How do we know pregnancy? A brief sensory auto-ethnography
By Leah Barrett Werner
Leah Barett Werner is in her first year of the Social and Cultural Analysis PhD program at Concordia University. Her research focuses on social and cultural values surrounding work and care. Her daughter, Ellie was born in January 2023, and is currently discovering the taste of every object within her reach.
My senses are a mess.
Can your senses even be a mess?
I feel like they have been rearranged.
Smells dictate what I can do, where I can be, and where I can’t be.
It dictates how I feel, physically and mentally, all the time.
I am worried about taking the metro, about walking down the street. Were there always these many smells everywhere? And loud noises?
I am in France. There are cigarette fumes and perfume everywhere. I start to feel like public areas are off-limits.
I can’t wear much of my clothes because it has this awful smell that I can’t get
rid of even after washing it four times. I am pretty sure people around me think I am ridiculous, or at least exaggerating. And I understand. But if I smell my clothes or go near them, I will throw up.
I feel confined, my senses have become a little personal enemy, a little prison.
But I must admit, the taste of berries, of milk, of cornflakes and of ice cream has never been so good.
…
In retrospect, the first time I suspected I might be pregnant was after waking up one spring morning in early May. After making my morning coffee and taking my normally very enjoyable first sip, I spit it right back into the cup. It was disgusting. I emptied the cup in the sink thinking something must have gone wrong somewhere along the brewing process. I made a new one. The same thing happened. It was thoroughly confusing. Am I sick? Probably. But that doesn’t normally happen when I am sick. It must have been the first time since I started drinking (and loving) coffee, at around the age of 11 or 12, when I suddenly could not stand the taste.
I spoke to my mother on the phone a few days later and, chatting about this and that, I mentioned to her that I couldn’t drink coffee lately because it tasted off. Are you pregnant? She immediately asked me. I said I didn’t know. What was going on? Was this some kind of hidden knowledge I had never heard of before?
It was through seeing the lines on the pregnancy tests that I had this knowledge confirmed. They were indeed there; two pink lines on each of the four tests I took. But it didn’t feel real – how could I understand, or know for that matter, such an immense thing through seeing two meagre pink lines on a cheap looking plastic test (one that really looked exactly like a rapid Covid self-tests)? These little lines, lines that had nothing to do with me or with my body, were supposed to show me that a living thing had begun growing inside my body? It made no sense.
I then downloaded a pregnancy app and googled what the embryo looked like. I wanted to see for myself. I read it was the size of a sesame seed. The illustration mostly made me nauseous. It didn’t make it any more real. Indeed, it was not through my vision – at least not only – that I began to know.
I think I am beginning to know. This morning, a few days after taking the pregnancy tests, I woke up with a strange metallic taste in my mouth, and all I could think about was wanting – no, needing – a bowl of Kellogg’s cornflakes (the really plain ones) with milk and strawberries, something I don’t think I’ve had since childhood. A few moments later I felt an incredible wave of nausea and ran to the bathroom to throw up. I was thrilled. I think I really am pregnant.
My knowing and sensing my pregnancy came gradually. It came to me through all the senses – through smell, taste, touch and sound and vision. One of the first sounds that contributed to my knowing was through something called a Doppler device that picks up the baby’s heartbeat. As soon as my doctor, who was not a warm or chatty person by any means, picked up the heartbeat she said, that is the best sound in the world.
Then there is the first ultrasound. Everyone says this is when everything becomes real – that’s when you really knowthat you’re pregnant. And when I went with my partner, I had expected to have an emotional experience, to cry at least a little. And it was cool, but neither of us felt that it was really any more real afterwards… Instead, my knowing came in different ways…
For the first three months, in the first ‘phase’, this was in a wholly unpleasant way. I was in the thralls of what I came to think of as my newfound super-smell and super-taste. I realized that I had thoroughly underestimated the ability of these senses to impact my well-being before these months. It shifted the way I related to everything around me and it shifted the way I inhabited spaces. It affected my relationships to those around me. I had to (lovingly) forbid my partner from using anything scented – soap, shampoo, deodorants – and from eating anything with the ‘wrong’ smell.
