Painting My Placenta: Part 1

On birthing + loving imperfection

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

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You can order a custom placenta watercolor from Jess here.

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After I gave birth, I began painting watercolors. I had spent the better part of a year preparing to give birth and yet, in the end, everything was entirely unexpected.

In particular, I found myself painting placentas: the ephemeral, endogenous, and magical organ that fed my son and nearly poisoned me to death. 

The disease of preeclampsia is fascinating; it’s elusive, and can be fatal. Basically, your placenta — this critical life-giving organ that grows you a baby — hits a wall and turns on you.

Isn’t that life? What was once the best thing can suddenly become the worst thing. Winds change, circumstances shift.

I gave birth the same day I was diagnosed.

Blood pressure rises and the body swells; the kidneys and liver become burdened as the placenta stops functioning well. All of a sudden the placenta is a time bomb that must be dismantled before it detonates. There’s no sure way to predict or prevent preeclampsia, and the only cure is birth.

Left: “My liver, made it.” Watercolor; Right: “My kidney (right? left?)” Watercolor

The first placenta I painted was a still life of my own, from a photo taken by my midwife. Then I found I couldn’t stop. Each one thereafter became more imaginary and abstract, though still very much a member of a murky sisterhood.

Painting placentas became ritualistic for me: a cathartic fascination; a peacemaking exploration; a meaning-making mission; and OK maybe a little obsessive.

Painting them became a prostration to the majestic organ itself— the only one that can be grown, discarded, then grown again like some omnipotent starfish arm.

Painting placentas became a devotion, in my vulnerable state, to what might have been and what was. An elegy to the thing that tried to kill me but didn’t, and now lay dead.

As I painted each one, I meditated on its magical and gory lobes. I reflected on its miraculous existence, complicated composition, and eventual demise. My son’s first and other mother, before I met him, responsible for his breath and his growth. Filtering toxins and managing immunity and blood flow: the bouncer of my womb.

The placenta begins to form almost immediately upon an egg’s fertilization, as the lucky blastocyst, that powerful little ball of cells, begins to embed into the uterus wall. Some of those cells become parts of the developing fetus, while others are destined for the bright lights of placenta life.

By about 10-12 weeks into a pregnancy, the placenta is formed enough to “take over” as lead gardener, tending to the pregnancy with the right hormones and nourishment. The placenta accompanies the pregnancy, growing alongside it until it is time to land on earth.

My own placenta was hard-fought and well-won. This pregnancy had come years after I first set out for it, and had required several surgeries, months of near-daily blood draws, dozens of doctors appointments, hundreds of hormone shots, and an excruciating extended stay in the unknown.

While some have the kind of pregnancies that take them by surprise, I had the kind I didn’t fully believe in until at last my son was in my arms.

At eleven weeks pregnant, when my placenta should have “taken over,” I was still administering daily progesterone shots into my ass. It’s not that the doctors didn’t trust my placenta, but I guess they didn’t really trust my placenta. So I suppose I didn’t either, an accomplice in mistrust. The shots were an added safeguard to help this fragile victory stay a while; bumpers in the gutter although you can bowl a turkey.

While I was filling up another sharps container, I wondered what my placenta was doing. Waiting in the wings, biding its time. Maybe feeling insulted. It could take over, but would it?

The exact cause of preeclampsia is unknown, but it’s thought to originate in the placenta. At some point the placenta begins to lose its magical vascularity, with blood supply to the fetus dwindling and pressure rising in the rest of the body. Asset becomes liability. Most likely, it’s that — for some reason — the placenta never developed properly at all. She was a bad egg from the start.

Before I got preeclampsia, I had been planning to welcome my placenta into the world at home, with ritual, just like my baby. I envisioned birthing my son then birthing my placenta. Him slippery and tethered to it, his grim but vital twin.

I’d envisioned the luxury of time spent with my placenta, taking it in with marvel, in all its beautiful bloodiness. I would gaze upon it in the flesh, for the first and last time, and maybe touch it. I would honor it and most of all thank it. Good work, girl. You did it; we did it.

My husband and I had mulled over what to do with it: bury it or something else? Across more than 4,000 species of land mammal, most eat their placenta after delivering it. In part, because it’s so nutrient rich; in part, to hide the evidence of fresh vulnerability from potential predators.

When my health took a turn at 36 weeks pregnant, it turned out my placenta was the predator.

My planned spontaneous home birth quickly gave way to an urgent cesarean section a month early. Instead of laboring it lovingly into my own home, my placenta — like my son — was sliced out of my body with celerity. Then it was quickly severed from him. A near-instantaneous family fracture on day one.

