Author: Sheila Quirke

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25 Things Moms (And Dads) Can Do To Combat Climate Change

Hurricanes, floods, fires, tornadoes, sweltering temperatures, the polar vortex, melting ice sheets, hungry polar bears, dead coral, and on and on and on. Politicians can deny and ignore climate change, they can erase web sites and scientific data, they can discount the 97% of scientists who stand united that human activity is changing the climate of our one and only habitable planet, but it will not change the reality of what it happening to earth and all its living creatures.

It’s all a bit overwhelming, isn’t it?

It’s easy to stick our heads in the sand, assume that someone else will clean up the mess, but that’s not what we teach our kids, is it? We don’t teach them to trash their home.  We don’t teach them to not take responsibility for their actions or their messes.  So why do we excuse ourselves, our elected officials, and our own contributions to what is happening to our world?

Here are 25 things you can do to help combat climate change in your own little corner of our collective home.  Feeling helpless is only making things worse.  Stop relying on others and start doing something positive.  Today.  Now.  No excuses.

  1. Recycle.  I wash my garbage, yes, I do.  Call me crazy, but it makes me feel better.  It’s nothing for me to rinse out a milk jug or a can of beans knowing that it won’t end up in a landfill.
  2. Compost.  Food scraps = food for growing things.  Do it.
  3. Shop off virtual yard sales.  Does little Timmy really need a brand new train table when your neighbor is selling one in like new condition for $25?
  4. Buy clothing second hand.  Yes.  So important.  For your kids, for yourself.  I wrote about it here.  Oh!  And I am a convert to Thred Up.  Have you see The True Cost documentary about fast fashion?  It’s on Netflix.  Watch and learn.
  5. Use metal straws.  This one was a bit of a challenge for me, but learning the impact of plastic straws on the environment was a revelation for me.  Now I have to sew a little cloth bag so I can carry a couple with me in my purse.
  6. Ditch those paper plates.  Sure, if you’re hosting a big barbecue, carry on, but for every day?  Nope.
  7. Vote for candidates that acknowledge the reality of climate change.
  8. Eat less meat.  Reduce beef in favor of chicken, fish, eggs, or vegetables.
  9. Change out your incandescent light bulbs to LED or flourescent.  This one hurts, too, but Mother Nature needs it.
  10. Change your energy to “green” by contacting your electricity or utility company and switching to green alternatives or “green pricing,” that ensures all your electricity is provided by clean and renewable sources.
  11. Clean or replace your HVAC filters every three months.
  12. Use a programmable thermostat.  Why heat or cool an empty home?
  13. Wash your laundry in cold water.  Seriously.  The sky won’t fall down.  And hot water does not make things any cleaner.
  14. Stop wasting water in your home.
  15. Line dry your clothing.  This is one of those times I wish I had a back yard.
  16. Stop buying bottled water.  Just say no.
  17. Keep your car tires properly inflated.  Who knew?  Tires inflated properly run more efficiently and contribute to less gas.
  18. Bring your own bags to the grocery store.
  19. Introduce your kids to NASA’s Climate Kids website.  It’s super cool!
  20. Read books from the library.  Read all the books!  They’re free!
  21. Start listening to the Warm Regards podcast.  It will make you smarter.
  22. Watch and discuss Wall-E with your children.  You can get it from the library!  It’s really all about the environment.
  23. Celebrate Earth Day and Arbor Day  with family.  Together.  Celebrating our earth.
  24. Plan a local vacation — no planes and close to home.  We did it this year and it was both more relaxing and cheaper.
  25. Use cloth napkins.  So simple.  We’re still using some we got for our wedding, sixteen years later.

 

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Rotted Teeth

I went to an oral surgeon this week to atone for my dental sins.  After thirteen years of neglect, part of the price I paid for these dental sins was the extraction of three rotted teeth.

In 2004, the last year in which I saw a dentist, just a few months after getting my first crown, it chipped away as I ate a peanut M & M. That crown was expensive.  And it hurt.  And, just like that, biting down on a peanut covered in chocolate and candy coating, it was busted.  I was angry and afraid.  Getting that crown hurt.  Paying for it hurt more.

