a placenta and a pickaxe

Yes, I will address the title. Yes, it is relevant.

Okay, so I left off my autobiography in early February at that part where I have a publishing deal and Travis has a plan to move us to Fiji, but we are keeping it quiet from everyone but close family.

There is a lot of paperwork and logistics, passports, visa appointments, and miscellany to address very quickly. This move is happening at lightning speed for any move, let alone an international one. Travis will leave Colorado for Fiji in mid-March—that’s 69 days from job application to boots on the ground if you’re keeping track—and I will pack up the house and finish out the school year with the kids.

I’m going to skip the full breakdown of the logistics because frankly, thinking about it still stresses me out; I do not know how we achieved it all in time. But I’ll hit the important points of the plan. My parents will come to stay shortly after Travis leaves and they help me shuttle most of our things to a storage unit, pack up what we want to send to Fiji, and generally help with the three-kid circus. After school is out, I will road trip to Michigan with my mother-in-law, the three kids, and the cat to rendezvous with Travis at his sister’s wedding before we head to Fiji together.

An aside, immediately after Travis left, we have kid dental crisis after crisis with a sprinkle of the usual kid health issues. Something like ten dental appointments in six weeks, it was not very chill of my children. And that was in addition to travel vaccines and visa appointments and frantically arguing with insurance trying to get a last migraine treatment with my neurologist. Oh, and switching up insurance companies and doing COBRA coverage in the midst of it all. It is…a process.

The silver lining: moving keeps me busy enough that I didn’t have too much trouble keeping my book news secret.

Cut to April. I’m living with my parents and my three kids and a lot of moving boxes and trying not to let the stress turn me into a jerk/cause my parents to disinherit me. These couple of months are also an exercise in independence. It is the longest consecutive time that Travis and I have ever been apart. On the plus side, I learn how to drywall and change a windshield wiper.

And a chore I didn’t give Travis enough credit for: being my DIY barber. I don’t have time for a hair appointment, and eventually my undercut grows out enough that it has to be dealt with. Nothing will make you miss someone more than when you depend on them to shave half your head every few weeks.

I take stock of my options. My eldest child. My ten-year-old who already has an unfortunate habit of playing barber middle of the night; perhaps this could channel her yearning to put scissors to hair toward a more productive outlet. But she gave my youngest micro bangs a few months ago. That’s an easy no. The next option is my mom, who I haven’t trusted to cut my hair since she cut my bangs poorly when I was three. Also no. I consider my dad, the family member most often trusted with the clippers. But he just gave my mom micro bangs a month ago. And then I remember last week when he very specifically warned me not to drop the snowblower on his head while we were loading it into the truck and I promptly dropped the snowblower on his head. I think he’s forgiven me. He might still be the best option. Then again, he holds his grudges quietly. I will not ask my father to cut my hair. Well then, there’s my brother. But last time he let me cut his hair, many years ago, I neglected to tell him I was hungover and didn’t have my contacts in until I was already halfway through and left his hair shaved except for the a few inches directly surrounding his ears. Not my best work, I admit. My dad had to clean up that haircut. So maybe I won’t ask my brother for this favor either. In the end I have to shave the back of my head myself.

There’s a few other times I doubt myself. Three months of solo parenting and moving a household is a lot. But Travis is getting everything ready on the other side of the world and there’s the promise of tropical weather and the pacific ocean to keep me going. So I get things done. I get the house packed, sell one of the cars, get the house on the market, and get the logistics in place to trek first across the country and then across the world. I keep the kids—I wouldn’t say in line, they’re generally as chaotic as a herd of lemmings—but I keep them reasonably organized.

The first half of 2025 is full of surprises, stress, and uncomfortable things that, for the most part, force me to grow as a human. I worry and stress endlessly, but I’m also too busy for a full blown breakdown and almost unbearably excited for the second half of the year to arrive.

But before I can leave Colorado behind, before I can start a new adventure in Fiji, there’s something I have to take care of. A situation I’ve been procrastinating that will soon become an unavoidable problem.

Every night, after long days of packing, after I’ve put my kids and my parents to be bed, before I turn the lights off, I stand in my kitchen and stare at the deep freeze. It’s soft hum, a reminder of unfinished business. Unease stirs inside me as I contemplate the problem I can put off no longer. Because I have a nearly four-year-old predicament I’ve been hiding underneath the freezer-burned ground beef and the one package of expired broccoli that needs to go in the trash. A secret haunts me, that must be dealt with before I run away to Fiji. In my deep freeze there is a placenta. My youngest child’s placenta, to be precise.

So here’s the thing. When you give birth to a child, you also end up with this entire organ your body grew. It’s the size of a dinner plate. Seriously, just think about that for a second. A whole 2ish pound organ made in 9 months. A marvelous feat of human biology that’s kept your baby alive, though it also makes you barf up your breakfast every morning for months on end. A complex biological life-support machine. A go-between organ that belongs to two human beings. The first group project you’ll ever do. Placenta science is freaking cool. And weird. And a little creepy. But I recommend you go research how pregnancy actually works in mammals. It’s a very fascinating subject, I promise.

And another thing, my personal opinion; pregnancy sucks. It’s very hard work, a physically and mentally taxing experience that I don’t think those that do it get enough credit for accomplishing. And to be honest, I’ve spent years annoyed that my first two placentas were just discarded post-birth. I can’t explain it, but it feels rude. Like yeah, what am I going to do with this now retired organ…but I worked hard to build that piece of flesh, you know? I puked day in day out for that, I should have something to show for it besides a tiny human who poops their pants and never sleeps. Maybe that’s just a me feeling. But four years ago, pregnant me decides that after two births and two discarded placentas, that this third one will be different. This is going to be my chance to be efficient and recycle and really do some good with an otherwise discarded organ.