My son was laid on my chest as my placenta was bagged. My midwife stood just outside the operating room, cooler in hand, and whisked it away.

At home a week later, my midwife brought it back to me in a small jar of clear capsules filled with rusty-looking dust. She also shared with me a precious photo of my placenta she’d taken before processing it. This was the first time I laid eyes on it; I felt love, pain, and some disbelief. A final photo of an estranged loved one, now deceased.

“Thank you + good job girl” August 20, 2023. Watercolor + breastmilk.

In the early days’ haze of postpartum, I began painting almost mindlessly. Well, mindfully, but not cerebrally. I began painting intuitively, as I lay on my couch healing, swirling, spinning. My body was still swollen, a reminder of my no-good placenta.

In seismology, aftershocks occur as the earth’s displaced crust resettles after an earthquake. They’re distinguished from the main event by their diminishing magnitude and dispersed location. In other cases, a single earth quake can occur in two or more ruptures that have similar magnitude and originate from the same location — the same shifting chasm. These twin ruptures might occur ten minutes apart, or many years. This is called a doublet.

I was home from the hospital just two days, with an eight-day old newborn and a fresh wound, when the doublet hit. Postpartum preeclampsia, god damn. The disease seemed etched into my body like, “placenta was here.” In the ER, they struggled to coax my blood pressure back down from the 170s. I spent the next few days hooked up once again to a magnesium drip to prevent stroke or seizure while my body tried desperately to normalize.

From inside of the experience, I thought what in actual hell is going on here?

Finally home, again, I struggled to make sense or meaning. The more I researched preeclampsia, the more I searched for peace in my paintings. The peril of my condition, as it had continued to manifest, was alarming.

I tried on the narrative reflected back to me by the literature on the disease: my placenta was malformed; not vascular or healthy enough; not strong enough to allow me to carry my son to term; simply not enough.

The idea that my placenta was to blame curdled in my belly. It echoed from a dark place I’d visited many times before in my life. When you’re trying to get pregnant and not, or when you’re getting pregnant and losing it…things get heavy.

At best, your body feels insufficient and impotent; at worst, it is your enemy — a vicious traitor. The through line between that unfortunate pendulum swing is a profound, corporeal lacking.

I had trudged through blizzard after blizzard of not enough to get to where I was. At last I was bone-tired of hurting myself by believing it. 

Laying on my chest, wheezing beautifully, was a thriving little human who survived both despite my placenta and because of it; a creature who could not have existed without it. Thanks to my placenta, his head was warm and soft against my face and I could smell heaven.

Painting.

It wasn’t until I began inching toward a prolific number of painted placentas (more than one is already prolific, one might argue) that I realized what this time was gifting me: the goodbye I’d been robbed of.

I didn’t have the luxurious meeting with my placenta that I’d imagined and my son didn’t have a  proper goodbye. Instead, we had — the three of us — experienced a sudden doublet; a rending followed by a forever loss.

Painting was allowing me to pay my respects. But paying respects — as you know if you’ve lost someone, and we all have — is as much flowers and elegies as it is a bewildered or angry, “what the fuck?!”

So painting became a truth and reconciliation space to hold it all. Through brushstrokes I asked and answered, “What do I make of you, who was both not enough and exactly enough?” and “How do I love you, who tried to quit on me and my child?” and “What more do you need of me now?”

How do you eulogize a loved one who was so deeply imperfect? Who was violent and dangerous, but also gave so much and loved their absolute hardest? How do you, in death, protect the posterity of the both / and?

Here I am, trying.

The most radical concept in Buddhism is bodhicitta, or the notion that every sentient being — even every thing — contains the awakened heart and mind of the Buddha. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this our basic goodness — a foundational, inherent, self-arising truth that at our core we are loving, open, and good. It’s not conditional on anything at all, it just is.

You don’t have to be anything other than what you already are. You just have to find a way to see all that you are and all that you contain. Then you will see that all of you is so, so good.

Sometimes this insight doesn’t come until the very end of our lives, or in the experience of death.

Sitting here in the postpartum, which is also the postmortem, I see how my placenta loved my son to life, enough to bring him to me. I paint its bodhicitta— watery, vivid, dark, dreamy, mysterious. Mine and not mine at all. Basically good and certainly enough.

• View my placenta paintings.

• Order a custom placenta watercolor.

• Learn more about the fertility support + creative art therapy I offer.