I met my future husband at a dorm room party on Friday, April 24, 1992. Twenty years ago today.

“You were babies!” people exclaim when I tell them this. Yes and no. I was 19, he almost 21. We did, in some ways, grow up together.  We’ve seen the world change together, from days of waiting for letters in the mailbox to texts moments before we walk in the door. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years. Sometimes I feel like we are exactly the same people, and other times, when I think about the details of our courtship, I have to admit that my life today is many moons removed from that one.

The night I met LJ, I’d earlier been out to dinner to Olive Garden to celebrate the birthday of a new male friend. B and I had met just a few weeks earlier, at the beginning of the spring quarter at Kalamazoo College where we were both first-year students. I wandered into my friend Hannah’s suite in the newly remodeled Severn dorm while B and a group containing some folks I knew and some I didn’t were going around saying nice things about one another. He said my lips looked “kissable.” As someone fresh out of a year-long relationship with a high school beau, the attention of college guys were something I’d just opened my eyes to.

A few weeks later, on April 24, I went along on a group outing to the mediocre meal spot and gasped at the prices of what appeared to me then as fancy entrees. I opted for the plain marinara pasta after I realized I could fill up on the table’s free bread and salad. Kissable comments aside, this was a group thing, not a date with B. The thing that made it special was my actually getting off campus and getting out with new people instead of pining in my dorm about my jealous (newly ex-) boyfriend back home, still in high school.

Still, it was spring, and though I was not looking for love, my newfound freedom was apparently attractive. Not only had B shown an interest, but I was also going to have a date the next night with a basketball player a year older than me. What a 6′7″ guy would want with a 5′0″ girl like me, I had no idea, but I was ready to branch out!

There was a new group of girlfriends I was trying to connect with now that I fully planted in college and had lifted my boots out of the mud of my previous relationship. It was through the Outward Bound-like program I’d done at the beginning of the year, Land/Sea, that I met one of these women, a gorgeous creative spirit named Ivana. I met up with her and her roommate, Denise, and some other friends of theirs who  looked beyond my frizzy hair and the nerdy rayon shirt I was sporting from The Limited — hunter green, with gold and green buttons down the front — and let me pre-party with them before we headed over to Severn for a suite party next door to where I’d met B.

Not a whole lot of details stick out about that night after that. I know people were selling beer behind a makeshift counter in the far back bedroom, and I went to get at least one. But the rest of the evening, my butt was pretty well glued to the wooden framed dorm couch, sitting next to LJ. A junior just back from study abroad in Germany, he’d happened upon the first-year party with some friends because there was nothing better to do. It was a small school with a subdued nightlife.

He and I spent much of the night sitting next to each other on the boxy cushions of that couch, looking into our dark brown bottles and sharing the darkness of our souls. His parents were just splitting up, and I shared how my (so young!) life had been shaped by my older brother’s suicide five years earlier. Not exactly flirtatious material.

But it stuck. He walked me home across the quad in the chilly April air, and we hugged goodnight on the steps of Dewaters dorm before he headed to neighbor Trowbridge Hall. I figured that would be it; we’d shared a connection, we knew each other better than we knew some of our friends, but this was not the stuff of romance. And I was on the rebound anyway. Too early for anything too deep.

Sitting alone at breakfast in the cafeteria the next morning, I felt a little funny as he walked by, tray in hand, alongside another woman. (This was also the season of defining myself as a feminist, so my classmates were no longer “girls”). Smiles were exchanged, and I think I might have passed him later that day while he was playing frisbee golf near my dorm room. I do know the day was grey, and I know that later that night I had an innocently awful date with the basketball player. We rented White Men Can’t Jump. I probably don’t need to say anything more, but it’s too tempting not to add that he made me pizza with pepperoni, not realizing I didn’t eat mammals.

Rather than accept his offer of staying over in his extra room, I drove back to campus mostly sober and to answering machine messages from Ivana who told me that LJ from the night before had been wearing a funny hat and looking for me. She said he seemed disappointed that I was on a date. She didn’t know a lot about him except that he seemed nice, and she thought he’d been on Land/Sea, too. So our start was build on somewhat false pretenses. I thought he, too, had hiked through the Ontario wilderness.

It wasn’t long before I learned that he hadn’t and that I got a chance to learn a whole lot more about him. He found me that night and we chatted in the florescent light of the “lounge” in my dorm, an underutilized square of cinderblock walls that looked like a place furniture went to die. I wonder how the green and black stretchy sweater I was wearing would look now. At the time it seemed clingy, but in an age just after oversized was fashionable, it’s hard to know.

Our first date soon after was a trip to Meijer’s so I could buy deodorant. The next time I bought tampons. I didn’t even really consider that he’d flinch, and he didn’t. We had dinner at Pizza Hut and Burger King. This was all on my dime, our excursions in my car with my new feminist bumper stickers. LJ hadn’t much worked, and his folks were fighting at each other through his finances. I was buoyed by parental allowance and my own earnings from summer jobs.

LJ made me a mixed tape of jazz and I didn’t really know how to appreciate yet, and I took him to see Tracy Chapman. When tickets for U2’s Zoo TV concert went on sale, I stood in line at a Harmony House back home where I ran into high school buddies. We all bought tickets in a block together, me musing I hoped I would still be with this boyfriend when the concert came around in September, something like three months and what seemed like a lifetime away to a 19-year-old.

I was still with LJ, after a summer of visiting LJ on campus for K’s then-year-round calendar while I was living at home and working at the now-defunct F&M drugstore. I used to buy I bought discounted Entemann’s goodies to bring for my weekend visits to Kalamazoo. At the time of the U2 concert, LJ and I both were sick with bronchitis, but we went anyway and watched Bono talk live to the MTV awards show.

We spent the fall together on campus and then most of the rest of our relationship long-distance, through him graduating in 1993 and me going to France for six months. LJ visited over Christmas, and when we fell asleep to the smell of a honey candle I’d bought at a farmer’s market in Lyon, I knew it was his arms I wanted to spend my life in.