Naturally, when I Google, “what can I do with my placenta,” the results are rather limited.

Some people consume their placentas. No shade to anyone else’s choices, but that is never something that appealed to me. Fertilizer is the other apparent go-to for placenta use. But using my placenta to grow a tree isn’t the winning idea for me either. We move so much that the option wasn’t super viable. And if felt like abandoning them; if felt like abandoning a piece of my children. I acknowledge that, yes, this does sound irrational; I am aware. Parenthood is not an experience made for rational people, though. And finally, we lived in wildlife-prone areas. The last thing I need is a bear in the yard digging up a free meal. Nope, fertilizer is not the answer.

But finally I stumble upon an intriguing option: Cadaver dogs. According to ye old Google, you can donate a placenta for cadaver dog training. Cool. Basically community service then. Now this option, I can really get behind. I had a phase as a child where I wanted to train a seeing-eye dog. I was never qualified for that, but this option of donating my placenta to train a cadaver dog looks—if I squint—like fulfilling a childhood dream. So, four years in the past, after the birth of my last child, I sign the consent papers at the birth center and cart a placenta home, double ziplocked to avoid a mess.

My husband sighs and says, “If you ever disappear, they're probably going to ask me a lot of questions about this bag of human tissue in the freezer with your name on it.”

Some time later, I awake from the postpartum haze of baby hormones and got a few full nights of sleep, and I start to wish I’d let them throw away my placenta. If you ever feel insecure about cold emailing some kind of request to a stranger—be it a novel query or a business venture—just think of me and you’ll feel better. Think of me with my placenta in the freezer, realizing I have to find a way to get rid of it, cold emailing anyone in the state with a cadaver dog and an email address on their website. Turns out Google is a dirty liar, or people with cadaver dogs don’t reply to emails from random people offering free placentas.

So I lived life by the motto, “I’ll deal with the placenta in the freezer later.” If we move, I’ll deal with it then. That is future Mira’s problem.  

Cut to future Mira. Trying to move out of the country but held back by a hormone fueled whim to train cadaver dogs and a freezer burned four-year-old placenta. What the fuck. I am pretty pissed at past Mira. I debate the fertilizer option again. The groundhogs have already started plenty of holes in the yard. Maybe it would scare them into moving out. But I’m trying to sell the house; I can’t bury a placenta there now. What if the groundhogs unearth it? What if I attract a mountain lion? Not a risk I can live with.

I decided it is time to phone an expert. So I call my mother-in-law, the closest person I know to a placenta expert. She used to be an OB nurse and over the years has fielded many of my birth-related questions. Once one of her alpacas gave birth while I was visiting, and she called me over to go see what an alpaca placenta looked like. That’s how everyone bonds with their mother-in-law, right? Placenta science lessons. Plus, she nearly delivered my son in the back of an ambulance and had already had many a good chuckle at my frozen placenta predicament; it isn’t like this latest development is going to change her opinion of me, and I need ideas.

“Don’t your parents own some land near you?”

Why, yes. Yes, my parents do own a plot of land where they like to go camping. Why haven’t I thought of that before? So I make my plan. I have to bide my time a little longer. When the ground thaws and my parents move out of my house and back to Texas, I call up my little brother. I explain that from the cradle to the grave means from the deep freeze to my parents lawn and he agrees. Rule number one of closely bonded siblings: make them as guilty as you as often and as consistently as you can and you’ll always have a ride or die ally. This is not the first and won’t be the last time we help each other without question.

With my placenta thawing in the backseat, and my little brother judging me from the passenger seat; I sheepishly drive out to my parents’ land.

I forget the shovel.

Luckily my parents have a shipping container of random things stored on their land. My brother emerges with a handful of things he wants to “borrow” from my parents and a pickaxe. “This’ll work. Just don’t stand too close.”

I enjoy the mountain sunshine and the springtime flowers, patiently waiting with my Ziplock bag of placenta, while my brother curses the hard-packed earth.

“I wonder if the neighbors will tell mom and dad they saw some weirdos on the trail cam digging a hole,” my brother says, taking a breath between swings.

“It’s thawing already; it’s already too late to stop us,” I reply. I’m very glad I brought my brother along; this looks like hard work I’d rather not do. “Make sure it’s at least eighteen inches deep,” I say.

I may be a scheming older sister but I’m not a litterbug, so I must remove the placenta from its Ziplock. Luckily, I brought gloves. “Ooooh, look, you can still see the umbilical cord. Wanna see?” I ask my brother.

“You’re gross,” my brother says. He means it lovingly, I assume.

I upend the Ziplock and drop the placenta into its ultimate resting place with a plop and a squelch as my brother backs away in horror. He shudders in disgust a final time while I carefully bundle up the Ziplock and gloves into a trash bag. I bemoan the lack of foresight to bring Clorox wipes. Parenthood is a messy business.

“Are you going to tell Mom and Dad?” my brother asks as he fills in the hole with dirt.

“Nope,” I say as I cheerfully pack down the dirt with my feet.

“What if they find out?”

“That’s your problem,” I say with a grin. “I’m leaving the country.”

And this is where I leave you for today, I have mischief and small people to attend to. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.