My Grandmother's Placenta

Came to me in the shower

This is part of Womb Space, explorations of the womb space-- literal, energetic, theoretical + otherwise.

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My grandmother had a gaggle of children and thus a gaggle of placentas. Six, to be exact, which is a lot. That’s one more than the gumsticks snugged into a pack of Doublemint, which form a pretty complete package at that. She had six, though might have more had circumstances allowed.

She herself was one of 14— now that’s really a lot. My grandmother and her placenta were the penultimate. That’s aaaalmost the youngest but not quite, which she never forgot, nor did her younger sister Ann, nor let us forget. I, too, am a penultimate.

My grandmother, Rita, whom we called Mimi, loved babies very much. She loved her own and especially her own’s own. She was there in my first babyish days on earth, a living, breathing proxy, along with my own mother, for the placenta from which I’d recently been severed.

Everything about me was lineage to her. Bright promise and refractions of her own self. She trained as a secretary briefly before she turned to raising six kids. She was a good Catholic who didn’t leave a marriage though it deserved it.

I recall that I came from an egg that lived inside my mother when she lived inside my grandmother. In this way, too, my grandmother is a constant reminder of lineage for me. She was always old to me, with 61 years and 11 months to the day separating our births. But now she’s even older. she died in 2012, so she’s over 100 by now and just dust that I love.

Lineage is the experience of continuity across physical and temporal realms. It is the deep knowing of persistence despite death, demise, and decades. Lineage is substrate in which we’re suspended.

We live it every moment and as we live it we create it, but yet only seem to remember it occasionally. My grandmother reminds me that I’ll take nothing with me when I go, but that a great deal of my life’s value will be in what I leave behind for the lineage-emergent. Hopefully it’s a strong, fun, cool ladder dropped behind me for whoever is yet to come and whoever sticks around. What I’ll try to leave will be words, paintings, memories, offspring, and, I hope, the knowledge that I tried my best in the time I had, which is all any of us can do. That and try to get better at the Wordle.

A wise artist friend reminds me, “it’s not about you,” meaning my art. It’s through me, and maybe of me, but it’s not about me. This has been a great relief. In fact, as it turns out, very little in life — if anything — is truly about you. Not the subject of whispers across a room, not the reason someone left you, not the cause of someone else’s violence, and but not your masterpieces either.

Main goal with my painting these days is just to keep going.

The more I can live out creativity as a relationship between my (non-)self and that which wants to come through, the more I can get out of the way let things flow.

When I think I’ve painted something cool? Keep going. When I hate what I’ve painted and feel like I suck? Keep going. When it means something or when it means nothing, just keep going. This is how the placentas whisking through and seeping onto the page.

I was taking a shower when my grandmother’s placenta arrived. Hovering there above me in the steam, a crystalline and beckoning impulse. It was like a haunting or a possession; I felt mildly uneasy, knowing the emotionality that would await me, but moved forward without much cerebrality. If you know you know, and when you know you know.

Straightaway, it was time for me to begin.

My freeze-dried placenta capsules have been sitting, fallow, in the freezer for quite some time. Frozen dust in a frozen place, frozen in time. I took them ritually for many months after I birthed my son, withstanding the “meaty burps” that came later, as a friend perfectly, gruesomely described it.

The Ouroborous is depicted as a dragon or snake eating its own tail. It’s an ancient symbol of unity and of cyclical renewal: destruction, rebirth, and so on. It’s the “all-encompassing glyph of the alchemical process,” writes Kim Krans in her Wild Unknown Alchemy Guidebook.

“Note that the great serpent eats itself not others. The work starts and ends with the alchemist themself. Through this remembrance, the alchemist learns to service the world.”

It is said that ingesting one’s own placenta boosts immunity, energy, and mental wellbeing. There isn’t scientific data to support this, though I think that hardly matters to anyone who does it. Actually, placentaphagia, or eating one’s own placenta, is one of the most natural things one can do. Nearly all mammals, herbivores or carnivores, do.

For me, the decision was part-ritual and part-curiosity. A tip of the hat to weird magic. It was an attempt to close a wild, sacred and bloody circle. To eat my own tail. To take the seat of the Ouroboros.

“Anything and everything can be offered into its mouth for transformation. Good, bad, blasphemous, or precious—the materials of our life transmute into gems along the great serpent’s spine.”

If my thesis hold that the placenta is a fractal representation our complex human experience, then each pill I took offered a morsel of “anything and everything” into my mouth for transformation: grief, elation, confusion, quite a few petty grudges, way too much knowledge about the Real Housewives franchise, power, love, etc.

