When You Can’t Trust Your Nose in a Houseful of Boys

You’ve probably heard that one of the symptoms of Covid is the loss of taste and smell. I’ve known people with both, including at least two people who are going on nine months of no sense of smell. One of them has two kids in diapers so to him this might be a beneficial long-term symptom. 

In medical terms this is called anosmia. But some less talked about symptoms after Covid are when your sense of smell and taste are distorted. This is called parageusia and parosmia, and I’ve been dealing with this for a while. 

It’s turned into sort of a game for the kids. I used to have a very sharp sense of smell and would call out dirty laundry hidden under beds or a bad potato in the pantry from great distances. Now it’s a guessing game of, “is Dad smelling something real or not?” I’ll come into a room, wrinkle my nose, and ask what that bad smell is but no one else smells it. 

And in a house full of boys you know these rooms aren’t smelling like the countryside all the time. 

It gets more concrete than a smell though. My sense of taste, while not gone, will intermittently go haywire. I ate a blueberry the other day and was convinced it was a salt lick. 

I had french fries that I was 100% sure had been fried in lemon dish soap. But after having all the kids and my wife taste both the blueberries and the soap (I mean fries) my taste buds were voted down unanimously 

Protip: once you have half a dozen family members you have about as effective of a sample group as the majority of media surveys and can verify scientific truth in your own home. They aren’t a representative sample, but neither are most of the ones in the media. 

Anyway, smelling odors that aren’t there is the reverse of the well-documented parenting symptom of not smelling odors that are there. You go nose deaf in such an odiferous environment as a kid filled house. Gas, diapers, bathrooms, dirty laundry, lost sippy cups of milk — the list of odor producing items is endless. 

This may not be as bad at our house (but I supposed I wouldn’t know) since we get tons of fresh air in the house throughout the day because five of the six boys are afflicted with Ican’tshutthedooritis. The sixth can’t open a door yet but I suspect he will have it too. 

So between the intermittent phantom smells (and tastes) and the constant barrage of boy smells, I can’t tell if my olfactory sense is being gaslighted, deaf, or justly offended. Which, if I really think about it, is really the case for all my senses after long-term exposure to the boys.

Oh well, you know what they say: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And then just hope you can taste it.