Courtney Zoffness
Maternity
We’d been called cannibals—worse, madwomen—for our behavior. We’d been mocked, lectured, shamed. We told each other we didn’t care. We told each other we couldn’t care. We whose uteruses were clenching like fists to fit back inside our frames. We whose breasts swelled up to our chins. Whose hormones frothed in our veins. We were doing what nearly all female mammals do, we reminded each other. We were part of an evolutionary continuum.
Did we mind that scientists lagged behind the public? How long did it take them to embrace medical marijuana, we said, despite all the patients who swore by it? We would follow the evidence, not the academics.
Here’s what we knew: our placenta, sole source of our fetus’s nourishment and protection, was a power pack. Vitamins and hormones. Iron and oxytocin. The very things our postpartum body needed. The very things our body couldn’t afford to lose.
Here’s what else we knew: our sisters and friends and friends of friends had reaped benefits from ingestion. Pain subsided. Incisions mended. Energy spiked. Breast milk flowed. Brains held steady. Sometimes one does unpalatable things for the promise on the other side.
* * *
Our births hadn’t gone as expected. Our birthing canal was too small, doctors said, our infant’s head too large. Our baby was sideways and sunny-side up and undercooked. Had a cord around its neck. Had meconium in its lungs.
We labored for days or hardly labored at all. We breathed slow and fast and forgot to breathe altogether. We swirled our hips. We arched our back. We begrudged the mellow music mix we had carefully assembled and the images we’d brought to soothe ourselves: beach scenes, rolling hills, close-ups of our cats. Fuck that cat!
We bounced on a giant rubber ball and squatted on all fours and paced up and down hallways. We immersed in bathtubs and birthing pools. We leaned against walls and rails and bent over counters and watched ourselves in the mirror and declined to watch ourselves in the mirror, afraid to see our body so transformed. We gripped the bars of our bed so firmly that our knuckles ached for days. Our feet were cold, our forehead hot, and our thirst constant. When someone ran an ice chip over our lips, we nearly devoured their fingers with it.
We refused an epidural. We didn’t have time for an epidural. We demanded an epidural so strong that when we went to adjust the pillow beneath us, we were told the cushion was actually our own ass. We cursed our partner who had done this to us. We begged them for strength every time we felt our body seize.
One of us popped a blood vessel in our eye from the strain, a red star visible in pictures for days. Another bit off a piece of tongue. We moaned, squawked, growled. Made sounds we didn’t recognize and would never make again. Doctors used commands and forceps and plungers to urge the baby out of us.
We had planned C-sections and emergency C-sections and had our head crowned with a shower cap in an operating theater. The performance of our life. Nearly a third of our babies were born behind those blue curtains to an audience of strangers who would never know our name. At teaching hospitals, we heard the surgeon explain his technique to residents. A sharp edge to begin the incision, he said, and a blunt edge to push through the uterine wall to the amniotic cavity. The rounded instrument made it less likely that they’d lacerate our child. The residents stared at our watermelon belly, at our shaved-naked parts below. We felt their eyeballs and resented them.
There was pressure and nausea and a never-before-heard howl—is that?—and then: wet crumpled masses on our chest. You? we said. We’d never seen anything so small and wrinkled and human. We kissed their translucent foreheads, ogled their infinitesimal noses and thumbs. You’re him? we said to their bowtie lips. You’re her? It was only when we slipped a finger inside their curled hands and they gripped us that we believed them.
In the birthing center, in our den, before inviting in our parents and siblings and in-laws, we ensured the safety of our afterbirth. Is it intact? On ice?
Our hormones were already plunging. We thought of our colleague who had unspooled after her firstborn. The sight of my baby repulsed me, she told us. Can you imagine? (We couldn’t.) After delivering her second child, she was eager to ensure a new outcome, to write a different story for her motherhood. When she heard about placental consumption, she determined she had nothing to lose. The difference was night and day, she said of her postpartum states. Mother and son bonded right away. It was rumored that even still, years later, her love for her second-born outpaced her love for her first.
How many anecdotes like this had we heard?
Our practice had a historical tradition. A handful of us knew specifics. How the ancient Chinese mixed it with human milk to combat exhaustion. How the Chaga of Africa ground it into flour for porridge to protect the newborn’s life. How tribeswomen in India consumed the organ to improve fertility and Jamaicans stirred it into tea to ward off convulsions caused by ghosts. We’d heard stories of Vietnamese, Hungarians, Egyptians. The objectives varied, but the foundation was fixed: our ancestors near and far saw the organ’s merit.
Some of us had practice trusting ancestral stories. We revered matriarchs: Rachel who lost her life in childbirth; Sarah, Mother of Nations, who delivered Isaac in old age. We considered the Virgin Mary who birthed Jesus without an ounce of pain—a reward for her conviction. We abided Buddhist theology: To keep the body in good health is a duty. We had faith in faith. We subscribed to forces we couldn’t measure, knew the benefits of believing in a greater good.
