Gag Me with a Doorknob

Posted September 07, 2007

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Our friend Megan doesn't care for velvet. Not like Velvet makes my butt look big or I prefer drapier fabrics or cottony ones but rather Velvet makes me run, barfing, out of the room and away from the house to the car which I will get in and drive away to another county. Corduroy too. I used to forget sometimes and dress Birdy in this one sleeper I loved -- thick and luxurious velour that parents of a friend had gotten for us in Paris and that turned our children into little French butterscotch lion cubs -- and if Megan came over, she would look at me like I'd squirted cyanide into her quesadilla. "Good-bye," she'd say. "I won't be holding your baby today." And I'd slap my forehead and dart off to change Birdy into a onesie or pajamas or her own naked skin -- anything a little more unrevolting than Parisian plush. (Although sometimes, I admit, because I'm pesky like that, I can't help reaching for Megan's hand and rubbing her fingers on my corduroy thigh. She'll yank her hand away like I have touched it with a burning thing, say a hot branding iron of the words "velvet-hating nut" -- then she'll slap me with it.)

I'm thinking about this now because I just coached Birdy through a gagging episode inaugurated by our bathroom doorknob. "It was sticky," she said, gagging. And then, gagging, "It had yogurt on it." Now I'm not saying that our brassy old bathroom doorknob is any great shakes under the best of circumstances, and certainly, coated in a yogurty residue it leaves something to be desired. I am, nonetheless, not about to lose my lunch over it.

But Birdy. Birdy. She is turning into a real gagger, that Birdy. Save the lone doorknob incident, her gagging has been exclusively related to odor, and this is something I can relate to. For one thing, I have a keen sense of smell: Is there allspice in the stew? Did you use my special face cream on your elbows? I can identify any spice in any dish; I used to know who'd been cuddling our cat by the particular nuance of body odor; I can smell that Michael is shaving even when I'm downstairs washing dishes. For another, pregnancy turned me into an odor-trigger gagger myself. When I was first expecting Ben, we used to walk three quarters of a mile out of our way to get to a friend's house -- a friend who lived two blocks from us -- so that I wouldn't have to pass the Thai restaurant where I would be forced to stop, gagging on the sidewalk, gagging and scooting backwards like a hairballing cat, right in front of all the poor patrons trying to digest their mee krob. I could smell every single ocean-dwelling creature that had fermented its dead self into every drop of fish sauce. And, incidentally, I love Thai food. I also love barbeque, for that matter, but grilling ribs smelled to my pregnant person like a thousand charred pigs piled up on a funeral pyre. The same way that Birdy, now, can really smell the hoof in a bowl full of Jello.

Maybe pregnancy is designed to make you sensitive to the very children you will birth: crankiness, needing to be cuddled, to nap suddenly or cry, to throw blobs of food to the floor in revulsion -- these were behaviors I felt a great understanding about after I'd been pregnant. But especially the food aversions. Birdy, for instance, hates potatoes -- potatoes! -- and thanks to my pregnancy with her, I alone, in a world full of people who take them to be the very essence of benign blandness, understand the way that deep down behind their powdery good nature you can taste the black dirt, the very compost where all the world's corpses lie rotting. Unless the potatoes happen to be sterilized safely in a Pringles can, in which case they are perfectly palatable. I love potatoes myself, but I understand.

And so I understand, too, how my morning breath could be enough to make Birdy gag, gag, gag into the sunshine streaming through our pretty windows, "Mama you smell!" -- and then barf, splat, over the side of the bed onto the floor. I'm not saying it raises my self-esteem. I'm just saying I understand. (Maybe Birdy should get a gig in a mouthwash commercial!) It also doesn't make me feel great about myself when I'm about to get in the shower and Birdy presses her nose briefly to my side and cries, "Ew! Your skin has a smell!" and then gag, gag, gags and just barely stops herself from barfing. (Needless to say, this has provided endless fodder for Michael's teasing of me.) But I, pregnant, gagged when Michael tried to kiss me, gagged every time the toothbrush touched my lips, like Birdy does now -- I get it, the life of a smell-gagger. I really do. I get the "Who farted?" and the "Something stinks inside that vase where the flowers are!"

It's borderline, I know -- we have friends, little friends, who deal with more severe versions of this, and so I know that it's a fine line between plain old sensitivity and sensory integration issues. Believe me, I've Googled it. But so far we're managing. Birdy stands on one foot to brush her teeth -- a trick I learned from a dentist who said your brain can only process one thing at a time, and can't get organized enough to gag that way. And she wears a little lavender-drenched felt pendant around her neck to ward off the stink of humanity. "My poop!" she'll still cry, indignant, from the bathroom. "It smells!" And we say, like a mantra from a children's picture book, "That's how poop is." Then we say, not like anything at all, "Make sure you stand on one foot to flush!"

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Gag Me with a Doorknob

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Gag Me with a Doorknob

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