Another (yet-to-be-named) Podcast

Two of my wonderful friends (Sonia and Sarah) and I have recorded a podcast, which we plan to do every Sunday night from now on until we don’t want to anymore. Our ideas about what the podcast will involve are in the recording below, but in case you can’t be bothered listening, we plan to raise a discussion question, chat about it for a bit, and then share things we’ve read/watched/listened to, chat about those for a bit, and have everything over and done with in around 30 minutes. This week we talked about whether or not it was ever okay to comment on someone’s weight, and whether or not it’s ever okay to comment on what someone’s wearing (and I promise you we recorded the conversation before this article came out – I can provide proof if necessary).

Although we’re fans of listening to podcasts, we haven’t done much in the way of producing a podcast, so we would LOVE any constructive feedback, discussion topic ideas, and potential names for the podcast you’d like to offer. And so, dear friends and dear strangers, I present to you…*drum roll*…

Episode 1:

Antidepressants

from here

I started taking antidepressants a couple of weeks ago. I’d been spending a lot of time telling myself that everything was great, I was great, and then feeling depressed about the fact that I knew it was a lie. I felt not great, despite all of my efforts to feel great. My brain is evidently too clever to be tricked by my brain. 

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When I first started taking them the inside of my head felt hot and I was constantly aware of the fact that something new and strange was happening in my body. I felt an urge to tell people I was taking the medication, in case they spotted steam spurting from my ears or I was talking gibberish without realising it. As I explained to Alan, it felt like my brain was being pillowed by warmth and peace. Now I feel kinda normal (no steam, no desire to tell strangers about my medication) except the thick layer of depression that has underscored my every waking moment has faded away. I’m no longer spiralling from “Ugh, this is so frustrating” > wanting to break/injure something > collapsing in a useless and messy heap on the floor and wanting to die. Things are just frustrating. I’m doing a far better job at being playful and letting little things slide. I think Mo’s noticed.

I didn’t want to take antidepressants. Starting antidepressants felt like it would be a daily reminder that in the fight against Depression taking over, I’d totally lost, and therefore really was as sucky as Depression would have me believe. But then I read a couple of journal articles (I regularly call them ‘journicles’ accidentally) for uni about studies which suggested that depressed mothers were more likely to hit their children, and that depressed mothers were more likely to report their child’s behaviour as problematic, and this discovery coincided with separate conversations I’d had/would have with three important women in my life - my friend, my minister, and my mum - which ended up nudging me completely into the medication-should-be-an-option camp (two by gently pointing out my inconsistent views on mental vs. physical health, and one by declaring out of the blue that antidepressants were awesome and I should get myself on some post-haste). “But if I take antidepressants then I’m admitting I have depression, and I don’t want to be a person with depression! That’s not who I see myself as!” I cried to my mum. “Maybe antidepressants would help you be the person you see yourself as,” she replied. I was at the doctor’s first thing the next morning.

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Me [the day before starting to take the tablets]: So I might become a completely different person in two weeks’ time, when the medication kicks in.

Alan: Like Shania Twain?

Me: Was she seriously the first person you thought of when I said that?

Alan: No. I thought of Cher and Madonna first, but I kept going until I reached a name I could say out loud.

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We’ll see.

Placenta

A little over a year ago, I wrote The Gross Post, which is one of the most popular things I’ve ever written, apparently (I refuse to think about the kinds of terms people must be typing into search engines to end up at that particular post). Since then, I’ve had ‘Placenta’ as a note in my ‘Ideas for posts’ document, and today I’ve decided to use my ‘small window of blogging opportunity’ to finally turn that note into a ‘full post’ (I’m not entirely sure how or when to use inverted commas). Jill, you’ll be very happy to know that as per your caution, I have not done an image search for ‘placenta’, nor have I included any pictures of actual placentas below. Admittedly a search may have helped me to remember what a placenta looks like, but whatever, I’ve gone ahead and drawn one anyway:

...in case you couldn't tell.

When I was pregnant with Moses I thought a bit about what to do with the placenta after he was born. I found out about lotus births, where people carry the placenta around with the baby until it falls off naturally with the umbilical cord. There were instructions on how to make pretty placenta bags and how to keep it from getting too stinky. It was not for me. I also read about people burying the placenta in the backyard and planting a tree at the site, which is an idea I quite like, except that we were renting and it seemed a little weird considering planting body parts in our apartment block’s small shared patch of grass. Anyway, after a bit of reading on the subject I eventually decided to go with something less strange and just eat the thing.

It made sense to me that the large and sudden drop in hormones post-birth could be mitigated somewhat by eating the placenta, and my nerves about developing post-natal depression made me keen to try anything that may help balance my emotions and smooth out the massive transition from pregnant to birthing to breastfeeding woman. So we brought the placenta home, and then we froze it, and then Alan spent a good deal of time chopping it up into tiny pieces so that I could eat them like little ice tablets (I’d read about people cooking it, but the thought made me feel ill). When I tried my first one, I was stupidly surprised to find it tasted like blood and made me gag. I tried eating a couple more, and then I gave up. We lived with a bucket of placenta taking up an annoying amount of room in our freezer until we moved, 19-or-so months later.

Not one to be deterred, I tried eating Hazel’s placenta (my placenta after Hazel’s birth? I’m not sure who it belongs to), too; when my midwife told me she encapsulated placentas as part of her service, I was signing up before she’d finished speaking. YES PLEASE I WANT SOME OF THOSE. This time they won’t taste like blood so I’ll be able to eat them all and then I will feel happy and everything will be wonderful, I thought to myself. However-many-months later I was passed my container of placenta pills, and I tentatively took one, with a large gulp of water. They didn’t taste like blood!! They tasted like body. Like the inside of a body. Like the smell that’s around when you’ve just given birth. Body-insides smell. I gaggily tried a couple more, and then gave up on them too. We still have the tub in our fridge door, next to the olives.

If there was a lesson to be learned from this post, to wrap it up tidily, it’s one that perhaps most people would already expect: Placenta tastes like blood and/or body. For those who had no idea before now: You’re welcome.