From Soggy and Single to a Crunchy Mama (Wannabe)

I'd like to discuss two topics of great interest and importance to me: parenting and natural living. In order to understand the significance of those particular topics to me, though, there are a few personal things you need to know about my background.

First, I'm not a mom. Not pregnant. No neices or nephews. It's just me and my husband of 10 months, 2 weeks, and 9 hours. But this strange thing happened several months after I got married. I went from being adamently "child free" to developing a deep longing to be a mother. The last big endeavor of my life was my wedding, and I have approached the next one, parenthood, in much the same way. I belong a number of message boards for moms and moms-to-be and I cannot soak up enough information on the topic.

That is exactly how I discovered attachment parenting. Now, I'm not here to try to convert anyone, so if you just thought "What's attachment parenting?" go google or wiki it. If you just thought "Oh no, not another permissive hippy," then you're probably related to me and, if you aren't, you're more than welcome to move your cursor up to that X at the upper right corner of this window, and click away.

Attachment parenting is what convinced me, not only intellectually, but instinctually, that I wanted to be a mother. It took a little while, but I realized I had subconciously assumed that I would have to parent my children the way I was parented. Not as some sort of cosmic requirement, but more as a natural consequence of having children. Doesn't every woman end up sounding exactly like her mother eventually?

Once I saw that there were people who responded to children the way I wanted to, but was encouraged not to, I was hooked. I went from happily and purposely childfree to reluctantly childless over one weekend. And I haven't looked back since. For many reasons, it wouldn't be prudent for us to have a child right now, so we are waiting. One of us more patiently than the other, but still waiting nonetheless.

That covers the wannabe mama part, and even a bit of the crunchy. But to get to why this is blogworthy, you have to get a picture of how soggy I once was. Growing up, my father constantly berated "hippies," recycling, conservation, and basically anything that wasn't the standard American way of consuming and wasting. We didn't have a lot of money, but we were discouraged from doing anything that made it look like we were poor. Instead of avoiding WalMart for ethical reasons, we didn't shop there because it would make us look like "trailer trash" to the neighbors.

Because of my father's ranting, I honestly believed that global warming and deforestation weren't as bad as they were made out to be. I was forbidden from recycling, even as part of an elementary school assignment and I was afraid to use the recycling box in the classroom in the event that my dad would find out and I would get in trouble.

As I grew up, I leaned toward the "alternative" but that is a broad place to lean. I wandered from Wiccan to punk to Christian to Christian punk and ended up at a small, private Christian college. There was a lot of talk about honoring God, witnessing, social justice, and plenty more Christianese. We even occasionally heard about appreciating the glory of God's creation. But, never about respecting it, or preserving it, or even the Biblical concept of being a steward of it.

So, the day I told all of my girlfriends from my dorm about the awesome product I'd heard about, the Divacup, I got sneers, chuckles, even blushes. "How can you touch down there?" "But aren't you a virgin?" "Ewwww!" And that was the last time I brought up something so "liberal" to that group of friends again. But, I didn't realize that just that one tiny cup would be the beginning of my sogginess drying right up.

Since then, I have slowly but surely come to see how wasteful my life is and how desperately I want to be more than a consumer. To have a voice in what I use, how, and why. To not mindlessly pile my grocery cart with a mountain of paper products that will need to be replaced in a week and a small fortune of personal hygiene products that are anything but "gentle" and "natural" once they go down the drain or get to the landfill. While this is a gradual process, it is also one that I intend to follow through on, as best I can.

In both respects, parenting and natural living, I still have a lot to learn. But I believe strongly in starting early and soaking up as much information as possible. I want to document my journey in this blog and I hope that I might find some companions who are on a similar path, whether further down the road, or just getting started.