After that, I found a way to take my summer off so I could live with LJ and work, and be involved in my sister’s wedding preparations.  I also got myself a student-teaching job in Ann Arbor the next winter, so we lived together then, too.

But meeting someone at 19 seemed too young for forever. So after I graduated in 1995, I set off for Washington, DC to work at the Feminist Majority Foundation. LJ came out for our big conference, Expo ‘96 for Women’s Empowerment and brought my underslept and overworked self a lot of food from local restaurants. He’d moved to Austin, Texas, and was working for the central offices of Whole Foods Market even before they opened a Bread & Circus in DC or eaten up all the Fresh Fields stores.

He transferred to Chapel Hill so we could have a year of living only 4 hours apart, and then we moved together to Cincinnati so I could pursue graduate degrees in English and Women’s Studies. I started to think of marriage an arcane and sexist institution, and watching my sisters with their kids did not inspire maternal instincts.

After a few months working at Joseph Beth a super cool independent bookstore, LJ got himself a consulting gig and started to ride the dot-com bubble, jet-setting across the country and living out of hotels. While he built up his bank account and filled our cheap apartment with furniture for then-little-known Room & Board, I was reading and teaching about social justice and finding myself wondering if we were headed in different directions.

But we planned to move back to DC, where I started teaching in 2000. The transition hit me with a severe bought of depression. When LJ communicated his intention not to live like that forever, I got motivated to get help. Within months of getting on medication, I felt like a better version than I’d ever known of myself. Our landlords said they intended to sell our apartment. We decided to buy a house together, and while we were at it, I said, we might as well go ahead and get married. The meds helped me see both the forest, and the trees, and even the leaves, and I knew I wanted to be with LJ. So we put in a contract a month before LJ got laid off and began planning a wedding and 10-year-anniversary celebration for the following summer, to be held near our new home in July 2002.

LJ was unemployed and home painting the house when 9/11 happened. I called him from my classroom at school, and we went to an Ethiopian restaurant that night, pondering our future just miles away from the Pentagon. We’d met just weeks before the Rodney King verdict and LA riots set off a “Day of Gracious Listening” on our campus and protests, undoubtedly, nationwide. All the major historical markers of my adult life have been shared with LJ.

LJ benefited from the post-9/11 unemployment extension and got a job just before our wedding, which we did a little on the cheap but had a lot of fun. It made me sad that none of the girlfriends who’d been around when we met could attend and that two of LJ’s friends didn’t make it, dealing as they were with divorces of their own.

We had a wonderful time in spite of missing company, and it was great to celebrate a decade of togetherness. Still, it was a lot to plan for a wound-up gal like me (no J.Lo event planner in the budget!), and between the stress of that, the bigger crises of 9/11 and the DC-area sniper scare the following fall, combined with the day-in-day-out craziness of teaching high schoolers in crisis, my health started to suffer. My history of medications and a diet that wasn’t suited to me contributed to my finding myself in a bad way in 2003. Just when we were ready to start a family, I started to get depressed and anxious. My thyroid was out of whack, my gut was a mess, and my periods were nowhere to be seen. It was not pretty.

On my journey to heal it holistically, I learned I had celiac disease and was intolerant of dairy, too. Research and consultations with alternative health practitioners and mainstream docs alike became a part-time job. Although I was earning a decent wage, what with two master’s degrees and four years in the school system, it was a good thing that LJ had found his way back to employment that put teacher salary to shame. From a rough place to a healthy one cost a pretty penny.

In 2004, I was much improved. One weekend we attended the standout Napa valley wedding of our best man, who married his Kalamazoo sweetheart, and the next weekend we went to Colorado for another classmate’s nuptials. The former included lots of reminiscing, and the latter, not so much. LJ had been that friend’s best man at his first wedding to the woman he started dating the same spring LJ and I got together in 1992. What a blast that first wedding was in 1994. How bizarre to refrain from “remember whens” a decade later at the celebration of a new pairing. And humbling. Take nothing for granted.

When LJ’s mom remarried in 1995, she changed the date because I had a college friend getting married that same weekend. That friend, too, has since remarried. There have been moments I’ve wondered if LJ and I could make it. After my health had improved by our conception prospects looked uncertain, we started going to counseling, ostensibly to get support for dealing with potential infertility.

We got pregnant a month later, and have been riding the parenthood rollercoaster since. With both kids, there were months in the postpartum year when the lack of sleep and the trippiness of hormones converged to put me in great doubt about our future. We are not always the partners we want to be to each other.

Last fall, when it became a possibility that we could buy the house next door and renovate it exactly as we wanted, I knew it was his dream come true. His college application for Kalamazoo said he wanted to be an architect, to go to the 3-2 program and finish up at the University of Michigan after getting the best of the small liberal arts college experience. He didn’t pursue that path, but the desire to design remains.

And for us, the opportunity to take a look at how we live in our new family of four and shape a nearly identical home to suit that was an opportunity we could not pass up. So, for the past several months, we’ve been looking at our space and our habits and spending every waking moment thinking about what makes sense, what will be beautiful, and what will make us and our kids happy for years to come.

Although I’ve all but checked out of my friends’ lives in recent weeks and have spent a lot of money on babysitters while we manage this project, and although there are times when we’re at each other’s throats about all there is to do before we can sell this place and move into the new one, the process has helped me appreciate my husband in a new light.

For one thing, it kicks ass that he has figured out how to manage this insanity from a financial perspective. He did all the research to find out how to get us approved for a second mortgage while we still own this house, and then he did everything to get us to buy the new place directly from the owners, with whom he negotiated a deal worthy of neighbor envy. He’s an impressive realtor, without the capital R.

He’s also done a ton of work on both homes, in and out, and has designed most of the place such that we’ve needed architects only for permitting, drawings, and for feedback. The one we’ve turned to for design consultation says repeatedly, “You’re really good at this.”

She’s not kidding. He is. And he’s funny. And he can still play the piano like no one’s business, even though he hardly ever gets a waking moment to sit down at the bench without a child climbing on one of his extremities.

