My Concussion: A Love Story

I. Fall 

I slip on ice, the back of my head smashing into my concrete driveway. My brain rattles, and then there you are: my concussion. You hitch yourself to me, an invader in my head, and I plunge into dark water so deep that I can no longer care for my seven-year-old daughter. I can no longer drive her to school, or wash her clothes, or pour milk over her bowl of cereal. She sees me start a sentence and then forget what I am saying. She sees that I can’t make the simplest of decisions, like when my husband asks what I want for breakfast. She sees how taking a shower leaves me resting for hours.

I watch her blow an eyelash off the tip of her finger. She turns to smile at me, and I hate that she is wasting her wish on me, when it should be about first crushes, or scoring soccer goals, or getting the new pair of earrings she wants. 

Months later, I hear her wail to my husband: I want Momma back. When will she be back?

I hear these wails while I clutch the wall outside her bedroom. Something like guilt rots in my gut, but I can barely access that feeling, any feeling. They have been taken from me. By you. My concussion. I twist my hands together. They are too shaky to tuck her brown curls behind her ear.

II. Fight

I find a crumpled piece of paper under my daughter’s bed that reads I’m scared Momma’s going to die, and all I want is to get rid of you. I submit myself to needles in my head, and strain my eyeballs with vision exercises, and breathe into hyperbaric oxygen chambers, and lie on mats with pulsed electromagnetic fields. My scalp is peeled back to transect damaged nerves, and I stay still while a silver knob beats against my C1 vertebra, and watch lasers beam red into my neck, and let some guy with garlic breath tape a metal device to my forehead. I try everything I can, but you refuse to leave. You refuse to let me be a mother again.

I throw books at the walls, but really, I am throwing them at you. When I have no more books, I let myself crumple to the ground, my breaths shallow and furious. You have pilfered too much from me, and I beg you to make a deal: If you leave, I promise I will be a better mother. I will work less. I will make healthier meals. I will let her get that pet rat. I promise, I promise, I promise.

III. Forgive

Two years pass, and I discover new therapies that help. I meet other mothers who suffer from unrelenting concussions. I stop trying to work. You no longer haunt me every second of every day. I go to one of my daughter’s soccer games. I finish a bird puzzle with her.

Then, when she is nine, my daughter falls off a playground structure. A mother should know what to do when she sees her child sobbing in pain, but my head is cloudy, stuck. My legs are frozen. Snakes wriggle in my stomach as I watch blood drool down my child’s temple, turning her hair red and sticky. The words finally come to me: emergency room.

At the hospital, we are ushered into the same exam room where I waited after hitting my own head. My daughter needs a stitch, the nurse tells us, but doesn’t even check for signs of a concussion. I demand—too sharply, too loudly—a neuro screening. I can’t have my child become someone like me, someone who lost herself to darkness for years. The nurse huffs and my daughter shakes.

The tests are normal, but my daughter is on the verge of tears once the concussion exam is over. I clench my fists. For the first time, I notice that her fingers are clenched into balls, too. I uncurl my hands and sit on the exam table next to her, wrap my arms around her. I feel the weight of her head against my chest. Her soft head that was once inside me. She places her warm hand over mine.

Perhaps this is nobody’s fault. I remember that night in the hallway, when you made me walk away from my sobbing daughter, when my hands shook too hard to touch her. Maybe it’s okay that I had to walk away back then. Because you can’t stop me from cradling her now.

I stare down at her long eyelashes. Her exhalations smell like hot apples. I hold my daughter. I am holding her with you.