For a long time it felt just right. A ritual reunion between me and my placenta, a returning to whence we came. But then one day, I lost the taste. I felt full. The pills didn’t want to be taken, and I couldn’t fathom ingesting any more.

If the Ouroboros actually were to try and eat her own tail, she’d only be able to get so far. Technically speaking. There must be an end. It might be death, or fullness, or a moment of clarity, like, “what the F am I doing?!”

Special, special lineage dust, what would I do with the remaining placenta pills? I thought to try and paint with them. My grandmother’s painted placenta would be the next best home to my own body.

I imagined breaking open a capsule like a necromancer alchemist, pouring the rusty powder onto my heavyweight paper and swirling through a silky wetted brush. I imagined the desiccation blooming into various bloody swirls, great richness to work with: burgundy red ochre, Pompeii red, burnt umber, and so on.

The reality was drier and colder.

When I emptied the capsule’s contents into a small bowl, a tinny, meaty smell met my nostrils. I tried to love it but didn’t.

I dipped my brush in to carry some gingerly to the wetted paper. Neither texture nor color shifted. No gory swirl, no reconstitution of its former grandeur. Spread upon the page with water and watercolor, the placenta dust was stubborn. It stagnated gritty and gray like sand from a drab Connecticut beach that never gets warm enough.

The stagnancy startled me. Emotion overcame me as I re-met this dangerous alien lover. Hello, old friend. Hello, me. Hello? Yeesh. No blending, just a residue and a resonance. You get what you get.

With care, I dabbed at the grit, “painting” it into the center of my grandmother’s placenta along with some red glitter that was lying around. It was shadowy, not fully known and yet holding its own.

Details from the center

I painted my own placenta into my grandmother’s: a homecoming. Painting then, and even right this moment, I felt the emotion in my body of recalling myself in lineage. A great weight and a great relief. Always part of a fabric and constellation, even when I don’t see it or remember it. Never alone. Never not interdependently arisen.

Not all lineage requires bloodline, but all bloodlines carry lineage. You get what you get. And then you also make something of it. We’re never not in context, or many. Most of that not up to us. It’s decided before we existed or constructed perniciously or haphazardly without our input. But how we exist within that context, how we embody lineage, how we show up in the moment (how we moment)… that is up to us.

I’ve kept my placenta dust much like one keeps the ashes of a beloved human or pet.

As a side note, I don’t have anybody’s ashes currently in my possession, which is honestly off-brand for me. Time will certainly change that. In that way time is not a thief but Santa Claus.

My grandmother was cremated then buried in a Colorado mountain town. A peculiarly secure way to remain dead. Her ashes lay fallow like my placenta pills in the freezer, especially when they’re covered by layers of snow. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, but you gotta get through this well-constructed lacquer urn-box-thing first, you nosy worms!

Frozen ground, frozen ashes.

My grandmother is present to me always. That’s what lineage gifts us. Wormholes to presence across vast stretches of time. She is present to me every time I eat a candy bar, or laugh, or call my beloved dog’s name (Mimi). She was present to me during my pregnancy and especially since. I imagine how much she’d love my baby. Soooo much.

To paint her placenta was to commune with her, which is the most wonderful thing I could imagine doing outside of being with her alive. I got out of the way and it was what it was. Beautiful bright pinks like she liked to wear, often in blazer or drape-y sweater form, especially into her 80s and 90s. The soft but contained femininity of the 1940s, the trained-as-a-secretary-then-raised-six-kids kind of femininity. The I love God and salty margaritas and Tim Tebow’s Denver Broncos kind of femininity. Her painted placenta contains shimmers of her Lord in heaven. My grandmother took the eucharist like they were placenta pills: ritualistic and seeking closure, without any data to back it. In the end, it’s probably all the same.

Details from the edge

When I paint these days, it’s important to me to use whatever materials I have, in the time that I have. To not trifle too much with technique or prescription. To stay grounded in the here and now as a rooted vessel to let stuff come forth. The quality of my paper is good, but not top notch. The paints are great, maybe not professional. The brushes are available, and I like how they move. The most important thing is that the process is accessible to me like a ripe fig I can reach, whenever I need it.

My effort is not dedicated to the perfect setup or to the perfect outcome, but to the perfection of presence in-between, the process, as it unfolds.

I’m not sure that I particularly love this painting. I don’t, actually. But I loved the entire experience of it. This particular process was so special because it was a communion with her. It was one more facet of relationship with her and I didn’t want to let that / her go.

It was the hardest painting yet to finish. I let the painting sit for quite some time, as I do them all, asking, “what more do you need from me?” I was hoping it might need more and more, keeping me forever in communion with her. But eventually, it needed nothing more and I had to admit it was done. I had swallowed my tail far enough, it was time to just sit and feel full.