We had heard about flat head syndrome, or plagiocephaly. Apparently, your baby can get a flat head if he lies down on his back for too long, which seems unfair since all babies lie down on their backs for hours and hours every day. Even worse, if you turn your baby’s head to one side to prevent a flat head and you keep it on that one side for too long, his facial features are in danger of growing into that side, giving him a sideways face and making him look like a goddamn mutant. This was supposedly a real threat, even though I had never seen a grown adult with his face growing out of the side of his head like Man-E-Faces from the old He-Man cartoons.
We arrived home from the doctor’s office with our son and I began freaking out that his head was misshapen and that I had no good method of preventing it, short of rotating him every five minutes like a chicken cooking on a spit. The doctor advised us to alternate between feeding him with our left hand and our right so that his muscles would grow in balance and he would be symmetrical. Ever try feeding a child with your nondominant hand? It feels like you’re feeding him with a cadaver’s hand.
I stared at my son and I thought back to the time when I was waiting in line at a deli. The man in front of me was an attractive black man who happened to have the flattest head I had ever seen. It was stick straight in the back, and the crown of his head sloped up to it and formed a ridge at the back of his skull. He looked like a ski jump. I kept worrying that my son would grow up to be a ski jump.
“I still think he looks fine,” my wife said.
“Maybe his head is deceiving us,” I said. “Maybe it looks great to us because we’re his parents and our brains have warped the image. Maybe to everyone else he looks like, you know, a griddle.”
“I’m sure the neurologist will say he’s okay and that’ll be the end of it.”
I kept running my hands along the boy’s head, checking for imperfections as if I were a Third Reich phrenologist. I wanted to make sure there was adequate room for a fine brain that could perform math problems and come up with quick comebacks to dickish eighth graders. I put him down in the bouncy seat in the living room and my wife immediately chastised me.
“You can’t put him down.”
“I can’t?”
“The doc says you should try to hold him a lot. It keeps the pressure off his head.”
“But he’s heavy.”
“Just do it.”
I took him out of the bouncy seat and held him, and held him, and held him. It’s a fact that for every minute you hold a child, it triples in mass. By the tenth minute, I felt like I was holding up a truck. I had him against my body and the front of his onesie was soaked in my filthy chest sweat. I think he might have swallowed a chest hair.
“I can’t hold this thing any longer,” I told my wife.
“I’ll take him.”
“You’ll have to hold him all day, because I have a bad back.”
“Oh, that is so weak.”
“What? It’s true! I am medically endangering myself by holding that child aloft. And if I hold him for fifteen minutes and my spine breaks and you’re left without Mr. Handsome Helper . . . Why, you’re up shit creek, you are!”
My daughter walked into the room. “Can I hold him?”
“Oh, honey. That’s very sweet of you,” I said. “But, no, you’ll drop him on his face.”
“I looked up flat head syndrome online,” my wife said to me. “Do you know how they fix it?”
“No.”
“A helmet.”
“Oh, no. Not a helmet.”
“And they have to keep the helmet on for twenty-three hours a day.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Jesus.”
When your child is in danger of having a flat head, you quickly learn that the money-grubbing executives at Big Helmet have gone to great lengths to make baby helmets seem like a normal, even fashionable thing. The helmets we looked up online were all designed to look like skateboarding equipment, decorated with skulls and guitars and diamonds, all kinds of KEWL and XTREEEM shit that will help a parent think, This is cool and hip! rather than, GET THAT FUCKING HELMET OFF MY BABY.
I looked at my son and thought about what a helmet would look like on him. I thought about all the looks he’d get. We live in an age of remarkable sensitivity, where other parents go to great lengths to appear tolerant and accepting of ALL children, not merely their own. But deep down, we’re just as judgmental and catty a species as we were decades ago. The patina of niceness almost makes it worse. I thought about other parents looking at the boy—and he was such a beautiful, sensitive little boy—saying something nice about his race car helmet, and then going home and spitting out their real feelings. That poor Magary boy, crawling around with a helmet on. I wonder if they’ll have to tether him to a post in the yard.