“old timey organic” or “would you like some eggs with that lead?”

I can’t pinpoint exactly where it started, but I got sucked into the dream of an old fashioned better life.  Animal Vegetable Miracle, The Gentle Art of Domesticity, the constant discovery of the new and terrifying ways that we’re poisoning our children with pesticides and Happy Meals and vaccines and toys from China all fueled my lifelong love of chickens and cows and the idea of a farm life.

I already had quilting and knitting down, but added new wholesome organic pursuits.  I make my own bread to the delight of family and friends, my own yogurt to mixed levels of disgust, and follow with envy the blogs of women leading authentic farm lives.

So when our friend old us about a Victorian farmhouse out in the country, and that farmhouse just so happened to look like Anne of Green Gables might have lived there, and then there was an office with an external entrance just begging to be used as a studio, I saw it all pan out.  I would be one of those uber women leading an organic life.  Keeping my kids safe from the dangers of modern chemicals and modern influences…they would play in the giant yard, help me knead bread in the kitchen, gather eggs from our organic free range chicken.  Heck, in a few years we might even be able to buy out the landlord and then I’d build a little barn and get a cow.  A simple healthy life for my family.

And of course in this life I’ll be a more patient, more caring mom.  Like June Cleaver but with mousetraps in my apron pocket and socks I knit myself on my feet.

How is this life actually panning out?

So far I’ve stripped wallpaper in a room that turns out to be covered in lead paint.  The insulation is probably littered with asbestos and the pipes no doubt are leaching lead, too.  I’ve fed Will more Happy Meals in a week than most children eat in a year.  And he’s spent more hours watching television than he’s spent sleeping.  My ideal of simplicity probably doesn’t involve spending the equivalent of the GDP of a small nation at Target, and each night when I watch Will sleeping I want to slit my wrists for spending the entire day snapping at him and trying to get him out of the way.

In my pursuit of a wholesome healthy organic life, I have inadvertently exposed my family to more toxins than a few BPA crammed plastics could ever hope to dish out.  Yesterday I took my baby to the the lab to have his blood drawn…a test that would have been completely unnecessary in our cookie cutter 2002 built box.  When I told him to climb up in my lap and lay his arm down on the rest he said “But mommy–I don’t want to get ouchies.”  And when he whimpered for just a second as the tech sank the needle into his arm, a part of my heart broke.  When he bravely watched as the blood traveled from the needle to the vials (something I refuse to watch when my own blood is drawn!)  with glistening eyes but not a sound, I could have gone back in time and punched myself for my silly dream of an old fashioned life.

It’s tempting to think that new is dangerous.  That our plastics and pesticides, hormones and additives are evidence that modern=dangerous and old fashioned=safe.  But our kids have 5 point harness carseats.  Lead free homes.  Cribs without blankets or bumpers or slats wide enough apart to stick their heads through.  And in my case, it’s hard not to feel like I’m plopping my kids right down in the middle of the worst of both worlds.