And, even though I am someone who unfortunately set expectations too high for any mortal to meet, no one can argue with the fact that he is an amazing father. When he comes home from work, it takes only one “Go see your daddy!” to get our 20-month-old daughter off my pantlegs and giddily waddling toward the front door. When I woke up next to her this morning, admittedly in the futon in our son’s room while he and my husband slept in our king-sized bed across the hall, I felt such a feeling of gratitude.

This person has seen me through so much. Through stress, frustration, success, joy. Through accomplishment and embarrassment. Through accolades and disappointments. Through sickness and through my journey toward health. Through two pregnancies and a lot of time wondering if they would happen. Through a c-section and an homebirth. Through breastfeeding struggles and successes, going on five years’ worth now. Through mothering, with all its attendant ups and downs, and extremes. How astoundingly lucky am I?

I wouldn’t want to go back and tell the 19-year-0ld me where she’d be in 20 years because I wouldn’t want to change a moment of its natural unfolding. But when I think about her, I think about the magic of that night and a night a few weeks later when I jumped into LJ’s arms after a Saturday apart and before a spring dance. It was this night I spoke of in my wedding vows, of this moment on the quad looking up at the stars, asking for this to last.

It has. For a really long time that sometimes feels like just a few breaths even though it’s over half my life. When LJ and I met, I used to jog around campus in the evening, wondering what it would be like to own a home, to be a family. I imagined the babies I would have with LJ, never seeing being baldness into what has become redheaded childhood. I am living the life I dreamed of and so much I never knew to expect.

The other day, before LJ got a much-needed haircut, I looked at his shaggy head and saw a glimmer of the young boy I’ve seen in photos from a few years before we met, at his sister’s wedding. He was in a late-80s Don Johnson pastel suit. I didn’t know him yet, but after 20 years of sharing our stories and looking at albums that now show us where our children’s eyes come from, nothing is a total surprise.

And at the same time, everything is.

I love you, LJ. Thank you for a wonderful 20 years. Happy anniversary. I love what we’ve built together.

My son is not strong.

He is, as the kids say, a shrimp. On the soccer field, the kids complain when picking teams, “But he’s so small.” When one of his good friends found out he was taking a sports class after school, he told my boy, “You suck at sports.” I imagine he’s probably right.

My husband and I were both late bloomers when it came to athletics. He found his stride on the Ultimate Frisbee field in college and I mine in my thirties, running on the bike trail. I reached my full 5’0” potential at age 12, and he was short until he spurted to a respectable 5’11” after high school.

Our boy stands no chance to get through grade school unscathed.

When I started Patricia Ellis Herr’s book Up: A Mother and Daughter’s Peakbagging Adventure , I marveled at the idea of a five-year-old hiking 4-6 miles at a time. The idea of going on a serious adult hike with my six-year-old son is something I wouldn’t entertain for years. It’s amazing to me that this woman really attempted to do it 48 times in actual (if low) mountains with her daughter. My kindergartener has a heart of gold and enough energy to rock out in the middle of the kitchen, but I sometimes push him in the Sit & Stand stroller on the way up the hill from the bus stop. The boy down the street – just one month older  – can ride his bike up and down hills to town and to school, and mine isn’t even ready to attempt life without training wheels.

But he’s a solid kid – no waif – and he can hit a baseball and throw a Frisbee just fine. Normally, he’s healthy, just small and low on endurance.

This spring, though, is kicking his ass. He has allergies so bad that his eyes look like he’s been beaten up, his nose is running, he coughs at night, and this has been going on now for three weeks.

Forget about recess. The whole week before spring break – and this one, until it finally rains – he’s been kickin’ it with the admins, playing Uno in the office with some other poor sucker, a fifth grader named Alex. As a former environmental educator, it kills me that my kid can’t go outside.

Until his sixth birthday, he’d never had a dose of any conventional medicine. Around here, we turn to nutrition, homeopathy, bodywork (like craniosacral therapy), energy work and maybe some herbs to keep us well. But something is stressing his system just a little too much. One person said it was an overburdened liver. I don’t doubt it, knowing what he inherited from me, even though I tried to detox before he was conceived. I’d taken tons of allergy medication for years – maybe even decades – until I got rid of seasonal allergies through BioSET Allergy Elimination. I took him to that practitioner in the hopes that she could improve his situation. The jury is still out five days later.

My husband fed him a Claritin on his birthday at the beginning of this mess, and we thought maybe it helped him get through his party the next day, but the day after his second dose he looked worse than ever. So I said forget the drugs. We’ve consulted a bunch of other people and are now the proud owners of an IQAir Health Pro Plus air purifier, which is humming away next to his bed for the first time tonight. Fingers crossed.

Once this season has spent itself of its worse offense, I feel like I still have to figure out what makes him so damn sensitive and if there is anything I can do about it. It flies in the face of my paradigm of health to think that an otherwise healthy kid needs drugs to get through a month, but to look at him is to want to whip out your cell to call CPS on me. I do not want to dread cherry blossom time every year.

When I read my sister-in-law’s blog post about her daughter, my niece, seizing spring as though she is just bursting with sap, I got sad. I feel like a character in a Victorian novel who doesn’t see the foreshadowing on the wall that her child is going to succumb to consumption while everyone else is galloping off to greener pastures.

And yet, I know that he will probably be fine. I know that my fears are nothing compared to so many parents who have children with serious special needs or scary diagnoses or severe food allergies. But as a former wimpy kid myself who used to be grateful she hadn’t been born a boy who would no doubt be inept at such requisite skills as skateboarding and throwing things long distances, I feel sorry for my boy. He’s spunky, and he’s scrappy, but he ain’t strong.

When my friend and neighbor asked if I would watch her son so that she could take advantage of a $5 yoga deal, I said, “How about I offer up my babysitter instead and go with you?”

I’ve been meaning to get to Old Town Alexandria’s Radiance Yoga for a while, but it’s just a little to far for me to want to suck up too much solo time I could otherwise use for writing, cooking, cleaning, resting or, now that we are renovating a house and preparing to move, researching tile and paint or packing! And I’m not feeling all that great, much weaker than last spring when I did my 10-day Yoga Challenge.

