We were somewhere over Greenland when I heard my 10-month-old start screaming from the back of the plane. My husband had taken him to the bathroom to change his diaper while I remained in our seats with our sleepy 7-year-old.
As passengers’ heads started to turn toward the bathroom door, I felt embarrassed but not necessarily panicked (yet) — maybe he was just throwing a tantrum about the diaper change.
Then, suddenly, my husband was hurrying down the aisle toward me, toddler in arms. “I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice. “I didn’t mean to. I hit his head.”
My heart sank.
He had been hospitalized before
We already had some PTSD when it came to our baby son Sunny’s health and safety. At just 5 months old, he had been hospitalized with a bad case of RSV. One night, his coughs had turned into heaves as his tiny chest struggled to breathe, and we rushed him to the ER. From there, they took him in an ambulance to a pediatric hospital, where they suctioned his lungs.
I’ll never forget the look on my 7-year-old’s face as he watched his little brother get taken away in the ambulance. He begged for Sunny to come back.
Sunny did come back, but I don’t think I realized until I was 30,000 feet above Greenland just how tenuous I felt Sunny’s continued presence was. Now 10 months old, he was a strong and cheerful baby — but he was still a baby. Fragile, helpless.
It was an accident but I panicked
As my husband placed him in my lap on that flight, Sunny looked up at me with wide, wet eyes, screaming. “Head, mama! Head!” he cried. I could see the skin of his forehead already starting to change colors, forming a bright bump. I could have murdered my husband right then and there. I kept thinking, how could he be so careless?
Of course, it was an accident that could have happened to anyone: a parent scrambling to change a squirmy toddler’s dirty diaper inside a too-tiny airplane bathroom. The parent’s spatial reasoning being not his sharpest due to, you know, being exhausted on a long international flight with a baby, he steps with quickness and confidence through the bathroom door without any idea that in doing so, he’s whacking that baby’s soft forehead sharply on the frame.
It didn’t help that I was working as a parenting editor at the time and was immersed daily in an excess of news stories and studies about all things baby. I knew very well how serious a head injury can be in children. I had read story after story about head bumps gone terribly wrong.
And in the moment, as my sweet toddler sobbed in my lap, those stories were all that filled my head.
I obsessively monitored him
As we landed in Iceland, our destination, I tried to watch for any of the telltale signs of distress in Sunny: nonstop crying, vomiting multiple times, noticeable changes in body movements, sleeping more than normal, or having problems waking up. Luckily, Sunny was free from almost all of the above, minus sleep changes, which could easily be chalked up to jet lag.
Still, I continued to obsess over monitoring Sunny through the entirety of our trip — as we explored geysers and waterfalls and ate cardamom buns and fermented shark. I spent sleepless nights at our Airbnb listening to Sunny breathe and annoying him by waking him up to ensure that he did, indeed, wake up. And, perhaps worst of all, I continued to quietly blame and resent my husband for the injury; I could hardly look at him the whole week.
My kids, however, forgot the injury by day two in Reykjavik. Sunny was running around, swimming in thermal pools, and playing with Icelandic tots.
Ultimately, Sunny had a far better time on our trip than I did, and the injury to his head ended up being milder than the injury to my psyche as a mom. Sunny’s forehead bump had yellowed into a faded memory by the flight home. As our boys played peek-a-boo in their seats, shouting “halló!” at each other (pretty much the only Icelandic they had picked up), I was finally ready to hold my husband’s hand again.
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