I had a baby in January! She changed
the way I smell in more ways than one, even before she arrived. I had that
super-smell power in pregnancy; along with my already keen schnoz and some
nasty nauseau this made me weak in the knees in the worst way. The streets of
Cambridge have known my vomit. Certain late-summer evening-time plant smells
that have always felt a bit scandalous became wretched with their desperate
ooze. I remember telling people that I could smell poop through a wall, with
the door closed. (I was fun to be around, and I got some of that renowned
new-parent poop-talk practice in early.)
Then I gave birth and my sweat
changed, during labor and after. It became potent in a way that I associate
with too-close quarters and equatorial sun. Stink is one of the ways a baby
knows her mother, so perhaps the strength of my stench had a use, but it was
strange to be so potent during such a hazy, dreamlike time, as though someone
else had snuck into my clothes, my skin, in the night. The strongest of it
seems to have faded into what I now consider a 'chicken stock stink,' a kind of
brothy underarm smell that I'm not wild about but that doesn't bowl me over.
(If I return to this blog in earnest, you can trust it is likely to only get
grosser!)
Baby Zo in February, freshly bathed, regards her mother, a bit of a stinkpot
It
is too hard to talk about a new baby's smell, but I will say it is beautiful
and strange in ways I did not expect. There is something about her clean milky
brand-new puppy breaths that feels too tender to say much about. At one point,
she smelled to me like a (gently spiced) graham cracker--the way my own dried
drool used to smell on the pillow some mornings, one of the best smells I've
ever made now emanating from a new person I helped to make. She smells like a
sun-warmed kitten and the cleanest creek, so soft and sparkling and elemental.
Mineral and tang. Yogurt pop and cheese puff. Now she is four months old and it
is spring.
She
goes out walking in the evenings with her father and comes inside with that
clean spring smell lifting off her, and it’s enough to knock me to my knees again,
the radiance of it, but also a kind of grief that the world can touch her now,
and she has to carry it, beautiful and blooming, on her skin.
