By Mikki Fisher of The Red Tent
Having a baby is hard fucking work. Sometimes they can be hard to make. Sometimes they’re TOO easy to make (I’d like to throw a shout-out to wine for sponsoring my children). And once they are inside you they have the ability to make you beg for an epidural after twenty weeks of carrying them. They make you piss yourself, they give you bacne, they make you so tired you think you might die, they make you hornier than a 12-year-old boy and they make you almost blow up the Google search engine with questions you NEVER thought you’d ask. (Eg: How can I find my own cervix? And once I’ve found it, how can I insert a vice out of my husbands tool shed to open it the hell up so I can pull my own baby out?).
Of course there are unicorns who walk around barely noticing that they’re a walking, talking human incubator, but we hate them. Most of us need wheelchairs and a 24/7 on-call psychologist to survive pregnancy. Eventually we stick our arm up our hoo-hah with an eviction notice that says, “Just pick a hole, and get the hell out”. Sometimes they will listen, most of the time they will give you the finger and continue their 2am dance parties. BUT they come out! Eventually! I mean they hardly just ‘come out’. Birth is what I imagine an exorcism to look like. Screaming, swearing, vomiting and begging for drugs until the thing that has been sucking the life out of you finally exits you dramatically.
As I said, having a baby is hard work. Which is why you need to look after yourself once you’ve made it to the other side. I first heard about placenta encapsulation from a friend when I was pregnant with my first child. Her first baby had recently exited her and she could NOT stop raving about how good the tablets made her feel. She told me all about the Blue’s Day thing and the Crying About 2975392 Times A Minute For No Reason thing that comes with becoming the proud new owner of a human being. And she SWORE that the tablets made a huge difference in this massive transition. And I believed her! I’d seen Kimmy K barbecue a placenta off eBay for it’s health benefits so I knew that there must be something to the whole ‘placenta eating thing’.
I figured that it’s good enough for Kim Kardashian it’s good enough for me! Plus we’re pretty much the only mammal that doesn’t back up childbirth with a placenta eating sesh, so if you don’t take every word the Kardashians say as Bible then you can at least trust the animals who don’t have access to the Internet. They KNOW how much good shit is in our placentas! They know that it’s our damn right to eat the sonuvabitch that has been sucking the life out of us for ten months.
And I get it, eating a placenta sounds a bit fucked (and borderline cannibalistic), which is what makes the encapsulation process all the more amazing! All you have to do is birth the damn thing and make sure to let your midwife know that your placenta needs to be placed in a bucket of ice (AKA: Placenta On The Rocks). Natalie from Placenta Vitality’s spidey senses then begin to tingle (kidding, you text her like a normal person) and she comes and picks up your placenta as ASAP as she possibly can.
You then forget all about it because you are still deep in shock about the new human in your arms, plus you have the impending trauma of shitting for the first time post-birth. Natalie does all of her witchy business on your placenta (which by the way, is surprisingly massive) and turns it into cute little purple tablets that taste like berries. Hurrah! By the time you’re home with your new bundle of joy you are equipped with your jar of placenta tablets, ready to tackle Motherhood like a boss!
I’ve had my placenta magically transformed into tablets twice now and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough! Natalie makes the process insanely easy, because she understands that a new Mum has a bit going on and doesn’t have time to be Google-ing placenta smoothie recipes. As I said, having a baby is hard work on our bodies. So it is INCREDIBLY important to do everything you can to replenish it and placenta encapsulation is an amazing way to do that.
(This is an article I wrote for the Sunshine Coast Baby Magazine…but with more swear words.)
If you want to get your placenta encapsulated and live on the Sunshine Coast you can check out Natalie’s website at https://www.placentavitality.c...
If you want to get it encapsulated but DON’T live on the Sunshine Coast, then I don’t know anybody. I’m sorry. How anticlimactic.
Mikki xx
