Crazy person vs bad mother: a tale of two Ellies

Perhaps not surprisingly, my paranoia about environmental toxins has not gotten better with motherhood. My level of worry over my own and – more importantly, Emerson’s – exposure to pesticides, BPA, PVC, PBDE, phthlatates and other endocrine disruptors found in plastics, mercury, lead, electro-magnetic fields, pharmaceutical residue hormones and anti-depressants in water, etc etc has only increased. And while science has CLEARLY and REPEATEDLY shown how dangerous and damaging these chemicals are, I sometimes feel like the ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD who is trying to protect myself and my young son from them.

As you can imagine, this is quite hard. Especially while I am also attempting to not seem like a maniac.

I will resist the temptation to tell you why I AM RIGHT, and to share my long list of feared substances and the ailments they have been shown to cause. And I will further attempt to keep this blog post from getting too angry at all of the people who have made all of the terrible, selfish, greedy, short-sighted, foolish choices that have led to our environment now being an unescapable toxic soup. We live here people! What’s wrong with you!?!

My generally quite sane husband brings me out of my paranoid fits by reminding me: having an insane person for a mother is probably worse for Emerson in the long run than drinking out of a plastic sippy cup. Let’s focus on the big stuff and try not to worry too much about everything else.

And he is completely right. Though sometimes it is hard to know what the big stuff is and which stuff is small enough not to worry about. Here’s my problem: I feel like my duty as a mother is to protect my son from things that I know could hurt him and I feel like I have good information about what some of those things are but it is actually really hard to get enough information about products to know which ones have the bad stuff in them and which don’t. It’s so insidious! Hence the hyper-vigilance and general suspicion of everything.

I am the opposite of the mothers you see wiping down their children and all of their belongings with anti-bacterial wipes every 20 min, but I can identify with the instinct that is making them do it (even though I think they are misinformed*). We both fear ‘invisible threats’ and are compelled to remove them from the vicinity of our children whatever it takes.

In my better moments, I am able to let go of the anger and be at peace with what it means to live in our world at this point in time. There is a also lot to be grateful for in this crazy modern world of ours.

*I personally think it is time to ban the use of “antibacterial” products except in health care facilities where they are really needed. I saw an ad for antibacterial undershirts recently. Clearly this has gotten out of hand. And there are real and serious consequences if science is to be believed.