Bink Brain, Blue Brain, my brain, baby's brain
I'm reading again. This always feels a bit like a confession, like I have given in to my abiding addiction. Around here we have given up on storing our wealth in banks and are storing our wealth in books. We'll be screwed if everyone switches over to reading only electronic forms. I have two small stacks of new books I purchased that I have not yet read, and yet, I am reading a library book. It's possible that the road to hell is paved with books. I have things I could read for school (where I work at being a student) and things I could read for work (which is schools) and here I am reading something that is not exactly either. I blame my parents really - they encouraged early reading around their house and I've just not stopped.
Anyway, the book of the moment is Pink Brain Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It by Lise Eliot Ph.d. Eliot is a neroscientist who wrote this book in part because she was frustrated about how Leonard Sax (you remember Leonard Sax) and others use discredited science of the brain to prop-up their theories about the difference between males and female. She believes that there are in fact only small differences between the brains of infant girls and boys, and that it is how they are taught, trained and raised that causes the greater ones we see in adults. She's concerned that: "the new focus on nature seems to be encouraging parents to indulge sex differences even more avidly. Boys and girls are identified in utero and the nurseries painted to match months before birth. From girls' preschool ballet lessons and makeovers to boy's peewee football, hockey, and baseball leagues, our world is in many ways more gender divided than ever."1 There will be more on the book later - yes it's true, I smell a book review coming but there was one small piece of things that caught my attention thus far and I need to comment on now.
Eliot writes, "small amounts of fetal DNA actually cross the placenta and enter a pregnant mother's bloodstream. Using probes for specific DNA sequences located on the Y chromosome, researchers have shown that they can screen a woman's blood as early as seven weeks into pregnancy and determine whether she is carrying a male fetus."2
It is fascinating to me that from seven weeks onward one can detect fetal DNA in the parent. I understood that I was inviting foreign DNA into me as part of this who pregnancy exercise, but I had only understood that I was inviting the donour's DNA in, somehow I had not understood that I was also inviting the DNA of a bran new person to colonize my blood stream. Somehow, it seems to me, that by nature of it's connection to the outside, a uterus is inside me, but also not of me, my blood stream, in contrast is a closed system, and I imagine it as mine and mine alone. So far much of my thinking has been about pregnancy as a force of change and creation for the kid, and this makes me think about it as a force of change and creation on me. I do not imagine that the small person collects all pieces of hir DNA out of the parental bloodstream before birth, and I find myself wondering how long they linger there? Will I forever carry little pieces of the small person inside me? Will I be changed at that level, unable to ever go back to who I was before? Somehow it seems fitting, and haunting, and profound. You are not just inside me kid growing, you are in my blood, lodging in places I had not expected to find you, changing me in ways I had not foreseen. I expect this really only continues.
Footnotes:
1. Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps - and What We Can Do About It, Eliot, Lise Ph.d. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York. 2009. p. 14.
2. ibid. p.22-23.
Anyway, the book of the moment is Pink Brain Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It by Lise Eliot Ph.d. Eliot is a neroscientist who wrote this book in part because she was frustrated about how Leonard Sax (you remember Leonard Sax) and others use discredited science of the brain to prop-up their theories about the difference between males and female. She believes that there are in fact only small differences between the brains of infant girls and boys, and that it is how they are taught, trained and raised that causes the greater ones we see in adults. She's concerned that: "the new focus on nature seems to be encouraging parents to indulge sex differences even more avidly. Boys and girls are identified in utero and the nurseries painted to match months before birth. From girls' preschool ballet lessons and makeovers to boy's peewee football, hockey, and baseball leagues, our world is in many ways more gender divided than ever."1 There will be more on the book later - yes it's true, I smell a book review coming but there was one small piece of things that caught my attention thus far and I need to comment on now.
Eliot writes, "small amounts of fetal DNA actually cross the placenta and enter a pregnant mother's bloodstream. Using probes for specific DNA sequences located on the Y chromosome, researchers have shown that they can screen a woman's blood as early as seven weeks into pregnancy and determine whether she is carrying a male fetus."2
It is fascinating to me that from seven weeks onward one can detect fetal DNA in the parent. I understood that I was inviting foreign DNA into me as part of this who pregnancy exercise, but I had only understood that I was inviting the donour's DNA in, somehow I had not understood that I was also inviting the DNA of a bran new person to colonize my blood stream. Somehow, it seems to me, that by nature of it's connection to the outside, a uterus is inside me, but also not of me, my blood stream, in contrast is a closed system, and I imagine it as mine and mine alone. So far much of my thinking has been about pregnancy as a force of change and creation for the kid, and this makes me think about it as a force of change and creation on me. I do not imagine that the small person collects all pieces of hir DNA out of the parental bloodstream before birth, and I find myself wondering how long they linger there? Will I forever carry little pieces of the small person inside me? Will I be changed at that level, unable to ever go back to who I was before? Somehow it seems fitting, and haunting, and profound. You are not just inside me kid growing, you are in my blood, lodging in places I had not expected to find you, changing me in ways I had not foreseen. I expect this really only continues.
Footnotes:
1. Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps - and What We Can Do About It, Eliot, Lise Ph.d. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York. 2009. p. 14.
2. ibid. p.22-23.