requires immediate treatment where they have to take the baby away right away, to get them cleaned up and cleared out. They put him on my chest, saying “here's your baby!” as a nurse was suctioning shit out of his nose and mouth… He was just covered in shit. But he was crying by the time they got him over to the warming station.
I wish they could've just cleared out his airways on my chest and left his cord attached, so there's a lot of sadness that I feel since he had a traumatic separation from his placenta, and we didn't get to honor that bond in the moment.
But most babies don't get that. And I'm definitely grateful that he's been perfectly fine without it, too.
Anyway, the fun part is this: I told the staff that I wanted to let my placenta expel itself. Usually in the hospital, they pull it out after a little bit because everybody is on a time clock there and they follow their procedures and move hurriedly through everything. But they respected my wish, and my OB, who’s been in practice for 25 years, said he's never watched a placenta emerge on its own, which was just mind-blowing to me.
Mind you, it took 39 minutes from Lucian's birth to the placenta birth. And so I appreciate that doctor’s willingness and patience in giving me one of the things that I wanted! And he was seemingly fascinated by how it was coming out. He started narrating that it was “bulging out like a membrane.” I remember him using that terminology. And he said it was really cool. So I told my sister to take footage of it. So yes, I have graphic documentation of portions of my placental birth process. The doctor was just sitting there waiting and waiting. He asked me to try pushing a couple times, and eventually I pushed a little and it just slid on out and plopped into a bucket. Then the doctor showed it to us, and opened up the membrane sack so we could see where Lucian was living previously.
That ended up being such a beautiful experience. And while that was going on, Lucian was already nursing. So after everything we'd been through before all that, we were just happy as could be.
But it was really, really cool for us to see the whole tree of life that exists inside this big organ that creates a human baby. Every piece of the baby's body is built based on the genetics and nutrients and blood through the placenta. And it's just such a fascinating piece of life, and if you take the time to appreciate those little things that have huge impacts, you just fall more and more in love with life itself.
I feel very blessed to have had an interesting experience with the placenta that I grew, that formed my perfectly healthy little munchkin dude. And I'm just so grateful and so in awe of how life comes to be.
So we honor this first immaculate organ that (eutherian) life couldn't exist without. And we give it back to our mother, the mother that Lucian and Kevin and I all share. We praise it and we thank it. And we lay it to rest, so that it can be transformed into further life through the soil… however all the little organisms in the earth end up taking the pieces of Lucian's placenta, so it can live on forever and ever, and he can walk beside that life through his journey on this planet.