Sock Monkey Placenta

I spent my Sunday hangover on Gordon's couch, playing with his sock monkey.


“I grew up with one of these,” I told him. “Only, our sock monkey had a uterus.”

“Excuse me?”

“Ya know, for the sock monkey fetus,” I explained. “We had a baby sock monkey that fit in the uterus with a detachable placenta and umbilical cord.”

Gordon stared at me.

“With a snap,” I continued. “The cord was attached to the baby’s belly with a snap. Also, the baby had a Velcro mouth that could attach to the mommy sock monkey’s Velcro nipples when it needed to nurse, of course.”

It wasn’t until I had said all this out loud that I realized that perhaps this would be considered strange by many people. Perhaps not everyone’s mother was a home midwife and needed tools to teach young, soon-to-be big brothers and sisters how their newborn sibling would arrive. Perhaps not everyone’s sock monkey had a uterus and Velcro nipples.

"We lost the cord and placenta," I told Gordon over coffee as we sat in a café later that day. "My mom isn't much of a seamstress, so she had to hire someone to make a new one."

“So, let me get this straight,” Gordon confirmed. “Your mother had to call someone up and say: ‘I’d like you to sew me a new sock monkey placenta. We seem to have lost ours.’”

“Yes.” I took another sip of my iced latte. “Is that weird?”