Pregnancy Nose

Pregnancy has endowed my wife with a superpower and as much as I would like to pretend it is the ability to weaponize biokinetic energy particles, the truth is that she can smell things. I do not mean in the routine I-think-someone-hit-a-skunk way or the do-I-detect-the-aroma-of-chamomile-tea way. This woman is one errant gamma-ray away from being able to smell fear.

Each time she walks into the house, I feel like a drug dealer that just had the misfortune of being stopped by a K9 unit. More often than not, her brow will furrow and she will rhetorically ask, “Do you smell that?” The answer, of course, is always no. It has to be no, otherwise I am admitting to consciously allowing our home to marinate in whatever offensive odor she detected upon entry. This is usually followed by an exchange similar to this:

Her- “You seriously don’t smell that!?”

Me – “Smell what?”

Her – “That tangy sweet & sour primate smell.”

Me – “I don’t even know what that means.”

Her – “We have to find it. It is definitely stronger by the couch….”

Me – “Are you just saying that because I am on the couch?”

I will then spend the next 20 minutes on an olfactory scavenger hunt that involves me presenting her with prospective sources of nasal offense and her rendering a verdict. To her credit, we will occasionally locate an errant sippy cup or a few contraband goldfish crackers; but more often than not she will simply become distracted by another odor.

I once spent an hour tearing apart my son’s closet because she insisted that there must be an animal cadaver located therein. I never found anything. Maybe the smell abated on its own. Maybe there never was a smell at all. Maybe someone farted in their car as they drove by. I simply sprayed some Febreeze and we moved on with our lives.

The real victim in all of this has been the dog. Each time she re-enters the house after going outside to relieve herself we have to wipe her down with a dryer sheet. This serves to eliminate any “canine smell” while preventing static cling. It is costing us a fortune in dryer sheets, but it is easy to know when she is around because it feels like I am getting a creepin’ put on me by Snuggles the Bear.

Conveniently, this hyper-smell also makes it difficult for her to assist with dirty diapers when I am home. There have been many occasions where she has had to excuse herself to dry heave because she was overwhelmed by the odor. Not that I blame her, my son believes that any job worth doing is worth doing right.

Curiously enough, her other senses continue to operate at or below their normal levels. I have never heard someone claim their visual or audible acuity increased due to pregnancy so I am not sure if there is a biological reason for this or not. There is also the possibility that I am simply not talking to the right people and somewhere there is a woman at a maternity store telling the clerk, “I thought I needed Lasik and a hearing aid until I got pregnant with our first, but since then I’ve had perfect pitch and the Air Force won’t stop calling me!”