The prospect of getting to catch up with another busy mom, though, was as compelling as the potential bliss and healing power of yoga. Driving time without kids in the back means completing sentences!

So I checked out Radiance’s schedule of special $5 weekday morning classes during the month of March, asked my sitter to take on another kid for two hours, and made it a date!

When standing next to a total yoga newbie, one experiences a class with fresh eyes. The centering, the intention-setting, the altar, the breath, the pose. This really is a beautiful tradition. I’ve missed it.

It was a lovely Gentle Flow class, with a perfect balance explanation and movement for new and old alike. Since I’ve been dealing lately with exhaustion and probably a struggling thyroid, I was not up for anything more vigorous. it’s been hard for me to even want to keep up any kind of practice at home. This class hit the spot for getting me back in my body without any fear of not keeping up or overdoing it.

And yet, I’m actually a little tired now, maybe because the morning fog has risen only so high, keeping a grey cloudcover over a humid midday. So I’ve fired up the SAD light and made myself a cup of Rainforest Treasure Tea. I may even have a few drops of Camu Gold so that I can get through tutoring this afternoon. (Next week I’m meeting with an allergy elimination person and a medical intuitive who can perhaps tell me if these supplements are okay for adrenally-fatigued me.)

If I haven’t overdone it and feel okay when I get up tomorrow, I am hoping to take advantage of the $5 class special to check out a Kundalini yoga and meditation class tomorrow. If the breathwork could do me even a fraction of the good I felt after Tommy Rosen’s class last June at Wanderlust, that would be a real help.

If you’re near Alexandria, be sure to take advantage of these $5 Radiance classes while they last (hint: March ends soon!). And if you’re looking for something grander, check out my roundup of spring and summer yoga festivals.

Are there any other good yoga deals before DC Yoga Week begins in May?

Eighty degrees in March, and nothing is at rest.

The flowers are up, stretching their arms after nary a winter’s nap. The magnolia has exploded into blossom way before its time, dropping its once-precious petals onto the ground where they turn slipper and slimy like a million mini banana peels. After she sat down on our front steps, the petals left a smear of brown on my the puffy cloth-diapered bum of toddler daughter’s pale pink linen — in March! — pants.

Every day there is a new blossom or bird or piece of our house renovation next door to be the target of her chubby index finger and her catch-all “Whoa!” exclamation. If the warmth and too-early springing into green weren’t enough to rev us up, Daylight Savings Time’s extra hour has shifted our reality into a new gear, one that makes bed before 8 a near impossibility.

Leading up to last Saturday, when we lost that hour, I had managed to get little A to nap twice with help from the car on cooler days before the hammering began next door and then, by napping with her. After my doctor told me “I think you need three hours of rest a day,” I decided that I should just give up on productivity during at-home naps and rest my weary body instead.

That felt good, losing track of time and waking with a new lease on the day. The trick was to start early enough that I didn’t risk sleeping through my son’s afternoon bus pickup time. As long as it was cool, I found I could even get to sleep again in the evening. Finally, my cup was filling with rest. But it was not to last.

All that week, I tried to find slivers of time to fit in my homework for my Mother’s Self-Renewal class, reading and journaling. I’d already missed one of the classes, wallowing in self-pity at all the responsibilities pulling me in so many directions I felt I’d tear apart and lose my stuffing. This time would be different, I’d promised myself.

The plan was that my husband would take my son to gardening day at his school that Saturday morning. I’d have an hour or so of relative quiet in the house to make myself some grain-free “bread” and then nap with my daughter, say 11 to 1, have lunch and leave, fully rested, at 2:15 to enjoy listening to Studio 360 on NPR en route to Tenleytown for the 3:00 class. Also in the plan was for me to come home bursting with energy and joy, or maybe just be pleasantly calm that happiness and parenting and house renovation were not all mutually exclusive.

Then our fridge broke. Or at least got testy. We spent part of the morning moving important things into the new fridge in the shed, purchased on Black Friday for the home we’ll move into this summer. My husband searched around for a fridge that would fit our current smaller space. It ended up that I took the kids — both of them — to gardening day and he used my Sears card to schedule a Monday delivery for a new stainless number to chill our chow.

My son mostly just played with his friends while his sister, after an initial excursion across a muddy field, happily sat and dug at dirt while I weeded. It was a lovely spring morning, still chill enough to feel like the right season. But by the time I’d changed a diaper and nursed in the library, it was past lunchtime and I was tired.

So was the baby, but she was having none of nap. I thought she might fall asleep on the way home. No such luck. Then I tried laying her down, but she preferred instead to cry or crawl over me and push her chubby hand into my flabby belly or neck. I started to see my chances at “self-renewal” crumble.

Off I huffed to drive her to sleep. My husband didn’t stop me with any protestations about my not having the time to do that and go to my class, too. And I didn’t beg. My hopes were already dim.

By the time I pulled back into the driveway with a zonked-out toddler in the back seat, I was too hungry and too tired to drive 45 minutes for a class that I wasn’t very prepared for. I texted the teacher something terse about not being able to finish the session and came inside where my husband was holding the key to the other car so that I could ostensibly turn around and go to class. Points for trying, I guess.

But he doesn’t get that it’s just not that easy. Not for me. I had no snacks, there was no plan for dinner, and I hadn’t rested. I’d been out all morning and used up all my energy cards. This healing business means business.

So what did I do? I didn’t mope as long as I did the previous time I missed class. I resolved to make something out of the day; I took a few drops of Premier Research Labs vitamin B and set about to clean the house enough that it wouldn’t drive me crazy anymore.

The supplement and the sorting seemed to have a positive effect on me, but between the B and the late nap, the baby acted like I’d given her a triple espresso. Back when I was first trying to heal from adrenal fatigue in 2004, I did a couple of vitamin B IVs and National Integrated Health Associates. It’s quite a buzz, like liquid sunshine, warming and energizing you from the inside out. I’d venture to say that this is what my daughter was feeling from my souped-up milk.

At 8:14 p.m., when she should have been asleep, she was giddy and ready to party. The phone rang, and my friend Sarah was ready to talk with me about her journey through adrenal fatigue and the GAPS diet.

