BRAAAAINS.

Well, this blog has been dark for a bit because I have been fussed about my kid. This is nothing new. I am often fussed about my kids. I am a born fusser.

Two weeks ago, my daughter was downhill skiing – the last run at the end of a long day down a not-so-difficult slope. And she decided to jump on some kind of box or obstacle or whatever, because she felt like being a hot shot. It was a trick she’d done a hundred times. And she face planted on the ice. Hard. She was wearing a helmet, thank goodness, but brains are delicate. Ridiculously so.

My husband brought her home, gash-lipped and swollen-cheeked. The side of her face had swelled to the size of a softball. The cut across her lip was not infected, but it would be soon. And she had a concussion. And I went bananas. Like, I was so anguished at the injuries on my offspring, that I could hardly even see straight. Or think straight. Or even walk straight. I am only just recovering.

The brain is a funny thing – all mush and squish and water. The consistency of tofu. The color of porridge. And yet. It organizes the mechanization of the the organism – powering motion and control, balance and awareness, analysis, planning and synthesis. How is it that something that fragile is responsible for the miracle of thinking, wondering and imagination? How is it that it only takes three pounds of delicate goo to create Calculus? Or write the Divine Comedy? Or design the Forbidden City?

My kids are smart. Way smarter than I am or was. And their brains are precious to me. My daughter – math genius, painter, voracious reader, novel writer, aspiring engineer/comic book artist, opera singer – is at this moment in her life when her intelligence and talents are revealing themselves to her. Where she is seeing for the first time what her brain can do and where her brain can take her. Where she is taking ownership of all that she is. And the thought – the very thought – of a disruption in that was, frankly, frightening to me.

So I started learning about brains.

Did you know, for example, that the brain is 70% water? Our thoughts are fish, I think. They are bright schools of flashing fin and scale and eye. They crowd the waves and plunge in the depths and strike out on their own. They have teeth. They have speed and agility. And sometimes they are sharks.

Did you know that the first sense that we develop in utero is not smell, as I have so very often erroneously told my students, but touch? We develop our sense of touch at eight weeks gestation, and the first place we experience touch is on our lips and on our cheeks. A kiss, I think. We are ready to kiss before we can kiss, we are ready to be kissed before we ever see another face. The first thing we kiss is water – just as our thoughts live in water. Our first moment of love and thought is experienced alone.

When awake, the human brain uses about the same amount of energy to power a light bulb. We don’t actually have to be particularly bright in order to do this. Dull and tiresome people are just as shiny. This is good to remember. Water and light, particle and wave. We are many things at once. 

When we learn something new, the structure of our brains changes. This change is visible on scans. We are flux. We are change. We are the tides of the ocean and the wandering river. We are water droplets in the air, dispersing and gathering and dispersing again. We are a gathering storm.

When a person is deprived of food, their neurons begin to eat themselves. This can happen very quickly. This is the reason why we become foggy and stupid when we accidentally miss lunch, and why it is a terrible idea to ever go on a diet. We are cannibals. We are insatiable. We are the Worm Ouroboros, devouring ourselves forever. 

When I took my daughter to the doctor, he did his tests and pronounced a concussion. He gave her a serious look. “Concussions are no joke,” he said. “You need to let yourself turn off for a little while. No school. No homework. No reading. No screens. Just you and a dark room and your eyes on the wall, kiddo. You need to let that brain heal.” He explained what a concussion was and how they worked – how she had two bruises on her brain and not just one – a bruise on the front, and a bruise on the back. He explained that, just like a sprained ankle, the brain heals best in a state of rest.

“Brain rest,” he said. “That’s what they call it. And I’m not going to lie to you: it’s really, really boring. You just have to let yourself do nothing. All day.” She stared at him as though he had asked her to swallow a truck full of sand.

“Can’t I just get a new one?” she asked. “A brain, I mean. Surely you have extra brains in jars, sitting around somewhere.”

The doctor assured her that he did not, but Ella was skeptical. “What’s the point of science if we can’t put our brains in jars and swap them out when we feel like it?”

(She denies saying this, by the way. I assure you that she did. Plus she is an unreliable narrator of her life, currently, because of the concussion. Or, at least she was then. And anyway, this is my blog. So.)

Fortunately, her teachers take concussions seriously, and were extremely amenable to flexibility. They like her brain, too, and were happy to have her stay home and rest. “Better to have her rest at home for an extra day,” one teacher said, “than to send her to school before she’s ready, and have her feel so lousy that she has to go home anyway.”

And so we did. But still I worry. I found out yesterday that she has been carrying her stuff around all week because she couldn’t remember her locker combination. And I notice that she is tired a lot more. I don’t want to foist my worries on her – she’s got enough worries of her own. And so I bite my tongue and fuss.

About three years ago, I was out for a run and slipped on the ice, knocking myself unconscious. I don’t think I was out for very long – in fact I know I was not, given that it was incredibly cold, and I hadn’t frozen yet. But it didn’t even occur to me to get myself checked out, nor did it occur to me that I might have a concussion. But I was super tired for weeks after. And I had atrocious headaches, the likes of which I had never experienced before or since. And I did find myself forgetting stuff. And three months later, I fell into one of the worst depressions of my life – and I’m only just now finding my feet.

Did I have a concussion? Did that concussion make me more prone to outsized sadness and anxious thinking? Would I have avoided later complications had I given myself space and time to heal when it was necessary to heal? Perhaps. All I know is that I will take no such risks with my child.

My daughter is now at her rehearsal at Project Opera (the youth training program at Minnesota Opera – a wondrous organization), and things are getting back to normal. I’m still encouraging her to limit her screen time, and to try to maximize her sleep every day. And she is very good at noticing that she is more tired than usual. She lays down for a little bit when she gets home from school. She turns in early. She is giving herself permission to relax. This is a good thing.

I hate it when my kids get hurt. I hate it. In the meantime, I’ll do what I can to protect that beautiful brain. It is ever so precious to me. Of course it is.