Being one of some 1500 traditional food enthusiasts here at the Weston A. Price Foundation Wise Traditions conference is humbling and exhilarating. So many people have regained health or healed their children through real food. The stories at the Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS diet) lecture alone were amazing. It’s easy in mainstream circles to feel like an outcast, a weirdo. When your diet is so restricted, you just smile and nod when others wink and nod about chocolate, or wine, or even about fruit or raw veggies, which I still can’t tolerate after nine months on the GAPS diet.

Real Food blogger panel at the Weston A. Price Foundation Wise Traditions conference

But here, as I listen to people who’ve put their whole family or hundreds of their patients on the GAPS diet and who, unlike me, actually render their own goose and duck fat, I feel like I’m getting off kind of easy, doing okay after nine months on the grain-free, starch-free, sugar-free diet.

And yet, listening to Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride talk about the physiology of damaged guts with damaged gut flora, I’m ever more determined to get well. As long as I continue to suffer from psoriasis, I will know that things are not okay in my body. Even if it goes away in a few months, as it did after my first child started sleeping (rather than nursing!) through the night at age two, I know I need to be very careful about what I eat. Forever. Not just in terms of no dairy or gluten but in terms of blood sugar fluctuations (which happen with a vengeance even just upon consuming fruit).

And the lifestyle component. Sigh. I need to give something up to simplify, but I just don’t know what that is. I need to make relaxation a priority or I won’t do it. I need to commit not to just taking care of pain and digestive distress but to the whole of my body. And not just to promoting and cooking real food and being an active volunteer in school and community but also to the whole of my home and family.

Tonight my husband spent almost two hours in the car – including a bathroom and sushi stop at  Kroger – to bring me my baby to nurse and my son to see after I’d been at the conference all day, some 15 miles away. In the grand scheme of things, this is not the end of the world. The kids were both fine and happy during dinner, but I’m sure it sucked to be stuck in Dallas traffic for so long. My husband was pretty blitzed.

Other dads attend this conference with the whole family. Still other dads might go to McDonald’s rather than care about where their food comes from, much less want to spend money to sit in a hotel all day to listen to people talk about food. Mine is somewhere in between – supportive and on board but not an advocate or anything close to a purist. I don’t get criticized, but I don’t much get thanked, either. And I definitely get the sense that I kind of make things hard. Maybe I do.

I believe that my children and my husband benefit from all I learn — and practice — about health and wellbeing. Sometimes that seems to get lost in my pursuit of something like a writing and editing career (and the hope of a future career). And lost in my desire to spread the word about all the things that have made such a difference for me. It’s not just enough to live it; my life and my telling about it have to be meaningful.

So it can feel like an indulgence to go to lengths to have great experiences like coming to this conference. But then I meet someone

Annette Fischer of Wilderness Family Naturals and daughter Logan sell oils, nuts and other snacks at the Weston A. Price Foundation Wise Traditions conference

like Annette Fischer, who founded Wilderness Family Naturals with her husband in 2000. They were living in the wilderness with no electricity and no water, with seven children who were born at home, and they wanted to share information about living naturally through herbs. So they put up information (most of which had to be taken down due to pressure from the FDA), and now they sell the highest quality products they can find. I’ve been a happy customer for years, since I first learned about WFN from an employee at MOMs Organic Market. Now that I’ve met the co-owner and her eldest daughter of nine, aged 10 to 24 (they now have another two children who they adopted from Haiti), I feel like my passion and my family should not be at odds.

And I’ve just now heard Kristen of FoodRenegade.com talk about earning more money than her husband through her blog, with the biggest source of income coming from her own products: e-books and e-courses. She quit doing copywriting work – which allowed her to stay home with her kids – when a conflict of interest surfaced with a client, and now, three years after she started blogging, is performing such a service and earning a living to boot. While homeschooling three kids under the age of seven!

I can’t not write. It’s just not an option. And I can’t watch important things happen and not have a say. I think of my children’s future health and freedom to eat real food, but I’d also like to earn some green to go toward that food we buy.

Time to sign-off before I get picked up to head back to my father-in-law’s where I expect to be coaxed away about every two hours by a baby who wants to nurse. Before I leave again in the morning to learn some more.

