Boy, you think you're a careful, concerned parent doing everything anyone could to ensure that your child will never contract autism or cancer or any of the other scary diseases that seem to lurk everywhere in our toxic world, and along come abundant assurances that you could be doing so very much more. It's enough to make a tired mom collapse in a puddle of tears and resignation.
Trying to Feed My Child
First, on Tuesday the New York Times (my source of all that happens outside my teeny, tiny world of mothering a toddler) reported that bisphenol-A, or BPA, a chemical used in polycarbonate plastic, is increasingly being shown to leach into food and liquids. When ingested by rat pups (the article called them "rat pups," which sounds a little bit too cute for me to handle, even if their torture is helping my child's health) in amounts apparently proportionate to what, say, our children would ingest from drinking their milk out of polycarbonate bottles, BPA caused changes in the mammary and prostate tissues of the pups, suggesting an increased risk of cancer. It also caused some of the female pups to experience accelerated puberty. (The full piece is available on the New York Times website and is called "A Hard Plastic is Raising Hard Questions." I'm not able to put the direct link here.)
Mike heard about the BPA risk in baby bottles a few months ago, and we immediately switched to a brand called Born Free, which is BPA-free. I try not to think about the fact that for over a year of Jake's life he drank out of Aveda bottles, which are supposedly some of the worst BPA-offenders. (Almost all baby bottles, by the way, contain BPA.)
Yesterday's Times article, however, warned that BPA is also present in the epoxy lining of almost all canned foods. The organic canned peas I've been regularly putting in Jake's lunch are apparently some of the most BPA-infused because they are cooked in the can, and the heat releases more of the chemical.
"What am I going to feed him?" I wailed. It's already hard enough negotiating Jake's allergies, likes and dislikes, propensity to grow bored with any food he is served too often no matter how tasty it once was, and belligerent insistence that he feed himself (meaning his food must be thick enough to make it from bowl to mouth in a wobbly spoon or served in pieces big enough for him to pick up and small enough for him to fit in his mouth). I believe deeply in the importance of eating food that isn't overly processed, too salty, or laden with high fructose corn syrup. And I gave up on buying non-organic produce when Mike asked me where the cantaloupe and yummy seedless watermelon I recently bought came from (Guatemala and Mexico, respectively). The pesticides used in these countries, he informed me, are greatly harming the health of both the agricultural workers and local songbirds.
Maybe we should just stop reading the New York Times. But of course as parents our instinct is just the opposite -- to hunt down every bit of scientific information that might bear on our child's health. We are particularly suspicious of chemical compounds that haven't been sufficiently tested. Hence, Jake weathered the last flu season without a flu shot because by the time I was out of excuses for not giving him one the only doses left in town were not thimerosol-free.
Just to drive home the point that feeding him is going to get harder rather than easier, at nine o'clock last night -- soon after I had successfully cobbled together a lunch for school today that fit within the increasingly constrained diet guidelines we have set -- Jake had a bad reaction to the local, all-natural sausage we bought for him at Saturday's farmer's market. I had been counting on that sausage to be a staple of his meals for the next week. But his evil-smelling diaper; sore, red bottom; and angrily splotchy cheeks disabused me of that notion.
It's a good thing we had a bag of organic peas in the freezer. So far, I haven't read anything dangerous about them.
Caring for My Child's Cough
Although I carried a healthy, organic, highly edible, and -- as far as I know -- carcinogen-free lunch to Jake's school today, I got a dose of you're-not-doing-enough from another quarter.
"I sure wish he'd get over his cough," one of Jake's teachers said to me. Just by way of conversation, of course. "He's had it for three months already."
Jake's cough is a bit of a sore point with me and Mike. We have wrangled with various members of the daycare staff over its source, severity, and contagiousness. On all three fronts, our pediatrician has assured us there is nothing to worry about. As far as we can tell, he basically has post-nasal drip. Every time it gets better, he contracts another daycare cold, and it starts again. Short of giving him steroids, there's not much to be done.
I explained the outlines of this diagnosis to Jake's teacher.
"It's down here," she insisted, pointing to her upper chest. "When he goes down for nap, you can hear him trying to clear it."
I promised her I had recently seen Jake's pediatrician three times in the space of a little over a week. The first time had been to secure the doctor's note telling Jake's daycare that the rash on his face was not contagious. (It was, in fact, the result of the new laundry detergent they had begun using to wash the sheets on which Jake slept at nap time.) A few days later, he returned for his fifteen-month physical. The third time, I merely called the doctor to make sure that if his lungs were clear the first two times she listened to them, there was no reason to have her listen to them again.
"Well," said his teacher, shaking her head as if to simultaneously indicate how wrong I was and how sorry she felt for Jake, "it just can't be good for him."