I learned to live with it.  I didn’t chew on that side of my mouth for years. Years and years.  I adapted.

After that chip, four more teeth chipped.  Hell, one fell out completely, save the root, which was tucked away in my gums, playing a game of periodontal hide and seek.  That, too, was years ago.

I have walked around the earth for thirteen years carrying a mouth full of rotting teeth.  I have been living one of my anxiety dreams on the daily — teeth so rotten that they just crumble out of my mouth.

Dang, it fells good to admit that.  I am certain I was fooling nobody.  Any wide smile confessed my dental sins and shame whether I intended it to or not.

BEHOLD. My dental shame. This is what 13 years of neglect looks like.
BEHOLD. My dental shame. This is what 13 years of neglect looks like.

My dental phobia was trumped this spring by some pretty intense dental pain.  One of my teeth started aching something fierce.  I experienced the kind of pain that woke me up at night.  It was time.  I called a dentist.  It was a new dentist, someone I had found through an “ISO kind dentist” request over a year ago on a local Facebook mom’s group.

The woman who answered the phone was nice.  So compassionate and so kind.  I spoke through tears, “I have severe dental phobia, but a tooth is hurting terribly.  I need help.”  I am crying even now as I type these words. Crying about a stranger’s kindness and crying about the resolve it took to pick up that phone and crying about a husband who loves and cares for me even more than I do myself some days.

They saw me that morning.  Within a few hours I was sitting in a different office getting the root canal-ed right out of that painful tooth.  There was some antibiotics and one hell of a bill.

Two weeks later was another appointment for another root canal for the next door neighbor of that first rotten tooth.  Teeth 30 and 31, respectively. With my acute dental pain addressed, I had instructions to go back to my referring dentist for follow-up and to begin the process of trying to salvage thirteen years of neglect.

Par for the course, it took me almost four months to make that follow-up appointment.  Dagnabbit.  I hate that I am this way.  I can freaking guide a daughter through cancer treatment, I can give birth, I can claw my way through the adoption process, but sitting my ass in a dental chair is somehow too difficult for me to manage.

But push was coming to shove and my referring dentist started to make polite “reminder” phone calls that I needed to get back on the dental saddle.  Finally, I made an appointment to have three teeth extracted this week with an oral surgeon.  I went for the one stop shopping package, getting three teeth pulled at once, ripping those suckers right the fuck out, including the coy one tucked up in my gum, no longer fooling anybody.

The surgeon was young and had kind eyes.  We chit chatted just a bit, making small talk, all assembled (me, my husband, the surgeon, two assistants) politely ignoring my shame that filled the room, my dental dirty laundry.

The doctor told me I would receive drugs I know well — Versed and Propofol, to sedate me.  I wouldn’t feel a thing.  It made me cry thinking that I was getting what my girl got each morning before her little brain and spine were hit with a harmful radiation that, like me, could not save her.

And then, just like that, three rotten teeth disappeared.  I didn’t feel them come out.  I don’t remember feeling anything.  The drugs did their thing so I could get on with my thing.  And now, with the help of Visa, I can start to heal.  I am still angry at myself that I did not ask to keep those suckers.  They would have been a useful tool in a cautionary tale of “What happens when you don’t brush your teeth,” for my sons.

As the hours give way since the triple extraction, I can’t help but think, Wouldn’t it be lovely to take all that is rotted and rotting in our lives and just extract it?  Take the bad stuff away?  Have someone give us a magic potion that puts us to sleep and wake up to a fresh start, even if that fresh start is a bloody hole, a cave where there was once a rock?  Make a clean break from that which holds us back, leaving room for repair and something better, stronger, not broken and damaged and rotten to its core?

I am so flawed, so broken, but I can still choose hope.  My rotten teeth are gone.  For now.  There is a real possibility that if I do what I am supposed to do, I will never experience this shame and pain and fear again.

I hope I am strong enough.  I hope I learn to value my health more.  I hope my ability to do what is needed is greater and stronger than my fear and tendency to retreat and withdraw from that which I do not like.  I hope my husband forgives me.  I hope I can be a teacher to my sons about the importance of caring for oneself.  I hope I know I am worthy of living outside of shame and owning my flaws.  I hope one day soon I can feel again what it is like to chew on both sides of my mouth.  I hope I can forgive myself for being rotten to my core and knowing I can do better and be better.