Little Miss Alert played with Daddy for a while as I took notes, and then I just nursed her through the rest of the conversation, which was a real turning point for me. To say I am grateful for Sarah sharing is like saying this winter has been on the mild side. Gross understatements. I know lots of people who’ve had lots of health issues, but where I am right now, hearing about Sarah’s journey and healing was nothing short of inspirational. She’s due to have her second child soon, and we talked about birth and recovery along with hard-core gut stuff. It was powerful to hear people on the GAPS diet talk about their experiences at the Weston A. Price Foundation conference and it’s educational to read the many wonderful posts on blogs like Cheeseslave, where author Ann Marie has answered my question about SIgA today. But still, just talking with someone who I’ve known go from sickness to health was so soothing and buoying.

By the time Jen Kogan, the teacher of the self-renewal class called to check up on me on Monday, I had made peace with the fact that this is just not the time for me to take it. The house renovation project needs my attention for the next three months, and my health has got to be the focus of whatever I have left (after, of course, taking care of my children and arranging for childcare and summer camp and whatever we need to keep us all sane and our hair intact). As much as I’ve been wanting to pursue career development, I have to accept that whatever writing I can get done for my own spirit has got to be enough for now.

The rest of week was a hot, sunny blur of contractor appointments and pollen. I felt like Vitamin B and Vitamin Sarah were still going strong well into Thursday night, when another friend at the Holistic Moms meeting told me she’d read my blog and that we had more in common than I’d known. “This is just the current season of our lives,” she reminded us both. When I got home, I was surprised by an email from a graduate school friend who has also gone grain-free after vegetarianism and is on her own journey to balance health and parenthood. To be thanked for my writing twice in one night was a gift.

It’s not lately been clear what literal season it is here, and I tend to want it to be everything all at once in my home life.

The season to mother well vs. to mother myself.

The time to embrace life as a stay-at-home mom vs. the time to publish, to volunteer, to network.

The time to just rest vs. to develop a serious yoga practice, or return to running.

The season to make all my food from scratch all the time and be strict enough to heal (necessary reality) vs. the season to be all done with that and ready to embrace and enjoy so many delicious things I haven’t had for so long, without fear of pain or illness.

I can’t tell winter to just chill out and be winter, and I can’t tell spring not to come. There is no use fighting whatever is. And even if I can’t figure out what today’s reality is going to be or predict tomorrow’s, I can choose to accept rather than fight.

The dirt doesn’t push back the flowers. Let the beauty reveal.

Stop and smell the hyacinths while they’re here. Whenever that is.

No one has to convince me not to try to be perfect. Okay, I do have perfectionist tendencies in some areas, but when I read about mothers having epiphanies that they don’t need to keep the house spotless, I feel like I am living on some other planet. One with lots of spots.

It looks -- and sounds -- pretty messy and conflicted around here!

My floors get vacuumed fairly often, but they are so dirty my daughter’s white socks are permanently light brown on the bottom. And that’s even with her taking them off and walking around barefoot half the time. There is always stuff on the floor.  “Done with it? Drop it!” appears to be our family motto.

Reading Chapter Five of Renee Peterson Trudeau’s Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal at first glance didn’t do anything to make me feel any better, or to inspire me to slack on my expectations. It actually made me feel kind of bad that I really don’t hold myself to very high standards – I let plenty go! – and I still feel frustrated!

Yes, I would like my home to be a lovely place of beauty. Yes, I would like my kids to grow up with respect for their toys and to learn to treat things with reverence rather than refuse. These things are about values, not because I feel like I have to reach for some externally-defined sense of perfection.

A large part of the desire to renovate the house next door came from an interest in re-imagining home: figuring out what doesn’t work and finding creative solutions to make it work when the template is closer to blank.

Yes, I would really like to get this right. But that’s so that I can actually enjoy the place I spend so much time because it looks pretty and feels calm. Not because I think I “should.” I know I can breathe better with space.

I seek beauty for its own sake, not out of some external sense of necessity. But still, beauty — living in it, creating it, appreciating it — proves elusive amid all the other things there are to do just to exist.

I make all my food from scratch, not because I fear the organic police will give me a bad consumer citation but because I will get sick if I don’t.

I live without caffeine and chocolate and chocolate, not because I’m depriving myself but because their negative impact on my health will be keenly and quickly felt.

Everything I do is purposeful, and yet nothing seems to actually get done.

Last May, when I wrote about the book Good Enough is the New Perfect, I felt freed by the idea that many things I saw as conflicts were not really conflicts. It was a matter of perspective. Yippee! I could change my reality by changing the way I looked at it!

Well, now these different pulls/commitments/desires/needs really do feel like conflicts. Because I simply have got to sleep more or I will never get well. That eats into time I could be pursuing another leisure activity, or meaningful work, or cleaning the home. And it’s hard to feel like doing any of those when your energy is so low. I know it’s time to seek another healthcare practitioner, but I haven’t been able to find the time or energy to do that research. One bright spot is that I emailed a friend who had adrenal fatigue and was on the GAPS diet for a long time, and she said sure, she could chat with me. And Ann Marie at Cheeseslave, having kindly already responded to a comment of mine on her GAPS Diet Myths post, wrote me this week that she’d soon post the question I sent her on an upcoming Sunday Q&A.

Really, I want some giant healing hand to pick me up and hold me safe while, with its other hand, it pushes a pause button so I don’t have to miss out on my children’s lives, my friends’ lives, my home project, my pursuits.

But there is only one now, and if sleeping and breathing and mindfully eating are tops on the agenda, that’s just what I have to do.

I need to be my own giant hand.

And my own pause button.

—

Share with me your self-care secrets!

The instant I read the words, I regretted picking up my BlackBerry that one last time before going to bed. A well-meaning relative of mine had read my recent post about my health and my leaky gut problem and told me: “This is not the time to volunteer for things.” She intended to point out that there would be plenty of time later in life for me to pursue my interests when I didn’t have as many health challenges to face and when I wasn’t in such a busy time of motherhood with a kindergartener and opinionated non-verbal toddler.