"It just can't be good for him." The phrase haunted me on my walk home, driving my feet faster against the pavement as if stomping out the tears threatening in the corners of my eyes. You'd think by now I'd be impervious to other people's prescriptions for how to care for my own child; you'd think we all would be after over a year of hearing them, as we all do. But coming on the heels of the BPA news and the belief taking root that my sixteen-month-old boy would soon contract prostate cancer, it was all a little too much to bear.
We could, I have concluded, spend our entire lives trying to protect our kids. Some people do. And none of us will ever be completely successful.
Living Healthy but Living in this World
Increasingly over the years I have been practicing yoga, I have come to see how what I eat affects me. Some of the effects are immediately apparent. Caffeine makes me crazy. Too much cow's milk on an empty stomach makes me unbearably sleepy. More than a "Melissa sized" glass of wine tends to make me headachey and dehydrated. And, just in case you don't already think I'm a little bit crazy, I swear that wheat makes me irritable. (Even more irritable than not being able to eat so many foods.)
Other effects of what I eat are more distant but equally important to me. I worry deeply about pesticides and chemically engineered food, especially as I look at the frightening number of people I or my friends have known who have contracted brain cancer before their fortieth birthdays. I can't help but care about the agricultural workers who grow my food, the animals and habitats affected by agriculture and overfishing, and the people all over the world who are starving right now in part because of U.S. politics. And I care, as well, about the animals raised to be eaten, and how inhumanely the vast majority are treated during their short lifetimes.
And so I eat carefully. I am, for example, one of those people who will pay more for the word "organic" on the label even when Consumer Reports tells me it's probably not necessary. If you play the odds, they are probably right, but I rejected statistics a long time ago. Who cares if there's a ninety percent chance eating nonorganic bananas is as safe as eating organic ones? (In case you're wondering, I did not read that statistic in the New York Times. I made it up.) Just because what we know right now suggests the chemicals those bananas have absorbed aren't harmful, there's nothing to say we won't find out differently one day.
More to the point, I don't care. I don't want those chemicals in my body. And I surely don't want them in my son's.
But here's the thing: There are chemicals in my body. I ingest them every day, not only in food, but in the air I breathe, the clothes I wear, the things my body touches. Because I live in the world.
Jake lives in the same world. His sixteen-month-old baby body is no longer clean and pure. It probably never was. After all, I lived out my pregnancy within a few miles of the Port of Long Beach, within the circumference of what one map Mike saw called "the circle of death." Did I cry about this fact more than once? Sure I did. But we didn't move.
Practicing yoga extends far off the mat where we practice asanas. It extends to what we eat, how mindfully we eat it, what other substances we put in our bodies, and how we try to practice ahimsa, or non-harming, toward other living creatures as well.
But, as the Buddha preached, we can't all live the sort of ascetic lives that can lead to enlightenment. Even at the end of the 6th century B.C.E., when the Buddha lived, it wasn't possible. Imagine what he'd have to say about life in the 21st century.
As important to yoga as treating our bodies with respect is treating ourselves respectfully. To me, this means I can only do what I can do. Probably because my natural tendency is to do a whole lot more than I can do and to chastise myself when I can't do it.
Sometimes I have a day like today when it becomes clear to me that I simply can't. I can't make sure Jake never eats something bad for him. Not if I want to enjoy watching him eat food at a restaurant sometimes. Or, one day soon, to go to birthday parties to eat non-organic ice cream and cake frosted with high fructose corn syrup. Not if I want him to live in this world as a happy, free, interested little boy.
There's no sense in feeling guilty over something you can't control. And there is, in a way, even less sense in beating yourself up for giving yourself a break.
Give Yourself a Break by Giving Yourself Something to Break From (Eating Yoga)
Rather than offering an asana today, I invite you to practice yoga in another way -- through what you eat.
I'm not suggesting there is a list of things you shouldn't eat, or that you should do the diet thing of restricting any food that falls in certain categories. Instead, I'm suggesting that you spend a day or two or a while being conscious of what you ingest and of how it makes you feel.
That's it. Be aware of how you feel after eating a bowl of organic greens and whether that feels different from eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Okay, you don't have to eat the whole pint, but the amounts you eat fall into the equation as well. How does it feel to eat when you are stressed? Hungry? Bored? Don't put a ton of energy into suddenly "behaving." Just be aware.
Yoga, really, is about awareness. Not about everyone practicing in the same way, but about everyone honoring the fact that our bodies are all different. We all need and want different foods, so there's no formula for what you should or shouldn't eat, or when you should or shouldn't eat it. Just see what rhythm makes your body happy.
If it feels good, stick with it. But don't forget to give yourself a break sometimes. If for no other reason than to appreciate how good your own rhythm feels. And to acknowledge that there are some fun things -- ice cream and pizza and a good mojito or three -- about living in this world too.
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