I was travelling at the time, visiting family in Denmark and France, which made things more complicated. I remember going to a health food store in Copenhagen in desperation one day – I needed to get something that I loved the smell of. I bought a small bottle of peppermint essential oil. It was supposedly good for relieving nausea, the woman working there told me. I used it for a week straight and took it with me everywhere, bringing it out whenever I would smell anything unpleasant. It was my little saviour. I would rub it on my hands and on my temples, and when I discovered that I couldn’t stand the smell of any of my clothes or my suitcase, and after trying to unsuccessfully get rid of the smell they inhabited, I rubbed it all over my clothes. My family that I was staying with found this exceedingly frustrating – granted, it was a very strong peppermint smell that surrounded me at all times. Then, from one moment to the next, it turned on me. It started to completely disgust me. It is currently wrapped in three plastic bags and on my roof because I continued to smell it through the plastic.
But then there was the splendid pleasure of food cravings. Sometimes they would come seemingly from nowhere, and sometimes from memories of very particular tastes in childhood. I spent a whole day in Copenhagen trying to hunt down a specific brand of chocolate-covered, orange-flavored popsicles that I had eaten as a child. They were only sold from an ice cream truck that would visit certain neighbourhoods weekly and I managed to find the schedule online and track it down – a fact my family found quite amusing. But it was worth it. I needed that exact flavour.
There were also food aversions. At first, couldn’t stand the taste of dark chocolate, which I have always loved. It tasted like sand in my mouth but one month later it was all I wanted to eat. I felt outside of normal sensory experience, and it was at once alienating and empowering. It made me feel connected to what I imagined as my more visceral or primordial sides, despite the difficulties of navigating public spaces not designed to be sensitive to pregnancy super-senses. It felt like a transition, towards something I didn’t know yet.
Phase two – the sense of touch
A whole new component of feeling began to develop inside of me sometime mid-way through my second trimester. It shifted things profoundly. I started to know on a deeper level.
I began to feel the smallest little movements inside my belly. I told myself it made it feel more real (although what it means that pregnancy ‘feels real’ I am not sure of). The feeling started as little flutters coming from far away, but far away inside my stomach. They gradually grew stronger and more forceful. Then they began to respond to outside touch. When me or my partner would put our hands on the skin of my belly, the baby would respond with movement.
The interplay of touch and movement was incredible to me. If I would put my hand on one side of my belly, the baby would gravitate to that side and try her best to respond to that particular spot. And I would feel her movement both on the inside and outside.
Then I progressively began to be able to see her movements on the outside. I remember the first time I looked down and saw my stomach move while I was completely still. A little vibration at first, and later I would see little limps pushing out my skin from the inside. It looked like a little like an alien was inside of me. I couldn’t really picture her, but I knew her movements.
It is crazy how much she moves around in there, I told my partner one evening. I wonder if it means she will be super active when she comes out. He said he didn’t think so. It makes sense that a living thing moves around a lot, right? What living thing doesn’t.
She really is a living thing. And I am somehow embodying two sets of senses.
A strange fact of pregnancy.
I started to wonder if she feels the liquid she is in. Does she taste it? I know she
swallows it.
Does she smell in there? I know she can hear, sounds muffled by layers of skin and liquid. Does she feel warm, cold? Does she feel pain, pleasure?
I feel like the mediator between her and the world quite a responsibility.
My womb a soft and liquid buffer, but the world is probably still irrelevant to her
she has everything she needs in there.
She is a little kick boxer. As my skin stretches,
she begins to see dark and light we bug her with a flashlight,
testing if she will respond with movement but she doesn’t take the bait.
…
I began to think about what sounds might bother her and what sounds she might like to hear in there. When the fire alarm goes off, I worry. But when I listen to music I wonder if she delights in it. I wonder if she is dancing in there.
And as my body changes, so does the space around me and how I inhabit space. I notice I relate differently to people around me. Not always in a good way. Taking the metro is a whole thing. The lack of curtesy of people upsets me. They don’t even notice me. They stare into the screens of their phones; engulfed in their little unreal worlds.
Everything feels so heavy, quite literally. I often long for lightness. People now ask me not how are you? as usual, but rather, how are you feeling?
Before getting pregnant, I had heard stories of pregnant women finding it frustrating that people would touch their bellies; this notion that when a belly inhabits a baby, it becomes a public object, one that is acceptable even for strangers to touch. Maybe in part because the sexual element is absent from that kind of touch, replaced by something else. Curiosity perhaps. I had sort of expected this to happen and prepared for it. And I didn’t actually dread it; I didn’t mind sharing the sensation that was so magical to me, of feeling a living thing you cannot see. But it never happened.
…
And here is where I end with the hope of having given an insight, albeit personal, into some of the ways we know pregnancy through the senses – an insight into what pregnancy feels like, looks like, smells like, tastes like and sounds like.