I get her point. Really, I do. The problem is that her note assumes that volunteering is something that detracts from my well-being. Sure, it might have seemed that way in the post she read. I’d rushed to finish it and get it up rather than wait until who knows when I’d get a free moment to sit down again. I did, I realize, sound a little overwhelmed. And yes, balance is something I’m working on.

But I don’t regret my choices, and I don’t want them restricted. That wouldn’t help. If I weren’t busy with something that felt meaningful, that contributed to my priorities, that gave me joy, or that fueled me with passion, I would be, simply put, depressed. Staying busy and engaged in something bigger than myself is a necessity for me to stay mentally healthy without medication.

And staying off medication is something I feel is a physical necessity as well; I simply don’t think my body can handle being on anti-depressants. They made an amazing difference for two years, and then again for a year while I sought treatment for hyperthyroidism (Graves’ Disease).

But they are drugs. Even if I weren’t a true believer in the healing power of nutrition and energy work, my system has shown me it simply cannot handle anything artificial. As much as SSRIs helped, I’m also pretty convinced that they contributed to the mess I’m in now — a much smaller role than 30 years of eating gluten, probably, but a role nonetheless.

No amount of saying no to volunteer work is going to undo all the damage that was caused by decades of eating food my body couldn’t handle, to say nothing of mild but young substance abuse. What will help me heal is continuing to eat real food, pursuing what makes me happy, and cultivating a mindfulness practice. It takes a lot more time and energy than popping a pill, but I really don’t see that I have a choice if I have my long-term health in mind.

Until I got this late-night email, I was, I admit, stewing a little about the lack of time to do everything I cared about. But rather than push me to step aside, as was its intention, the note inspired me to remember why I have chosen what I’ve chosen to do and to be grateful that I have the opportunity to do it.

The fundraiser I was working on was a great success, both in money raised and in positive momentum and a spirit of community, which was probably even more valuable to this project about which I care deeply. Even as I wished for more hours in the day to proofread the program and organize the volunteer schedule, I remembered that I proposed this event because I believe in the cause and that I offered to head it up because it’s something I knew I could do well. I knew it could be a great thing, and I wanted to create that.

So I carried that purpose with me into the event and sincerely enjoyed it. I lapped up the kudos with nary a self-critical remark or “if only we could have” lament. It was just good, plain and simple. We can debrief and learn from it, sure, but the thing I am most proud of is just enjoying it.

And then, when I came home after being gone at the school 11 a.m.-5 p.m. and launched right back into domestic goddess mode, I took on that role without resentment. Sure, there was a smidge of “really?” in my brain when my husband said he was super tired, but rather than go to a place of bitterness, I just chalked it up to a confirmation that the job I usually do of managing house and home is, indeed, a tiring one!

I wanted the laundry and dishes dealt with, so I did them.

I wanted celery and other veggies for the next day and to not cook that night or ask my tired husband to rally, so I went out to the grocery store after picking up take-out.

I wanted to do yoga before eating in peace and quiet, so I waited until after the family meal and bedtime to get on my mat and then eat my own safe food.

Somehow, that email sparked — or stoked — a fire. What started as angry turned cozy and glowing. The email inspired me, in part, to take the Mother’s Self-Renewal workshop to explore issues of balance and honoring our many selves. That first session then gave me the sense that I am both not alone in my dilemmas about time and also that my process is one to honor. It is part of my mothering to model not perfection but an embracing of personal growth and inquiry.

So thank you, dear relative, even if noting you wish you’d gotten advice from your elders still doesn’t convince me that you weren’t being more judgmental than supportive. Regardless of their intent, your words helped me see through the messiness of internal conflict and to look toward something varied and beautiful.

I wouldn’t have even bothered to do the test if I didn’t think I had digestive problems. I know I do. But some of the information I got from my labs this week was information I didn’t even know could be found.

It’s been 11 months since I went on the GAPS diet, which has helped immensely with IBS symptoms. But I’ve had to stay on a modified version of the introduction diet: whenever I try to introduce too much raw vegetable, I pay for it. And fruit? I stayed off for a long time until peach season was in full bloom. I indulged some, really imagining that local, in-season produce could really be okay. But it wasn’t.

In August I met with a chiropractor and energy worker who helped me dramatically, and when I saw her later in the fall, she confirmed what I’d suspected: that I just had to eliminate all fruit. Me + any kind of sugar = problem.

To compensate for my lack of sweet indulgence of any kind, I sought out more and more fat. I was eating spoonfuls of nut butter after high-protein, filling meals. It seemed both a physical need to load up at meals in the darkening days of late fall and also an emotional need to indulge. For a while these were all soaked nuts, but that got so expensive to buy and time-consuming to make, I started buying regular nut butters, which I think have way too much phytic acid for me.

But compulsive eating wasn’t the only problem: I was also scratching the skin on my knees and elbows until they bled. This happened after several months after my first child was born and lasted until he was two and sleeping through the night; I don’t know if it was all the healing stuff I did that spring, or just the time elapsed, a decrease in nursing, or or an increase in interrupted sleep that made the difference. With my second child, the psoriasis came just a few months after she was born (at home, not a c-section), and now 17 months in and some decrease in nursing overall and night waking in particular, I see no signs of improvement.

Rather than take steroids or other topicals that are just going to push the problem further into my body as I did through my childhood and young adulthood, I’m determined to address the source of the problem. If only we could figure out what that is.

From the kitchen in the house we are renovating. I feel like MY insides must look just as bad.

The doctor recommended an expanded GI panel from DiagnosTechs. The test cost around $250 and would analyze my stool and saliva for parasites, bacteria, food sensitivities and some other stuff I didn’t even know it you could analyze.

The results just came in last week. I am free of any icky critters, my pH is fine, and Candida (yeast) showed up at only trace levels. Good news.

However, there were some bacteria, which we’re going to treat with Goldenseal and garlic, and the test confirmed dairy (casein) and gluten (gliadin) sensitivity through positive SIgA results.

