Our Dog Knew I Was Pregnant Before the Test Did

My husband still tells this story at dinner parties and I still let him, because it is genuinely the strangest thing that has happened to us, and our dog is the hero of it, and she deserves the attention even though she pretends she does not.

Our dog is a retired racing greyhound named Willa. If you have never known a greyhound, they are the most emotionally reserved dogs on earth. They are sweet, but in a distant, cat-like way. Willa loved us on her own terms, which mostly involved lying on the couch like a fainting Victorian and occasionally deigning to be petted. She was not a cuddler. She did not follow us around. She had opinions about her personal space and she enforced them.

So the week everything changed, I noticed immediately, because it was so out of character.

It started with the nose. I would be sitting on the couch and Willa would come over and press her long nose right against my lower stomach, and hold it there, breathing in, very focused. The first time I laughed and pushed her off. She came right back. Then she started resting her head on my stomach, this dog who did not rest her head on anyone. Then she started following me from room to room, which she had never done in four years, lying down wherever I settled, always angled toward me, always with that quiet attention on my middle.

My husband noticed too. He said, only half joking, that Willa was acting like I was made of steak. I told him to stop. But it kept up, day after day, this gentle relentless attention, and after about a week of it I got a feeling I could not shake. A crazy feeling. I did not tell him. I bought a test on the way home from work and took it in the bathroom that night while he was making dinner.

Positive.

I came out holding it and I could not even talk. And Willa, I swear this is true, got up off the couch and came over and pressed her nose to my stomach again, and then looked up at me, and I sat down on the floor and cried and laughed at the same time while a greyhound stared at me like I was slow to catch up to news she had known for a week.

We had been trying for a long time. Longer than I like to say. There had been disappointments that had worn us both down. And the first living being to know it had finally worked was a dog, days before any test could have told us, because she smelled something in me changing, some shift in chemistry that human noses will never catch. The doctor later told me it is not that unusual, that dogs pick up on hormonal changes very early, that she had probably been smelling the pregnancy before I had any symptoms at all. She said it kindly but plainly. I did not care how ordinary it was to science. To me it felt like a miracle with a wet nose.

Willa stayed close to me the entire pregnancy. She stopped being aloof, at least with me. She would lie against my growing stomach in the evenings and I would feel the baby move and Willa would feel it too, I think, because her ears would flick. My husband started calling her the security detail.

When we brought our daughter home, I was braced, the way you are warned to be, for the dog to be jealous or nervous. Willa walked over, sniffed the baby very carefully, the same focused way she had sniffed my stomach months before, and then lay down beside the bassinet. She appointed herself. For the first two years of my daughter's life, Willa slept beside her, moved when she moved, watched over her with that same reserved greyhound devotion.

Willa is old now, gray around the muzzle, slower. My daughter is five and does not remember a day without her. And I have never once been able to shake the feeling that Willa knew my daughter was coming before I did, and had already decided, before any of us, that this new person was hers to look after.