Jewelry

My Breast Milk Was Made Into Jewelry - Refinery29

I’m not quite as much of a hippie as many seem to think. Yes, I’m a lifelong vegetarian who has voted for both Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein in the past (but WILL be voting for Hillary in November, let it be known). Still, when I got pregnant, I was floored by the number of people who assumed that I would soon be eating placenta, sewing cloth diapers, and/or breast-feeding my kid until he’s 11. So far I have done none of those things, but here's one thing that I have done that guarantees that my hippie card will be valid for the next umpteen years: I have commissioned jewelry made out of my breast milk.

One of the first things I did when I found out I was pregnant — in between freaking out, puking, and puking some more — was hire a doula. (They make births safer and cheaper, didn’t you know?) During our initial meetings before the birth, my doula asked me the usual “how crunchy do you want your birth experience to be” questions: Did I want to cut the umbilical cord myself? Did I want to use a handheld mirror to reach down and view my baby’s goop-covered scalp as it first greeted the world? I politely declined these things, trusting that the plain-old birth experience package would be plenty magical and gross, no bonus add-ons necessary. And yet, months later, when faced with the question of whether I wanted to pump liquid out of my chest and mail it in a ZipLoc baggie to an artist in Indiana who would transform it into keepsake jewelry so I could remember this whole birth/breast-feeding/new-parenting business forever, I was like, let's do it.

Of course no one actually asked me this question; I asked it of myself when I stumbled across Sacred Legacy Arts on Instagram. Its founder, Kelly Howland started experimenting with what she calls “DNA keepsake jewelry” after the birth of her second son. Aside from breast milk, her custom pieces can include such items as hair, ashes, and our old friend, placenta. The concept seemed like the adult equivalent of the collages I made in preschool that included leaves, sand, and probably also my hair, all glued to construction paper in the name of art and nostalgia. But Kelly’s jewelry made with human bits is actually pretty. Plus, it’s not like I could be a huge copycat and just get my kid’s belly-button stub cast as a necklace or anything.