We the determined, the eager, the daunted.
Even there in our beds, as hours-old mothers, we were awed and afraid of these tiny, susceptible faces. We felt inadequate, felt a responsibility too big to bear. So many ways to fail. We watched hospital workers shuttle in and out of the birthing suite, and an obvious fact became profound: all of them had mothers. Every human resulted from a singular, astonishing birth. We felt the eyes of history then. The dominion of the matriarchy.
And so we ate. We ate to prove our devotion. Our readiness. Our worth. We ate for our mother, to show we were just like her: willing to do anything for our children. We ate to prove we were nothing like her. We ate to earn our keep in the community and ate precisely because our community disapproved. We ate to honor our forebears and to glorify Mother Nature. In homage to the celebrities we worshipped who had done it, too.
Those most prone to despair requested a bite straight away. Our doulas were prepared: serrated knives, cutting boards, rubber gloves. They severed cherry-sized morsels for us to swallow right there in the hospital. Right there in our kitchen. The cooking process destroys the protein and hormones, they explained. Still, the look of it. The smell. We closed our eyes. Think steak tartare, they said to our sour frown. Think sashimi.
The less intrepid among us received smoothies blended onsite: strawberries, raspberries, blueberries. Not bad, we said as we sipped, earthy aftertaste and all. Our husband tried it too, just for bragging rights. We caught it all on tape. Bottoms up! In the footage we look wild-haired and stupefied, ruddy liquid glowing on our upper lip, newborn dozing on our chest.
A handful of us treated it like we would any raw meat and did the prep ourselves. We steamed, adding cayenne and lemon and ginger for sterilization. We fried with shallots and garlic. We ground to make tacos and Bolognese. Need we remind skeptics of what qualifies as food to millions around the world? Bull penis and squid guts. Pig cheek and goose liver. Duck embryos so developed you can see heads and beaks curled up inside the shell just before you swallow.
There were vegetarians among us, those who recoiled in butchers’ shops—all those skinned carcasses lined up behind the glass, all those pink butts and purple tongues. We were the ones who chose encapsulation. We hired a professional specialist to dehydrate and grind our afterbirth, to pour the fine powder into vitamin-sized pills at $300 a pop. Wasn’t our health worth at least as much?
A few of us didn’t have the moxie to go through with it. We had glanced down at the pivotal moment our hamburgered afterbirth slid onto the birthing table and vomited all over the midwife.
One of us didn’t agree with the practice but thought she ought to. Privately: Sure, other mammals eat their placenta, but some also eat their own shit. Publicly: I’ll do whatever I need to for my baby!
Did it matter that most of us, myself included, would not partake? That we gagged when a woman in our childbirth prep class asked about ingestion? Looked up the practice afterward only to deride it? To denounce it? It would take months after that class to realize how much all of us expectant mothers in that room shared in common, all of us affixing synthetic diapers to rubber dolls. We wanted our bodies to zipper themselves back up. Wanted immuno-protective breast milk. Wanted to love our babies with the ferocity they deserved. Wanted to return to work after mere months at home without sobbing in a bathroom stall.
In the nights and days after birth, we would sleep so little that our eyes would thump in our heads. We’d misplace words, sentences, entire paragraphs of thought. Was I saying something? Time would be marked by Baby’s feedings, poops, and naps, and by our incessant questions. Is he consuming/producing/resting enough/too much?
We’d turn square blankets into origami swaddles, apply ointment to bitty behinds, place witch hazel between our legs and gel pads on our nipples and frozen pea bags on our throbbing abdominal scars. We’d try any technique we were told could soothe a colicky baby: pushing a vacuum, shushing in ear canals, driving our car around in circles. Buy whatever the Internet promised would help—gripe water and gas relief drops and anti-colic bottles. We’d cut irritants out of our diet, sip mugs of raspberry tea, procure a motorized swing half the size of our small living room because we heard it made napping a breeze. We’d feel doubtful and hopeful as we took deep breaths and called our therapist and gobbled vitamins D and B6 and B12. And some of us, blinking awake in the dark, would swallow pieces of ourselves.
As for these new creatures that had just been on the other side of our skin, we’d marvel at their gauzy eyelids. Their seashell ears. Their curved spines unused to having the whole wide world as their womb. Were they okay? Were we? We knew only that we were smitten. That we were sapped. That we would do anything—die—for these soft, defenseless, partially blind babes. This eruptive love: it would become us.
We the bewitched. The exalted. The disbelieved. Ever ravenous. Ever ready.
Courtney Zoffness is the author of Spilt Milk (McSweeney's, March 2021). She won the Sunday Times Short Story Award, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction, and artist residencies from MacDowell. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, the Southern Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University and lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.