No surprise there. The doctor I saw is generally not an absolutist on food or a believer in intolerances needing to last a lifetime, but she said it was clear I needed to stay gluten-free and dairy-free. The test panel explains:

“Predisposed individuals often experience intestinal inflammation after consumption of offending foods. Subsequently, the intestinal mucosa releases secretory IgA to neutralize the antigens. SIgA testing, unlike IgG, allows the detection of mild, subclinical and latent intolerance cases. Furthermore, the short SIgA half-life ensures earlier and more effective compliance and follow-up assessments.”

To have a positive gliadin AB, SIgA reading at the numerical level I showed after more than seven years on a gluten-free diet (and very little prepared food in my diet in the past year) means that I am super sensitive, the doc said.

Also of interest was the fact that I had “abnormally low” Chrymotrypsin levels, which is “suggestive of poor pancreatic output of all enzymes.” Perhaps this explains why I’m so darn sensitive to sugar! For this we are supplementing with an enzyme and hoping it will kick-start my body into remembering how to make it itself (and certainly help me until that happens).

But the most important thing, is, apparently, that I have just about no protective gut lining, or Intestinal Secretory IgA (SIgA). When people talk about a damaged gut “leaking” food into the bloodstream, it’s because there is no protective mucus to stop it. This test calls low <400 mg/100 g dry wt.

My number?

<1.

Seriously.

So even after a year of gentle eating, my gut is still this damaged. I think if I hadn’t gone on GAPS, I would probably be in the hospital on an IV!

If I understand it correctly, my epithelium is so compromised, my digestive system is letting food particles into my bloodstream, and then my body is lashing out at them as though they are foreign invaders. One of the results is the psoriasis. If you poke around online, you’ll also see a lot about low SIgA being linked to autism and ADHD. The doctor says my gut, pancreas and thyroid woes are all linked.

So what do we do? For one thing, I’m taking L-Glutamine to help heal my gut lining. I’ve taken this before and am not sure why I didn’t pick it back up months ago. The doctor is also ordering me some casein-free colostrom. Gosh, maybe it would even help to drink my own milk. I’m staying on the Green Pastures fermented cod liver oil and fish oil.

There was another Medi-Herb product the doctor wanted to put me on but isn’t since I’m still breastfeeding little A. I worry that at some point, I might need to switch the priority of gut health to hers over mine and wean. My son nursed until age 3, and I didn’t think I do anything shy of two years this time around. But something’s gotta give.

This doctor and other practitioners are not finding (through muscle-testing) that I need probiotics at this time, and since I didn’t have a huge overgrowth of yeast and since I feel like I have had negative reactions when I’ve taken the GAPS-recommended Bio-Kult, I will stay off. I’m eating some fermented foods (not a lot), but I’ve slacked on using lots of animal fats like lard, as I was some months back. Lately, I’ve stuck mostly to coconut oil for cooking and olive oil for extra (uncooked) flavor.

And I haven’t been eating much in the way of organ meats, as GAPS would recommend. It’s enough work to start the day with green juice, get some veggies cooked in broth, make eggs, veggies and some (non-processed) meat and then do it all over again for lunch and dinner, plus prepare meals for the kids and my husband. And did I mention we are renovating a house? And I’m organizing a school fundraiser for a wetlands learning lab?

So what else is supposed to help with gut lining? Less cortisol. Less stress. More relaxation. Riiiight.

My fear of depression scares me away from a life of quiet (or much meditation, or enough yoga over walks), but taking on too much clearly is doing me no favors. If I just weren’t interested in so many things…

The baby is waking up from the nap she miraculously went down for (just over an hour ago) with relative ease (a rarity!), and my son and husband are headed back from the farmers market. Maybe now that it’s past noon on Sunday, a full 24 hours after I started this post, I should just pull the trigger and get it up.

But I’m pretty sure there is a whole lot more to learn.

For me, food is medicine. If health is a priority, take out foods that don’t work for your body — because of allergies, because they rev you up (like caffeine or sugar), because they draw you down (like alcohol) or because they add to inflammation (like sugar and a lot of the Standard American Diet) — and add in nutrient-dense foods that heal and build strength.

A mindful diet is the best way to feel good. After food comes sleep and a lack of “junk” in your life — electronic clutter, literal clutter, toxic people, stress of any negative variety.

But there are times when we all need a little bump of help, usually when one of those other needs above isn’t met, for whatever reason. When we get run down or out of balance, we can utilize supplements, herbs, homeopathy, and body work and energy work (like chiropractic, massage, osteopathy and craniosacral therapy, and acupuncture).

A while back, I went to a wonderful learning session with acupuncturist and mom Allison Kitchen. She gave an overview of some herbal remedies, some energetic principles, and some nutritional supplements that she finds useful for her family and with her clients.

Allison, who also spoke to my chapter of Holistic Moms last summer, was kind enough to donate a box of Emergen-C Kidz strawberry-banana flavor for a giveaway.

When your little one starts to sniffle, dose her up with one of these packets of fizzy vitamins and minerals. An extra dose of Vitamin C and everything else in these little sachets just might help her body fight that bug.And make sure she rests and sleeps! And eats homemade chicken broth!

Share your favorite cold season remedy below to enter to win this box. The giveaway will close at 5 p.m. on Friday, December 9. The winner will be chosen at random.

Visit Allison’s blog, What Zoe Eats, and learn more about Allison’s practice at DCMindBody.

A tale of two conferences

I’ve had a split personality this weekend.

Much of my time has been spent at the wonderful blogging conference, Blogalicious. Since I first arrived at the conference Friday morning, I’ve met great people, caught up with friends, and learned a ton about social media and media resources in general. A favorite session so far was a panel on finding “balance” led by Jessica Smith and Jeannette Kaplun. I’ll do more of a recap later this week for TheDCMoms.com.

Most of the Blogalicious attendees are staying on site at National Harbor, but I still have a baby who nurses through the night, and I live only nine miles away. I also have an extremely restricted diet and feel a whole lot better if I cook my own food. So I’ve spent mornings and evenings here at home with my family.

