Thwarted (Placenta) Plans…The plans were so great! We planned to keep the placenta from the birth of our lovely Isabella, to either dehydrate and encapsulate or to add a little each day to my morning green smoothie… lots of goodness going back into Mumma. Plan One Thwarted! The placenta wouldn’t budge (that’s another story) so it was removed manually under general anaesthetic. Boo! The hospital kindly gave us said placenta in a small tub but it was in bits, and I SO wasn’t going to eat it with all of that anaesthetic being held by it. No, no! So into the freezer it went. Time passed, baby grew and we tossed ideas around as to what to do with our rich and life giving placenta. Yes we’ll bury it on a family property under a Moringa tree… perfect! Plan Two Thwarted! Family sold the land! Hmm, what to do?… Set it free at sea. Yes, that’s perfect! Although throwing it out at a beach or onto some rocks wouldn’t work… imagine swimming to find bits of placenta. Oh no!!!! So, to sea on a boat it is… perfect. And the perfect opportunity arose… a trip to the neighbouring Island Martinique thanks to the St lucian Government (you need to leave from time to time so they will allow you to stay!?!? – shame they didn’t pay all expenses!). We’ll throw it overboard when we’re on the ferry. Yes! It will be perfect, emotional but perfect. A little ceremony and we’ll send it on its way, to nourish the waters and some lucky fish! Off we head, early one morning on our mini-break. Frozen placenta safely tucked away in the bottom of the push chair. What a great plan. Plan Three Thwarted… we forgot it was there!!!! With the early morning start, getting a sleeping baby organised, getting us organised, and the excitement of it all, we totally forgot!!! We cued for what felt like forever for the ferry, after disembarking we cued for customs, we caught a taxi with Bruno’s sister, husband and baby (local Martinique folk) to the airport to collect a hire car, it was all going so well :). Fitting everything and everyone into the car was another matter. The men folk squeezes the suitcases, the push chairs into the very small trunk and …. OH MY GOD who’s bleeding? There was what looked like blood running down the back of the very clean white hire car. We checked ourselves, no cuts no wounds… oh no, it’s the placenta!!!!! Squashed into the bottom of the folded push chair, container broken… Placenta everywhere. Bruno looked at me, I looked at him in horror… not the placenta! It’s so special, it’s so precious, it fed our precious Isabella for 9+ months, it did a great job… and now it was dripping down the back of a hire car and onto the airport car park. What to do?!?!? Bruno said it had to be thrown away, I had pangs of grief, “I guess we have to”! Funnily enough it felt OK, my pangs of grief came from my mind, not my heart. This isn’t what’s supposed to happen to a sacred placenta! I had such great plans for it, it was going to be so poignant, so beautiful! Bruno carried the dripping bag to the very large industrial size dumpster, explaining what it was in French to his family and as I stood in dismay, and he walked back with two very nice French beach mats!!!! Someone clearly had too much luggage on their departure, so we scored :). I wondered why it had happened this way, we didn’t need beach mats that badly! There must be a reason, I thought… after all there’s a reason for everything right? I wished the placenta well on it’s journey through Martinique to the dump site, wherever that is. Stained push chair in the car and off we went leaving a very stained car park behind. I expected to feel sad about the whole thing, but it really did feel right. Strange but right. Fast-track to 3 days later, after 3 days of doing a lot of driving around Martinique, getting lost often, so often. Another early morning and we drove bleary eyed to the airport to drop the hire car off before catching the ferry back to St Lucia. Of course they were doing roadworks at the entrance of the airport so we even got lost there, twice we drove around the front of the airport when we saw well preserved cottages at the front in a sort of garden, cottages that had been housing to slaves on the sugar cane plantation which once stood where the airport now is. The trip was for us (apart from seeing family, relaxing and getting a stamp on my passport) all about doing some healing of the imprints of slavery in Martinique. Each time we ‘got lost’ we passed a sugarcane plantation which we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Each time we drove along an unplanned rout we were doing healing, collecting ‘stuck’ souls of ex-slaves to help them to be free. And once we returned home I realised that the Monty Python placenta incident was of course perfect. We were meant to spill that blood on the old sugar cane plantation site, we were meant to pop it in the dustbin so that it would be carried through Martinique, spreading its healing energy as it went. We were meant to have a blood stained push chair that we took everywhere to share the energy in that way too. It was all perfect. You see that Placenta (and Isabella of course) represents a mix of ancestry, quite a mix… a Scottish slave master, slaves (both on Bruno’s side), an English Australian (that’s me), a mumma who’s a healer and a baby who’s an amazing healer. Quite a power packed tupperware container full of healing energy :). The best laid plans hey… they always turn out perfectly!!!!! May the healing ripples run far, deep and wide! Comments are closed.
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