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These Graham Cracker Days: Thoughts on Motherhood

Costco sells big boxes of graham crackers that hold four regular sized boxes — the kind that you can pick up at your local market. These days, my family, well, my boys really, eat enough graham crackers to make a run to Costco for things like graham crackers in bulk both cost and time efficient.

Whether it’s the changing seasons or the shortening days with the barely lightening mornings, I’ve been thinking about this phase in my life as my ‘graham cracker days.’  There will come a day when my boys will no longer want or eat graham crackers, but today is not that day.  With no other little one on our horizon, I am perhaps more acutely aware that this will be our last time at the graham cracker rodeo.

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This is not an advertisement.

Last week we swapped out our very last latched car seat for a high backed booster.  Diapers are now reserved for night time only for our little guy and are sometimes even dry in the morning.  I no longer think about snacks and drinks every time we leave the house, though I do carry a clean set of underpants and shorts in my purse at all times.  At.  All. Times.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes . . .

I am ready for it.  At forty-freaking-seven years old, I am ready for it.  Lordy, am I ready for it.  And it’s all good.  While so many of my former classmates are sending kids off to high school and college, I am sweeping up Cheerios and wiping bottoms. I am too old for this shit.  Literally and figuratively.

When I see babies now, I smile politely, but almost always think to myself, “Whew, I’ll never have to go through that again.” Yesterday, my little guy, for only the second time, sat on the toilet and made a poop.  Flloooooossshhh it went, down to join its friends at the poop water park.  The last time he pooped on a toilet was in April.  I danced and celebrated and texted my husband.  Finally, maybe, possibly, I see the light at the end of this very stinky tunnel.

My experiences with motherhood have not been easy.  After burying our oldest, having four miscarriages, and adopting our youngest, I know more than most that mothering and motherhood is precious and fleeting and a gift that not all are offered or prepared for.  To mother is sacred.  sa-cred, an adjective:  holy, hallowed, consecrated, sanctified, revered, venerated.

Because I know and truly appreciate the gift that it is to get to mother a human, I sometimes find myself feeling guilty when the thought of washing one more poop stained pair of pants or wiping up one more spilled glass of milk at the dinner table or asking yet again for the dirty laundry to be picked up off the floor kind of, sort of makes me want to scream.  Part of me believes that because I have buried my daughter and because another mother out there literally placed her baby in my arms for me to raise as my own, that I am supposed to value every single second of it.

I can’t.  I don’t.

It’s impossible, isn’t it?  The grandmothers behind us at the grocery store tell us to “enjoy every second of it.”  Other mothers who are waiting for texts from their teenagers warn us that if we blink, even once, we will miss our little ones growing up.  We are told and instructed to be both vigilant and grateful at all times.  Nope.  It’s enough for me to get through my days.

If there are smiles on the faces of me or my boys as the sun goes down, that’s a win.  If my boys are warm and fed and learning and kind and know they are loved, I am succeeding.  And if, during some of those days, I am not smiling, but cranky, it’s alright.  And if, during some of those days, my boys feel a little chilly or experience a moment of hunger or watch too many screens or feel angry and mad at me, like they are the unlukiest boys in the world to have me for their mama, I’m okay with that, too.

In these graham cracker days, I am happy to put one phase of my mothering to rest.  Packing up small clothing and plastic toys and sending them along to the Goodwill for another family to make use of is, for me, a celebration.  Guiding these boys to new adventures in schools and figuring out the intricacies of friendships and responsibilities outside the home are the challenges of motherhood I am preparing myself for now, with no illusions that it will be any harder or easier than what came before.

My beautiful husband and I brought babies into our lives in 2005, 2009, and 2013.  If you do the math correctly, we’re due for another in 2017, but as the year winds down and there is not a whiff of wondering what to expect while we are expecting, I feel so grateful and happy and accomplished for what we have done.  And I am stoked as I look ahead to my next phase of motherhood.  The one with fewer graham crackers.