7 Signs of Ageing: "Babies' Heads"

Yesterday I was telling my mother about that Welshman who dropped a big TV on his 4-year-old daughter's head, because I know she loves stuff like that. We agreed he obviously wasn’t careful enough with his Welsh TV carrying. But I’m sure she’s the only person whose first thought was “do you think he did it on purpose?”. I think she likes the idea of most things being a murder mystery. Maybe it's her age. But I changed the subject, remembering the last time we discussed a dead child’s head.

It was the story of a woman, wrongly imprisoned for killing a two-year-old. At the retrial, they concluded he had various brain disorders, not only resulting in his death but causing him to have an over-sized head and a droopy eye for months prior. She did the usual, “anyone can see he looks weird”, “social services are rubbish and possibly hate babies.” But what makes my mother hilarious occasionally is when she is deadly serious whilst saying something totally absurd, which then turns to anger when I laugh rather than taking her seriously. This was the case when, following the story of the droopy-eyed, big-headed dead baby, she turned to me and said, “thinking about it now, there were a lot of really big headed kids everywhere when I was young.” And finding that humorous only made her more serious and forceful. “Well you ask your dad! Go on, ask him if there weren't lots of kids with big head when we were children!!!”. Understandably, this made me laugh more rather than less, which caused her to respond irately, exploding with an angry stare and the very odd put-down of “LISTEN!! I’ve seen more big headed babies than you ever have!!!”

Babies' head’s, regardless of size, get my mother in trouble all the time. Because when she sees a friend's newborn child or grandchild, if she thinks it’s a nice looking baby she always says something like, “really though, I’m not just saying it, he really is a lovely looking baby. Because you know, you do get some pretty ugly babies.” But the problem occurs when the baby isn't lovely looking and the proud parent showing the baby off has heard my mother's reaction to a lovely looking baby.... which she doesn't repeat for their baby.... Thus they take her palpable lack of enthusiasm as a proclamation of disgust towards their ugly baby. No amount of “aaww, look at him” compensates for the awkwardness. Thinking about it now though, my mother says very little when she looks at baby photos of me.

I know I've spoken about babies dying of brain disorders and having their head's crushed by massive TVs, but not all tales about babies' heads are so comical. Try explaining to my mother that, just because a story about a baby that had a little foot in a tumour in it’s brain briefly mentioned stem cells when talking about teratomas, doesn't mean stem cell research was repsonisble for it's brain tumour. “See, bloody stem cells...” Seriously...

And don’t get me started on what she thinks about babies with 2 heads or 2 faces. But we did both agree the best photo in a slideshow of ‘medical marvels’ was that of the world’s smallest bodybuilder. Although I dispute that, if he isn’t one of the smallest people in the world, the fact he has a gym membership makes him a medical marvel.

[Question You Must Answer In The Form Of A Comment:] When still intact and attached to a living baby, do you think babies' heads smell nice?