Half Brain

Numbers have always given me fits. I don't know if it is because there was always a lot of anxiety in our family around math or if it is just that the left half of my brain doesn't work well. Mother used to drill my brother for hours on his multiplication tables. I can still see her sitting on the floor opposite Ray, flipping the 4 x 6 cards over to reveal the answers on the back of them. Ray would be sweating bullets, worried that he would get scolded for not knowing the answer to one of them. And he usually couldn't be quite fast enough for Mother.

Funny, he later was a 4.0 student in his college math classes. He could have actually been a math teacher or scientist. He's really smart. But he has trouble with the right side of his brain: reading, writing, spelling, emotions--all the things I do well at. If you could take the two of us, put us in a bag and shake us up, the end product would be someone who was quite good in most everything. But apart, we struggle in our own ways.

Some years ago when I was working as a nurse, I had to chart everything that my patients did, including their vital signs every few minutes. Every missed heartbeat, every retch (this was in the recovery room!) As the patients wheeled into my work area, I would snap up a chart and write the date and their first set of vital signs before anything else. Imagine my surprise when reviewing the chart I would see dates such as 1947, 1829, 1988. This was in 2000. I tearfully reported this to my therapist with my concern that due to our family history, I probably have early onset Alzheimers. Why else would I struggle remembering the date?

Actually, I never did have trouble with the hour or minutes. Just the year. I began to wonder if it was because I can look at my watch and see the time, look at a calendar to see what day it is, but the year is just plain recall.

Fast forward a few years. My church in St. Paul decided to have a huge potluck for me for my birthday. Being someone who always wanted to chip in, I asked if I could bring deviled eggs. Everyone loves deviled eggs and there typically are never enough on any potluck table. Sure. There were to be about 40 people there.

Great, I thought, before I slowed myself down to start calculating on paper how many eggs I'd need. There are 40 people, and since everyone loves my deviled eggs and will probably want two, I'll boil 80 eggs. Perfect. Eggs were only about $ .79 so I could pull this off, even as a graduate student.

I boiled and boiled eggs. At one point the nagging voice in the back of my head wondered why there were so many jillion eggs--somehow they seemed to be a bit many for only 40 people. Every flat surface in my kitchen was covered with hard boiled eggs. When I popped out the yolks to add mustard and other things (the deviled part), they filled up my big Pyrex bowl. Now I didn't have space to put all those 160 egg halves. This was definitely too many. But I dutifully took them by the bucketfull to my party. It was amazing--everyone loved them. They ate and ate them before it dawned on me that each egg is halved and that I really anticipated that everyone would eat two entire eggs, not two halves. Good grief.

The party planners had a good laugh about this, asking me again what my PhD was in (not math!) They took home oodles of eggs. We were just about giving them out to strangers on the street. I think I took a dozen or so (whole) eggs home.

It is humbling when part of your brain doesn't work. My students often give me these looks like they consider me to the The Great Oracle. But they don't realize yet that I'm teaching them the things that I'm good at, not the things that I can't comprehend--like number type things. It's just that it's easier to hide a left brain deficit than a right brain deficit. People are penalized for not being able to write, read, or spell, but it's not so dire if you can't add or count. So I limp on with the mass of humanity who struggle with numbers, reading, spatial skills, etc. It is hard to feel like a half wit, but in actuality, many people are. We just have nicer names for it.