YO MAMA: What's that smell?
The smell arrived the way all mysterious odours do: slowly, insidiously, and unattached to any apparent causatory incident. Suddenly, it was just there. And because “there” was a hospital room the day after our son was born, we couldn’t exactly get away from it.
It had such a thick particulate stench you could practically feel it in your nose. It was the kind of pungent smell my dog would just love to roll in.
“Check the garbage can,” I commanded from the hospital bed I’d been planted in since late last night. Maybe some bits of blood and afterbirth had been tossed in there.
My husband sidled cautiously up to the can and stood back while lifting the lid with an outstretched hand. It was as if he expected to find a severed limb. Just as he was about to open it, a nurse bustled in with a cheery hello and my husband startled away from the can.
“How are we all doing?” the nurse chirped.
“Oh, pretty good,” I said. “A little tired.”
What a lie. I felt like week-old roadkill. I was sore and tired but I still pretended I was strong and cheerful and had everything under control. I definitely did not confess that I was terribly, obsessively fixated on a strange and mysterious smell. That I most certainly did not want to draw attention to.
As the nurse weighed my son I began to wonder if she noticed the smell. I tried to convince myself that it was probably just a weird hospital smell. If it was a concerning odour — a sign of infection perhaps — she would say something.
I glanced over at the tray of beige hospital sludge. Maybe the smell was coming from whatever that was.
“Have you been recording his pees and poos,” the nurse asked.
I perked right up like a straight A student.
“Yes, he’s had three wet diapers and one poop. It was the meconium one, I think.”
Of course! The meconium poop. That MUST be the source of the smell, I thought. That greenish-black, tar-like first poo that newborns pass. My “What to Expect” book said it was made of mucus, lanugo (the fine hair that temporarily covers the baby’s body), bile and cells shed from the skin and intestinal tract. Sounds like a recipe for some major stank if you ask me.
I had no idea where the dirty diaper had ended up after we deliriously changed the baby in the wee hours of morning. As the nurse finished her checks, all I could think was “where the heck did we leave that dirty diaper?”
It hadn’t even been 24 hours and we had already lost a poopy diaper in less than 200 square feet.
The nurse finally departed and I aggressively whisper-yelled at my husband: “the dirty diaper — where did you leave it?”
“I thought you threw it out,” he said.
“No. I thought YOU threw it out,” I replied.
You’d think we lost the baby the way we tore that room apart. We never did find the diaper.
“Maybe it’s me,” I whimpered. “Maybe I stink.”
The hospital room had a conjoining bathroom with a shower. I’d used it the previous night. There was a chair so you could sit under the water and think about all the other naked butts and bodily fluids that had touched it before you — and what kind of chemicals they used to disinfect it. The ambience wasn’t exactly spa-like, but it was better than smelling like a dead fish.
I emerged 15 minutes later radiating lavender and vanilla. But the smell lingered on. It was masked slightly by my perfumey shampoo, which almost made it worse — like air freshener spritzed over someone’s dump at the office toilet.
My husband handed the baby back to me and I instinctively breathed him in, my beautiful, bonny baby. There it was, that funky smell. Right in front of me.
“It’s the baby,” I mouthed, apparently afraid to offend the infant.
“But I thought they were supposed to smell great,” he said. “You know, the ‘new baby smell’ and all that.”
I always thought the new baby smell would be warm and lovely, like fresh baked bread or a kitten’s fur. Why weren’t we intoxicated by our newborn’s scent like moms and dads are supposed to be?
For starters, he was still covered in smears of vernix — a greasy, white substance that looks a bit like cottage cheese. Our midwife recommended leaving it on his skin for 24 hours to help keep him moisturized.
Fresh, breathable air versus soft baby skin. Ugh. Parenting decisions. I already hated having to put someone else’s comfort ahead of my own.
Noses plugged, we waited.
But first thing the following morning when the nurse came in, my husband blurted out “can we give it a bath?”
That’s right, “it”.
“Oh, well most parents like to wait until they’re home so they can use their own baby bathtub,” the nurse said. “All we have here is basically a big salad bowl.”
“Perfect!” my husband and I chimed.
The nurse wasn’t kidding about the bowl. It was very industrial. Cold, stainless steel. It looked like something borrowed from the operating room. The baby hated every second he spent in the bowl — and we didn’t enjoy it much either — but it was all worth it for that clean, fresh baby smell. It felt like we were getting his real scent for the first time, now that all the stink had been washed off.
“Don’t you just love that new baby smell?” the nurse gushed.
My husband and I looked at each other, then back at the nurse.
“There’s nothing quite like it,” I said.
— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.
We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor.
