Antidepressants saved my life at least once and might have saved my brother’s if he’d sought help instead of taking his life. Saturday, November 22 is International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day. This is the story of why I am grateful I had medication and how and why I hope to avoid it for the…
thyroid
Failure to thrive in motherhood
The moment I realized I could no longer handle teaching high school, I was sitting in a Teaching for Change-organized class with Enid Lee, one of the authors of Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development and a huge force in the area of critical literacy, which was…
A snapshot of health: tired adrenals
In the past few weeks, I’ve had to cancel some appointments for my own healing because my children were sick and I didn’t have childcare. I got so down, I canceled even more that I could have made; I got overwhelmed and started to question how I was ever going to feel better. It felt…
Food for thought
I can’t stand it. After 27 days of writing poetry, I want to write about nutrition! Aside from the fact that tomatoes are out of season and that I didn’t preserve any local ones, and aside from the fact that I’d once all but banned even gluten-free pasta from our house as a processed food…
20 years ago today: How I Met Their Father
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…
Back on the mat: $5 class special at Radiance!
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…
Blooming trees and buzzing Bs
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…
Mediocre would be good enough
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. My floors…
Let them eat lunch, from home
Eating close to the source is something I’ve been working toward for several years, ever since I started trying to get my health on track in the face of major digestive issues, infertility, and Graves’ disease (autoimmune hyperthyroidism). I was almost embarrassed to request Barbara Kingsolver’s 2007 Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life…
My gut, she leaks
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…
Wise Traditions 2011: Day Two
One in a series of reports from the Weston A. Price Foundation’s 2011 Wise Traditions conference in Dallas. Busy Crunchy-Chewy mama is processing and writing as fast as she can! See the first day post and Washington Times Communities article. Healthy notes from Day Two: I took a walk in the brisk morning on the…
Kids in the kitchen (better late than never!)
I did not get a post written in time to participate in the November Blog Carnival of Natural Parenting in part because I feel like I no longer do such a great job at getting “kids in the kitchen,” this month’s theme. We were great at it when my son was two and three, and…
Gluten-free expo comes to D.C.: win free entry!
Going gluten-free in 2004 was part of my holistic effort to bring my body into balance and heal my thyroid from Graves’ Disease, autoimmune hyperthyroidism. My goal was to get off anti-thyroid medication and get healthy enough to get pregnant. Although I also hoped to go off anti-depressant medication, I didn’t really expect that a…
Talking Real Food with Robyn O’Brien
When Robyn O’Brien’s youngest child had her first allergic reaction to eggs, I had already — over two years earlier — given up vegetarianism and soy in a quest to regain my fertility and, a few months later, given up gluten and dairy in a quest to heal my gut and my body overall from…
Thyroids of a feather…
When I wrote an essay titled “Attemptus Interruptus” about having to postpone conception to deal with Graves’ Disease, autoimmune hyperthyroidism, I had no idea that the woman I referenced in the second-to-last paragraph would face the same disease. I was best friends with S in eighth grade and spent most of the summer of 1987 on her…
Let patients get the full picture
This post originally appeared on DC Metro Moms on August 19, 2009 Let patients get the full picture “This is why health care costs are so high,” hissed my endocrinologist when she looked at the results of the labwork my holistic physician had ordered. To her, the additional blood tests were a waste of time…
Stress is something to let go of, too
I’d hoped that this spring season would find me happily detoxing away. I made a good start nutritionally, and I did the one dramatic foot soak. But I haven’t gotten much beyond that. We have been planning to move but had to do some unexpected negotiation after the home we want to buy got a…