You Must Have Been Dropped on Your Head as a Child

by Cathy

As she's done countless times before, Ari pitter-pattered her way down our hallway last night - no doubt, half asleep as always. Since I was still up, I headed her off at the foot of the bed, where she ended up bowed over, resting her tired head.

"Come on, honey. Let me take you back to your bed," I whispered as Joe snorted awake.
"What's going on?" he mumbled with one eye closed, arm stretched out in front of him as if searching for something.
"I got this," I said, as I ushered Ari's tired little body out the door and followed her down the hallway.

Upon entering her pitch black room, I heard her stop short and lay her head on the edge of the bed. 'Poor thing is sooooo tired,' I thought to myself.

I could barely see my hand in front of my face and couldn't gauge the distance from where she was laying to her pillow, so I just scooped up her legs and swung them onto the bed and put pushed hard to shift her up and onto her pillow. Apparently, she was MUCH closer to the pillow than I thought because the next thing I heard was a loud THUD. (It reminded me of those cartoons where the bad guy is using a tree log to bust down the door of the poor victim, except the log was Ari's head and the door was the headboard.) I froze. All I could hear was the headboard reverberating in the blackness. Oh my God, was that her head?!

She attempted to whimper on and off while I frantically whispered over her head: "Are you okay? Honey?! Is your head okay?! Are. You. OKAY?!?"

She wouldn't respond and this freaked me out because I didn't know if she was too tired or if I had knocked her out. So I sat there poking, pinching and nudging her while listening up close to see if she was breathing. With every poke, pinch and nudge, she shifted and with each of those shifts came a slight, tired whimper, followed at last, by a deep sigh. She was just too plain tired to acknowledge the pain resonating in her head. Sighing in practical unison with her, I sat there, my eyes now just adjusting to the darkness, and I thought about how scary it is that in just a millisecond, a serious injury could find your child. And what's more frightening? To know that it may be YOUR fault.


This happened to me once with each of my girls: With Bella, I neglected to strap her into her playswing and she fell hard on her tiny, still-forming head and with Ari, I let her 'cry it out' in the playpen when she managed in a fit of rage to break out of her baby prison and flipped over onto her head and the floor.

Of course I had to reference these episodes when my sister, a new mom, texted me at work the other day in classic new-worried-mom mode to tell me: "The baby just whacked her head really hard against my cheekbone while I was holding her and now she's crying. Do you think she'll be okay?" After I reminded her of my episodes, my sister replied with a relieved string of LOLs.

I was literally laughing out loud recalling the incidents now and my co-worker Marie had to come into my office and asked what party she was missing. I explained to her about my sister's worry and she too now had a baby-been-dropped-on-its-head story to share. "I was holding my son Nathan and he was about one at the time and we were at the park and he was throwing a fit," she began. "He got so fussy and fidgety, that he lunged forward and leaped right out of my arms and onto the cement pavement below."

I gasped. "What did you DO!?"

"I became hysterical, crying and screaming for someone to help me because I saw blood," she recalled with worry on her face. "Luckily, the blood was coming from his nose and nothing was broken. It was such a horrible experience. But he's okay now," she added with a laugh.

It occurred to me then that every mom out there has a freak-out story about their child that they can now easily share, but perhaps were not at all proud about at the time. In fact, my parents always tell me about the time I was in the baby walker when I was one year old, and my father left the front door to our apartment wide open as he went down three flights of stairs to retrieve the mail. I unknowingly waddled after him and cartwheeled my way down those flights of stairs while still in the baby walker.

I swear I still see a slight fracture in my skull from that incident. But it's okay, because you must have been dropped on your head as a child too. I'm SURE of it.