How do you balance passion, work, and non-work?

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Check out this post on my Washington Times Communities column — a quickie first-day update from the conference.

I just returned from my first tutoring session of the new school year with the boy I’ve been working with for a year and a half. He’s a student at a boarding school, parents living in Europe. The differences between his life experience and that of the students I used to teach at the public high school nearby are staggering, to say the least. I imagine I’ll eventually do some writing on the social justice quandary at some point.

For now, I’m just glad to be earning money.

JL and I are taking a new (yet much overdue), hard look at our finances. We’re also completely clearing out our house, purging all the stuff we don’t need or want and really storing the stuff we can’t part with (like all my grad school notes, research, and reading packets). Both processes are going to take while, lots of concentration and some more childcare, but we can tell it’s just time to get cleared out.

We don’t yet have all the numbers in front of us, but tonight I offered some thoughts on quantifying a life. It is so valuable to me to be able to stay home with my son. There’s no way to equal out what it means to operate from our home as a base, to get up when we want (though more routine might not hurt), to be able to take small classes here and there if we think they’re valuable, to be able to go to the zoo if it’s a nice day and we don’t have anything planned, to go to the farmer’s market early if nap is short or doesn’t happen. Since we can afford not to have an additional salary right now, it’s worth a lot to have the flexibility we do.

And yet I seem to have a higher need for alone time and creative output time than some of my other SAHM friends. Or maybe I’m just more directed to get that time because of my history of depression and other health issues: I know what I can’t let go of without compromising my emotional health, and, by extension, my son’s and family’s health.

Tutoring is great money, but if you don’t do a lot of it, it’s not the same kind of money a regular paying job would be. I explained to my husband tonight that in my head I have done a few things with the idea of what I earn.

1. I equate what I earn to a service I get — acupuncture, massage, craniosacral therapy, visit to funky chiropractor who clears stuff with adjustment and homeopathy. So if I tutor for five hours in a few weeks and get only two or three appointments that month, I feel like I’m canceling my costs out. I’m earning my keep — as long as I don’t go too far over in the other direction in childcare costs (currently 8 hours per week).
2. I feel like when I go to tutor, my husband thinks of it as though he’s doing me a favor. It’s like I’m going out to my writing group, or ICAN, or yoga — something ostensibly just for me. On weeks I tutor several times, I feel bad for keeping him from being able to work out or to stay at work late if needs to (unless I arrange some kind of childcare). This comes in part from my own baggage about having spent so much time on my teaching in the past, in a way that he often didn’t understand. But it also comes from the fact that we just don’t factor in the tutoring to our finances.

So now that we are going to try to cut our monthly spending probably by one-third, it’s time to seriously start to think of myself as a WAHM and set a goal for how much money I am going to earn per month. Otherwise, I will continue to look at the tutoring as just more “me” time with the perk of $ but without as much future or immediate payback as I’d get from working on a piece of writing or even catching up on email with friends and family.

It is great for me to feel useful and needed by the person I’m helping, but I need to also feel like I’m making a serious contribution to the family income. And for that, I need to move tutoring out of the “it makes me feel good” category and into the “this is what my family needs me to do” category.

So if I have a slow month or there’s a vacation, I’ll see if I can get some copyediting work. If, after months of working on a piece of writing, I get something published in a paying market, the $ need to go in that column instead of just my ego-boost box.

I certainly realize that I am privileged to be even having this conversation. We have been fortunate, especially in the past few years. It may not last much longer in this economy, so it’s high time we took stock of the organic produce bills.

I’m also hoping that, even if I earn only a fraction of what my husband does, putting this kind of info on paper will help us in our ongoing quest to define our roles in ways that are satisfying for both of us. It’s been a challenge to feel so skewed with such different lives & daily responsibilities. I’m not going to put my son in daycare unnecessarily in the hopes of creating a more balanced parenting gig, but I do hope that some harder looks at the numbers of what I bring in and what we spend for childcare will keep me from feeling so much like me just spinning my wheels in my private, decked-out hamster cage. My working will just part of the way our household runs.