Friday, April 4, 2008

Holy Holistics, Batman!

Lately I feel like I have spent every waking minute on Skin Deep. It's starting to feel like a never ending quest just to find new lotion or makeup or bubble bath. I'd like to stop, but I just can't seem to make myself ignore what I ironically paid no attention to in the past.

I'm in no way a granola mama. But I know some, respect them, and often wish I had the gumption to be more like them. The more that I move in the direction, the more I find myself mired in anxiety over the multitude of chemicals, toxins, and miscellaneous crap already in our house. M's sip cup = PVC leaching, plastic toys = phthalates, Burt's Bees baby lotion = unspecified fragrance, Joe's O's = sugar, etc. Everywhere I look, I find something else to feel uneasy about, because I'm more cheap than granola, and I can't stand the idea of just tossing out perfectly good (cancer causing! allergen filled!) products just because I made a poor choice in buying them.

I waffle between the following extremes:
1) How in the world can I leave these things in here for one more second? I need to scrap them all, right now, and start from scratch.
2) Scrap them all? No thank you. If that's the real solution, I'm just giving up right now.

Lots of other moms don't worry about these things, apparently. They don't walk out of Target in disgust because there are no lotions without fragrance. They don't agonize over how to translate a good recipe into one without refined sugar or white flour (but still good). I feel like I'm in a constant tug of war between those people around me who seem blissfully normal (but you know what they say about bliss) and those who seem holistically superior (but almost unattainably so). I don't really want to be either, really. I want to be conscientious but not obsessively so. But when I pull out the wrong snack at the wrong house, I just feel like I'm never going to be good enough for one friend, and never relaxed enough with the other.

The answer I try to stick to is that every step I make is one less chemical in the house, one step closer to a cleaner and simpler lifestyle. But when I feel like everyone around me is already at their destination, the road ahead seems lonely and long.

1 comment:

Heather said...

love the title :)
I totally hear you. I keep trying to move in the holistic direction, but then I give in. (I buy the super expensive crunchy sunscreen, leave it at home, and slather my baby in the toxic stuff...which is more cancer-causing, the parabens, or the toxic sun death rays?
You know, though, I'm a cheapskate myself, and the buying of the superexpensive stuff is bothering me less and less. We don't buy packaged stuff, I hardly ever buy clothing, I can afford the organic red quinoa.
I've found as I've gotten more and more crunchy, places like Target just turn me off. THey don't have the products I want, so they start being less convenient. Except for the toilet paper. They have the toilet paper.
Except I'm thinking about buying unbleached at some point...
Hmmm.