Smelling

Abstract

I stumbled bleary-eyed into my daughter's nursery as I'd done a million times in the past 2 years. Pulled off her sleep sack as she jumped up and down. "Mommy, Mommy." Something seemed weird. As I began to change her diaper, I was surprised to see a poop blowout. Then I realized it: I couldn't smell.It happened to me. I'm one of those. She had come home from daycare with a fever about 10 days before. A few days later, I had what felt like a bad cold. In Ontario, there's no more free COVID testing unless you are part of a vulnerable population, and a single mother in a pandemic is no longer considered vulnerable enough. Earlier that day I had seen a United States-based friend's social media post about how COVID tests are being distributed through vending machines all over the University of California, Los Angeles campus. Having lived in California only a year and a half prior, the pictures of privilege hit me hard. Following provincial guidelines, I had to just go ahead and assume I had it.I finished changing Sophie and took her to my room while I closed my eyes and played Cocomelon on my phone. Surviving our quarantine meant trying to get a little more half sleep before the day begins. Sophie had taken to looking at me and saying, "Mommy sleeping." She wasn't kidding, and she definitely did some astute social commentary. More like "Mommy zombie."In 2017, I published a book that emerged from my own anxiety around growing up a "smelly immigrant," or more specifically a "smelly Pakistani" (Ameeriar, 2017). The anxiety was so great that I would fight with my mother when she cooked South Asian food-food that now, 4 years after her death, I wish I could ask her to make. I carried Secret antiperspirant in my backpack in high school, constantly reapplying during the day during those anxious, sweaty years when we're learning to become adults.The pandemic has been weird. It's been weird for everybody, and for me it's meant a radical shift in my relationship to my body. A body that still hasn't fully recovered from the experience of birth. Bodily scars have more or less healed, but the body I inhabit is no longer mine. Or no longer just mine. I share it. I swore I would stop breastfeeding when my daughter turned 1, but then the vaccine was coming and evidence seemed to support that antibodies could be passed to infants through breastmilk, so I didn't wean. Then I imagined a hard deadline at 2, This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.