I Accidentally Kept My Placentas For 14 Years

It was supposed to be another ordinary-not-ordinary pandemic morning. Zoom school. Sourdough. Aggressive doom scrolling. Instead, we opened the back door for some fresh air and found a puddle of blood.

We’d failed to bury the placentas.

Left outside overnight, they were an open invitation to wildlife. There should have been carnage — shredded remains, a trail of gory paw prints. But the thick plastic freezer bags sat untouched, the only proof of our forgetfulness a dribble of blood, leaking politely down the back steps.

Our oldest son was born fourteen years earlier, in November 2006. His due date was Thanksgiving Day, but because no signs pointed to his timely arrival, we’d planned to host dinner at our house: a ready-cooked turkey and premade sides from Bristol Farms. The safest bet since I wasn’t allowed to travel.

As it happened, our son was punctual. The moment my mother arrived on Wednesday afternoon, the contractions began. An hour in, I called my midwife Shelly, who hurried over from her house a few doors down. Her proximity was one of the reasons we’d chosen a home birth. The other reasons don’t matter. My labor progressed nicely, but my son was sunny-side up, so Shelly suggested I do some sideways stair-climbing to help him turn.

“Those.” She pointed to the long flight of brick steps belonging to a paparazzo we knew only in passing.

We’d lived in Mount Washington for a year, in a 100-year-old Spanish revival carved into a steep hill, bought during the anything-goes mortgage era. I climbed my neighbor’s brick steps until I felt sick, then returned to my bedroom. My son was born two hours later, our adjoining placenta propelled into a metal salad bowl with a subsequent push. Mason was perfect, and our family arrived bright and early the next morning for Thanksgiving.

When I tell this story, people get hung up on the fact that we still hosted Thanksgiving. I agree, it sounds odd to me now. So much of this story sounds odd to me now. But I didn’t have to do anything. I stayed in bed staring at our boy’s tiny fingers, his squishy button nose, and before I knew it everyone was gone and I was asking for leftovers.

My husband headed dutifully to the kitchen and returned a minute later, sheet-white and empty-handed. “I pulled out a bag of what I thought was cranberry sauce,” he said.

I had no idea where this was going.

He rubbed his forehead. “Did you know they left us the placenta?”

This was news. In all our discussions about blood pressure, fetal position, and emergency backup plans, never once had anyone asked whether I wanted my pregnancy organ for keeps. My husband, bless his heart, had panicked and shoved it in the freezer. We decided to bury it under a tree. Later.

Weeks passed, then months. Babies are time-consuming. But also, pushing a human into the world had given me unexpected clarity. For years I’d scribbled in notebooks—late at night, during breaks at work — but I’d never let myself believe it could amount to more. A daughter of hardworking dairy farm folk, I’d been taught to value labor that could be measured in sweat and yield, not wonder and whimsy. Still, while I was pregnant, I kept a journal of wishes for my son, and at the very top of the list was the hope that he would have the courage to pursue his dreams. Only upon his birth did it occur to me: if I wanted to lead by example, shouldn’t I at least try to do the same?

Cue montage of online classes, stories cranked out between feedings and diaper changes, drafts workshopped, MFA applications filed. My husband was unfailingly supportive. He likes to say now that it was never really an option, that I’m bullishly stubborn when I’ve made up my mind, but there were other factors. He too was looking to change careers, the market was about to crash, and we likely couldn’t afford to keep our house anyway. We chose CSU Fresno for my graduate degree because my mom lived there, property was cheap, and we needed free babysitting. Once that was decided, it felt wrong to bury the placenta in Mount Washington, so we packed it in a cooler and moved it with us.

Only…

Our small tract home needed work, especially the backyard. Months passed, then years. In the final stretch of my MFA, I became pregnant again. We figured we may as well wait for our next son to be born so we could bury their placentas together.

Only…

As soon as baby August joined the family, Matt’s work yanked him back to LA. In one mad-dash month, we packed again, sold the house, and rented a compact bungalow in Encino. We intended to buy soon and swore we would attend to the placentas wherever we landed next, because we couldn’t exactly bury them at a house we didn’t own. That would be weird.

In case you’re doing the math, this would make roughly seven years of placenta ownership. Seven years during which we mostly forgot they were there, apart from the occasional freezer show-and-tell so curious friends could marvel at their mass (a whole pound each!) and deep ruby coloring. Not a trace of frost. By then, casual disposal felt obscene. They were heirlooms. They’d outlasted two moves and a housing market crash. After all that history, we felt obligated to make their disposal special.

Until March 2020. Fourteen years into placenta ownership.

We were still renting. I was still chasing publication while working part-time jobs, riding the rejection train but inching forward. Then the pandemic hit. And…you know what’s coming next.

A big fat grocery delivery.

When we finally snagged an Amazon Fresh slot, we panicked and maxed out: canned goods, frozen pizzas, provisions for the apocalypse. It was gluttonous and irrational, and there was no longer room for the placentas.

“It’s time,” I said to my husband, as if my water had just broken.

Just like that, the age of sentimentality had passed. Those pizzas were too precious.

The placentas needed to thaw before we could extract them from their resealable bags, so we set them on the back steps and continued unloading groceries.

And then we had a fight and forgot about them.

In the morning, the stairs were streaked with blood. I blamed my husband. He blamed me. Neither of us offered to clean it up.

A few hours later, as I was wrangling the kids onto Zoom, I spotted my husband upending the grisly bags into a deep hole. No pomp, no goodbye, in the backyard of a house we would never own.

We’ve since relocated to Atlanta, a mid-pandemic move that changed everything for the better. Ironically, this house might just be our forever home. We’ve planted trees. We’ve put down roots. No afterbirth in sight.

I’ll never stop telling this ridiculous story — it lands especially well in the South — but now that I know how it ends, now that I can see the whole arc, the symbolism is hard to ignore. When I gave birth to my oldest son, my writing journey was inexorably set in motion. Those traveling placentas marked the years I was growing into myself and nurturing my dreams. It took longer than I expected, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned since my son was born, it’s that the future we imagine doesn’t always take a straight path. And sometimes, that works out for the best.

Last year, I sold my debut novel in a thrilling whirlwind of yeses. It was a dream come true times ten. But my proudest moment came a few months later, when my son wrote about me in his college application. Eighteen years after the first placenta graced our freezer in Mount Washington, the same home and neighborhood in which I’ve set my debut. In his essay, he wrote about my journey as a writer. That watching me try and fail and try again had been an instrumental part of his childhood. It’s one thing to be told to follow your dreams, to never give up; it’s another to see a loved one do it firsthand. To my great pleasure, he concluded with the fervent belief that he too can accomplish any goal he sets his mind to, no matter how insurmountable it may seem.

He got in.

Tiffany Crum is a writer from Southern California. After many years in Los Angeles, she now lives with her husband and two teenage sons in Atlanta, Georgia. This Story Might Save Your Life is her debut novel.