by Tara Van De Mark

It sounded like the scooping of soft rocky road ice cream on a hot summer day. My pregnant belly jiggled every time. This pregnancy noise was a mystery to me until the Introduction to Breastfeeding class when the instructor tucked away her homemade plushy boob with darkened areola and shared her postpartum tips with the class. The room full of pregnant people leaned forward on their sitz bones to learn that after birth our babies’ nails will be soft from amniotic fluid, so the instructor suggested that we trim them with our teeth. That’s when I understood the noise; it was my baby scratching me from the inside.

The other pregnancy sounds I had known immediately, the popping of bath bubbles was the babies cells dividing as they floated through my fallopian tubes. The dachshund digging hurriedly to bury a bone was the blastocyst implanting in the lining of my uterus. My husband, Aaron, picked me up and twirled me around when I shared the news that we were pregnant. His cheer flashed to confusion moments later because I had no stick with two blue lines to show him, just the sounds I was hearing. With his ear to my belly he suggested we go to the doctor for official confirmation. 

Aaron held my hand during the blood draw while I closed my eyes and focused on the crinkling plastic wrap of my uterine sac forming. When they called us with the results I could barely hear his apology over the gushing amniotic fluid filling my womb like a splash park spout pouring water into a bucket. I purchased a stethoscope for Aaron so he could be more involved in the pregnancy. But when he couldn’t hear my placenta growing like synthesizer music of oyster mushrooms after rain he stopped listening.

By the first OB appointment the sounds had softened into something like a neighbor mowing their lawn. The OB’s demeanor turned clinical after she put on plastic gloves and I said it sounded similar to the rubber band stretch of my baby’s growth. With her back to me, she furiously clicked at her computer, asking about sleep, substance abuse, stress at work, self-harm, and family history. Yes, she acknowledged, pregnancy can stimulate skin pigmentation, cause brain fog, change hair and nail texture, increase olfactory senses, and cause nose bleeds, but hearing the fetus grow is impossible. She handed me a referral for a mental health specialist and asked that I make an appointment with her for further observation. I quickly changed to a practice group known for minimal medical intervention. Aaron was silent about the switch.

At the anatomy ultrasound the midwife responded with indifference when I said we were having a boy because I heard five distinct buds sprouting, two arms, two legs and a penis. Shrugging, she looked at Aaron and said, “Moms often have a sixth sense about these things.” He nodded gravely. I didn’t correct her, even though hearing is one of the five senses. Instead I chose to feel gratitude that the midwife did not make me an issue. By then Aaron had stopped asking and so I had stopped telling him about the pregnancy sounds. Instead he spent his free time in stores with names like “Rock-a-bye Baby” purchasing monogrammed seersucker onesies and talking endlessly with store clerks about jogging stroller suspension. 

During the birth month, I woke up to a child squeezing a water balloon until it popped, the amniotic fluid soaked through my pjs. My baby came down my birth canal like a screw slowly twisting into drywall. He would pause when I needed to catch my breath as if he too could hear me. I received him myself with a last big uterine surge and brought him to my chest, the umbilical cord pulsed like a metronome between us. All was silent, an unnatural deafening like closing the door to a sound booth. I felt it first, his little chest jolted full of air, then I heard his beautiful cry, and so ended our special hearing journey. 

He latched easily and I held him snug to my chest as the midwife began her examination. She was silently unobtrusive and, except for a pause at his long fingernails embedded with red tissue, she exuded a calm that told me everything was okay. Aaron finished taking pictures with his new phone, bought for this very occasion, then hurried off to call his parents. Alone I brought my baby’s nails to my mouth and chewed as fast as I could. They scratched my throat going down.