Take Back Your Health Conference expo hall

But the split doesn’t stop there. This weekend is also the inaugural Take Back Your Health Conference right in my backyard in Arlington, Virginia. Organized by an amazing young woman who was so sick she had to leave college but then found healing through diet and lifestyle changes, the conference has a great line-up of giants in the field of holistic health. So I spent some of today there, too.

It’s been interesting to be at the blogging conference thinking about my priorities and passions and then to see so many people engaged in those passions at the health conference. And then to come home and live some of those passions — at least attachment parenting and healthful eating, anyway. A few other aspects of healthy living are taking a back seat with so much shuttling around.

Think I’ll go have a mindful moment with my partner now!

That is, if my daughter doesn’t wake up first.

I’d always been intrigued by the lectures I saw Dr. Felix Liao giving about the connection between dental health and whole body health, but his Whole Health Dental Center just seemed too far away.  Then I noticed someone posting on the Northern Virgina Families for Natural Living list that his office had moved inside the Beltway, to Falls Church. And one of my friends and members of my Holistic Moms chapter, health and fitness guru Nina Elliott of Health and Wholeness, posted an event and mentioned she was getting her mercury amalgams removed by Dr. Liao.

So I finally scheduled myself an appointment for an initial consult this summer to talk about my TMJ issues and the recurrence of my thyroid disorder and the related health woes I have been dealing with in recent months.

Could the poor alignment of my face and other cranial restrictions possibly be part of the picture?

Is my pituitary gland struggling because of the way I put pressure into my jaw every night and whenever I am the least big stressed or upset.

What about my son’s jaw tension and his tendency to clench or want to bit when he gets upset?

With a tired baby on my lap and her brother in a playdate, I started the conversation last month with the intention to schedule a CBCT scan in the future and probably develop some kind of appliance. Meanwhile, my husband has long complained of ENT problems he associates with his orthontia and teeth he had removed. When Dr. Liao told me he was giving a lecture on helping children avoid that kind of fate, I set about to get there.

Below is an excerpt from the article I wrote about the lecture for my column at the Washington Times Communities. It was sponsored by the Northern Virginia Whole Food Meetup group and organized by the fabulous Alana Sugar, nutritionist extraordinaire.

With limited childcare, I still haven’t gone in for my scan, but my husband called Dr. Liao’s office the next day and has already had his!

Dr. Liao will be presenting at the upcoming Take Back Your Health Conference in Arlington on October 22 and 23. I’ll update this post when I know when he’s set to speak.

At the lecture I attended, folks had their heads spinning as they saw examples of form following function. Before and after photos of children and adults who had their bite corrected were startling: one boy looked as if he’d grown half a head in just a week. Facial symmetry and general vibrance improved, too.

The crux of the message was that nothing in the body happens in isolation. When we attempt to straighten teeth for cosmetic purposes, we risk causing a whole host of other problems if we don’t look at posture, alignment, and position of the bite.

If children have persistent headaches, ear problems, fatigue even after resting, chances are there is something amiss in their bite. Posture is related to the way our mouth lines up with our spine and the way our jaws line up. Cranio-Dental Disorder, Dr. Liao explained, can manifest not only in colicky babies and preschoolers with persistent ear infections; it can also contribute to struggles with academics and sports throughout life.

So why do some children come into the world with poor mouth and dental structures? A variety of causes can contribute, with nutrition one of the most powerful. Dr. Liao cited the work of Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist who traveled the world in the 1920s and found compromised dental and overall health among people whose parents had abandoned their traditional, nutrient-dense diets for processed foods.

Photographs reveal startling differences between groups who had incorporated convenience foods and those – even in nearby villages – who held onto their ancestral diets, which were often rich in fats and almost never vegetarian,  Picture wide jaws with straight teeth among the native peoples Price studied in contrast to narrow, V-shaped bites and crooked teeth in populations that ate processed food.

Other causes can include pollution from the 200 chemicals found in baby cord blood, as identified by the Environmental Working Group, and birth trauma that is not addressed early on by a chiropractor, osteopath or craniosacral therapist. Children who don’t want to give up a pacifier or stop sucking their thumb are likely trying to relieve a cranial strain, Dr. Liao said. “They are treating themselves the best way they know how,” he offered, but these habits will not address the core problem and can, in fact, create others.

Dr. Liao explained that our bite is not static, and it’s not simply mechanical. It’s part of our entire body structure. “You can’t drive straight if the steering system in your body” is not properly aligned, he explained. His “whole health” model of thinking rejects compartmentalizing the body, which he says works as a unit. By contrast, he said, many dentists fail to see he ripple effect of the jaw to other health issues, as though treating back pain, neck pain, or headaches does not fall under their job description.

Dr. Liao posited that a dental appliance should be “the first line of treatment” for snoring as it can help get the tongue out of the throat by correcting a narrow or receded jaw. It’s also possibly to expand the base of the nose by widening the palate, Dr. Liao said.

Not only can larger nostrils help with snoring, but addressing airway problems can alleviate oxygen deficiency that often results in headaches and depression in women and erectile dysfunction in men. In some cases, large tonsils restrict airways. Dr. Liao recommends working with a nutritionist, like event host Alana Sugar, to address food allergies that might affect tonsil size.

Breastfeeding helps to naturally develop a wide palate, and good nutrition from childhood can also keep a healthy individual developing a healthy bite. If children do develop problems, getting treatment early – often with expanders – can change a child’s medical fate. Dr. Liao quoted Dr. Jay Gerber who said that any treatment after age 12 is a compromise.

So what is a parent to do? Prenatally, both parents should get good nutrition from whole foods with plenty of healthy fats. Consider doing a cleanse before even trying to get pregnant. Breastfeed and follow a green lifestyle so that your children have the best chance of developing a healthy jaw and healthy body.

Observe your child’s face for balance vs. asymmetry or for other problems like pronated feet, and have him or her evaluated by age eight if you have any concerns. Dr. Liao uses a three-dimensional CBCT scan to see look not just at the bite and jaw structure but also to see if the head is mounted squarely over the body. From there, he has the information he needs to determine the right kind of appliance or complementary therapies.