I wrote about falling with my baby. Now other moms email me

The emails always contain the same question: How is he?

He is my younger son. The people asking about him have never met him. They have never met me. They are emailing because they are hoping to find some comfort during one of the most painful times in their lives: After they've fallen with their babies.

Sometimes those parents write from the hospital. Sometimes they write from home. Always they write after they have scrolled, clicked and read through one worst-case scenario after another.

At some point during their online search, they find a story I wrote in 2015 about falling with my son. It ran under the headline, "The day I broke my baby."

In retrospect, I wish I had chosen a different headline. The word "broke" feels so devastating, so complete. But that's how I felt after I fell in a CVS parking lot during a rainstorm with my newborn son strapped to my chest - devastated, completely.

"There are things I wish I didn't know," I wrote in that 2015 piece. "I wish I didn't know that companies make tiny braces, small enough to hold necks no bigger than a wrist. I wish I didn't know that when babies are transported in an ambulance, they are stripped of their powdery-smelling clothes and strapped to adult-sized gurneys, naked. I wish I didn't know that little bodies that are supposed to eat every two hours can go more than 12 hours without a drop of milk and be satiated by a pacifier dipped in sugar water. The day I broke my baby started like every other since his birth three weeks earlier - with me admiring his perfection."

I almost didn't write that piece.

At the hospital, I was so worried about my son that I wouldn't let anyone even clean my bloody knees. I was told he had a linear skull fracture and we would have to stay overnight so that doctors could determine if he would need surgery. He didn't, thankfully. After we got home, I wanted to take all the traumatic memories of that day and tuck them into the deepest, darkest nook of my brain. Since I couldn't rewind time and make the fall not happen, trying to forget it seemed the best alternative.

But as the months passed, and I watched him grow, I couldn't stop thinking about what I had heard from hospital staff members. We initially went to the emergency room at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington because it was closest, and from there, we were taken by ambulance to Children's National Hospital in Washington.

At both places, doctors and nurses told me that these types of incidents happen more often than anyone talks about. At a time when I felt most alone, they let me know that I wasn't.

"It happens a lot," John Myseros, a neurosurgeon at Children's National and the doctor who attended to my son, said when I spoke to him recently about infant head injuries. He said he sees infants with linear skull fractures, the type my son had, at least once a week and that the vast majority of those are the result of falls: "They are falls out of cribs. They are falls off of beds. They are falls out of grocery carts at Walmart or Target . . . They are parents who fall themselves with their kids in their arms. That happens a fair amount."

There are, of course, also infant head injuries that occur because of the intentional actions of adults. Those are criminal acts and deserving of charges. But those weren't the kind I reached out to Myseros to talk about. I wanted to ask him about the accidental kind that leave parents filled with guilt and worry and emailing strangers in search of comfort they can't find online.

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Myseros said that while some infant head injuries require surgery and have serious medical outcomes, most don't. He also said he was not surprised that parents don't find much encouraging information while Googling.

"The problem with most online searches is the people who write the stuff are also trying to protect themselves, so they are going to be on the aggressive side about bad things that can happen," he said. "Is little Jill going to have problems in algebra in seventh grade, well, I don't know and I can't speculate and I can't guess. But the chances that there are going to be any problems at all with development, neurological development, just from a skull fracture is very unlikely."

I decided to write about my experience in 2015 to let other parents who might find themselves in those anguishing moments know they weren't alone. What I didn't expect was how many would need to hear that. Seven years have passed since that piece published, and I continue to get emails from parents across the country. Most have been mothers, and more than a few have described punishing themselves.

"This weekend, I tripped and fell walking into our family room, and in the process, dropped my almost 4-month old son," reads one email. The mother who wrote it said her family went to the emergency room and a doctor determined that everything looked normal. "On Monday at a follow-up with the pediatrician's office, they, to put it plainly, felt the bump, freaked, and sent him for an X-ray, followed by a CT. It showed a linear fracture, and I felt like the worst mom in the world."

"Of course, thanks to Dr. Google, I have felt more shame (so many articles that say 'Likely no fracture or other brain injury! It's not common!') but came across your article, and it has made me feel better," she wrote. "I wish our sons didn't have to go through the experience of a skull fracture, but I do have comfort knowing I'm not the only one."

Another email came from a woman who described herself as a "worried mother of a daughter who had a similar fall 3 days before."

"We have checked with doctors and they sent us home after keeping her overnight just like your son," she wrote. "I just wanted to check how is he doing now?"

How is he?

I have come to expect that question. They are asking about my son, but really, they are asking about their own children. They want to know if he is OK, so that they can know whether their children have a chance at being OK - tomorrow, next month, seven years from now.

I tell them all the same thing. I tell them that the baby I wrote about is now a curly-haired boy who loves to draw, reads above grade level and makes his brother laugh harder than anyone. I tell them that he amazes me constantly.

"When I was in the hospital with him, I wish someone had told me that would be the case," I wrote to the woman who expressed feeling like the worst mom in the world. "I would have probably forgiven myself a lot sooner. Please be gentle to yourself."

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