Free Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood by Drew Magary Page B

special enough to have Dr. Ferris be the one checking on little Sally’s vaginitis. But the man was unavailable one week when the boy needed a checkup, and so we had to settle for Dr. Dergan instead.
    Dr. Dergan examined our son from head to toe, and we asked her all the usual questions.
Do you have some kind of magic way we can get him to sleep better? His shit looks like it has pearls in it. Is that okay? Where does he rank on the height and weight chart? Is he taller and heavier and therefore better than all the other kids?
Dr. Dergan answered our questions dutifully and then examined the boy’s head.
    “Hmm. Looks a little flat in the back.”
    “Excuse me?” I asked.
    “Nothing alarming,” she said. Doctors will never tell you any symptom is alarming unless there’s an arrow sticking out of your chest. “Just a little bit flat. You might consider sending him to a specialist at Children’s just to make sure.”
    She left, and my wife and I grabbed the boy’s head, scrutinizing it obsessively.
    “I guess it’s kinda flat,” I said. I took my hand and slid it up from the back of his neck to the top of his cranium. “See how it doesn’t stick out after the neck? Maybe that’s what she’s talking about.”
    “I don’t know. He looks fine to me,” my wife said.
    “Yeah. I mean, he has HAIR. The hair sticks out the back. You wouldn’t even notice the back of his head.”
    “You don’t think he has flat head syndrome, do you?”
    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