Tucked into the corner of my freezer shelf, beside the orange-juice concentrate and coffee beans, is my son Noah's placenta.

He's 1 1/2 now, which means the placenta has been there for as long as the freezer-burned lasagnas we stuffed in there to prepare for his arrival. A long time.

It is the size of a large Florida grapefruit, but it's red, and wrapped in blue plastic that looks nauseatingly like the stuff that lines the Styrofoam tray beneath the chicken pieces at Sobey's.

I'm shocked every time I reach in for a frozen bagel and confront it. I shut the door quickly. What the hell are we going to do with it?

I had a loose plan for Noah's arrival. It involved a hospital room, a midwife and as little medical equipment as possible. We had converted the study into a bedroom, dug out the infant car seat from the basement and bought the requisite "I Am a Big Sister" T-shirt for soon-to-be-enraged child No. 1.

None of this involved a placenta.

But there I was, in the hospital room, holding my new 10-pounder, when the midwife – the woman I had vowed to love forever moments earlier upon hearing her gentle, firm voice telling me I was one push away from meeting my baby and ending the pain – gave me a "tour of my placenta." I have it on video.

She stretched it out like a pancake, pointing out the beefy cotyledons that had been attached to my uterus moments earlier, feeding nutrients through darkened veins that stretched toward a giant white rope – the umbilical cord.

"Some people call it the tree of life," she said. "And your baby is the life."

"Do you want to take it home?"

How could I say no? It would be like refusing cake at your own wedding.

I had just cracked open and somehow survived. I had accomplished the most challenging athletic and emotional feat of a woman's life. He was magnificent. He was already breastfeeding. My blood was shot with oxytocin, that sweet natural drug. Everything was possible. Everything was new.

So, two hours later, we were on our way home in the car, a new family – stereo, pillows, leftover granola bars and placenta in tow.

I now think of it as an impulse buy. I've always been a sucker for female persuasion.

This is a common predicament. Every woman who gives birth at home with a midwife has to deal with her placenta. The policy of the Association of Ontario Midwives has been to tell clients to bury them, five feet deep "so raccoons can't get them," says Lisa Weston, the association's vice-president, and a midwife in the city's east end with the Sages-Femmes Rouge Valley Midwives clinic.

Most hospitals incinerate them after keeping them for a few weeks. Some even forbid women from taking them home. They are considered biological waste.

"It's an interesting disconnect," Weston says. "Women at home are not allowed to put them in the garbage. Women at the hospital are not allowed to have them."

Most midwives love placentas. They all give new mothers a tour of the organ her body built to feed, nurture and protect her baby for nine months. It's the only organ the body disposes. It's also the only organ made up of foreign cells – the baby's – that the body doesn't reject. For that reason, medical researchers overseeing organ donations study placentas.

"It's the forgotten stage of labour," says Esther Willms, the midwife who tended to my Child No. 1. "None of the movies show them. They're part of the miracle of the whole process. They're grown specifically to grow and nurse your child until they're finished their function."

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Perhaps this is what has kept me from dropping it into the green bin all these months. (They're verboten anyway, considered "pathological/medical waste," although who would check?) It seems disrespectful. I wouldn't, after all, chuck a sparrow's nest into the garbage. And if my liver dropped out, I'd likely donate it to someone at least.

Although I hadn't thought about it before Noah's arrival, I am grateful to my placenta for taking such good care of him.

Around the world, there are rituals honouring the placenta. The Ibo of Nigeria bury it as the dead twin of the child.

Other people eat them. They are said to help a woman heal after labour – both physically and emotionally. California midwife and medical anthropologist Janneli Miller offers to powderize her client's placentas, so they can swallow them in capsule form with white wine. More palatable than drinking it as a bloody Mary – tomato juice, salt, placenta, squeeze of lemon and voila, you have a cure to too much bleeding after childbirth.

It's hard to see why both of these options aren't on the menu at say, The Plaza Rooftop.

Mine, Miller informs me, is past that. Too much freezer burn. But, she suggests I cut the vessels from the organ and keep them for my first aid kit. They help heal bad burns, she says.

No thanks.

Willms planted her daughter's placenta in the front yard under some red tulips. They had a family ceremony, she says. Someone wrote and read a placenta poem. The idea was to nourish the earth with something that had nourished her.

That sounds pretty good to me.

What do you think I should do with it?

Let me know.





Catherine Porter's column runs on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca.