If you found me by choice, thanks! And if you accidentally stumbled here and are about to click away because you think I’m going to wax philosophical about the joys of dressing your kids in hemp, stick around.
I’m not here to preach.
I might use biodegradable toilet cleaner, but I’m not about to deny my kids the occasional restaurant hamburger and fries—though I can’t help reminding them what factory farming is doing to the planet. I live by example, but I’m not a sustainabully. (Yes, I made that word up.)
My family runs the gamut from preschool to tween. While blogging as Mommy Greenest, I’ve written about talking with third graders about global warming, feeding my kids organic food, battling a lice infestation without chemicals (they won), trying out veganism (less for the planet than for the purely selfish goal of losing five pounds), saving money by DIYing my own cleaners and face masks, and disposing of off-gassing toys while my two-year-old was sleeping. (“Doll? What doll?”)
My family and I eat organic and grow a lot of our vegetables. And I drive a relatively large SUV.
So maybe I’m not the greenest mommy on the block, but I try to make daily choices that can help shrink my family’s carbon footprint. And those choices—old and new, bad and good, right and oh-so-wrong (like that Volvo, which the dealer swore was going hydrogen)—I’ll share here with you.
THE NEST
Mommy Greenest’s tag line—“We guard the nest of the world”—was inspired by a speech I once heard given by pediatrician Dr. Alan Greene. He described the rates of children’s illnesses—including cancer, asthma and autism—as escalating at a pace so rapid they would soon be considered epidemic.
Scientists—Dr. Greene among them—believe that many of these illnesses are caused by chemicals in our environments, which children absorb at a rate much higher than adults. And even the EPA admits the chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis have never been tested for safety in children.
Research to support the negative impact of chemicals on our families can be found at Healthy Child, Healthy World, a national non-profit dedicated to children’s environmental health, which inspired me to learn more about greener parenting.
The analogy that Dr. Greene made was to the old “canary in a coal mine” adage, in which the coal mine is the world and our children the canaries, whose spiking rates of illnesses should be telling us that something is very, very wrong. In envisioning Mommy Greenest, I kept coming back to the idea of those birds, and the safe nest that is their right.
In taking small steps to keep chemicals out of our homes and our children’s lives, we act collectively to protect our nest—for all the world’s children.
I hope that we can inspire each other to keep taking those steps. Thanks for reading!
BACK STORY
So how did I get here? If you believe in fate, this story is for you.
I’m a journalist by trade and I’d been writing about fashion and beauty for about 10 years before I realized that something was wrong. Every eye cream promised to eradicate my wrinkles (they didn’t), every mascara I tried was “proven” to thicken my lashes without smudging (they couldn’t) and every little black dress I looked at was supposed to revolutionize fashion (um, no). If someone told me one more time about a shampoo that would give me body and bounce without blow-drying, I was going to scream.
Let’s back up a bit: I was always kind of a hippie kid. My nickname in college was “Flower.” My dad co-founded the Native American Studies Center at UCLA; I grew up going to pow-wows and thanking the plants when I picked flowers. I thought of myself as a pretty “natural” girl—I ate organic, breastfed my son until he was a toddler, and grew tomatoes in the summer time.
But in 2007, when I was pregnant with my third child—who you’ll see referred to here as the Barnacle, because of her naturally clingy tendencies—I became involved with Healthy Child, Healthy World, an organization dedicated to children’s environmental health and, through them, to Anna Getty and her work with Pregnancy Awareness Month.
It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least. I learned about chemicals in cleaning products that made the air inside my home more polluted than the stuff outside. I found out about the spike in children’s illnesses—from asthma to ADHD to cancer—that scientists linked to environmental pollution. And I read about toxins like parabens in beauty products, pesticides in cotton, and the organic alternatives manufactured without any of that nasty stuff at all.
Lipstick without lead? Mascara without mercury? The light bulb went off. Here were the truly revolutionary fashion and beauty products I had been waiting for. These products really were doing something different: They worked, without any side effects on me, or the Earth.
THE ECOSTILETTO CONNECTION
So I started writing about this kind of stuff, and publishing it online. Back in 2007, when I was working on GreenGirlGuide, I opened the mail one day to find a very intimidating cease-and-desist letter from lawyers for National Geographic, which saw a conflict between my site and their TheGreenGuide.com.
Once my partners and I realized that we had no resources to fight the geological giant, we decided to part ways. I knew that I wanted to continue online publishing about sustainable living, and I had two ideas: One was EcoStiletto, for women, and the other was Mommy Greenest, for moms.
I enlisted my friend, the graphic design genius Courtney Zielinski at Hughes Design, to work with me on some ideas, and registered EcoStiletto.com and MommyGreenestOnline.com, because MommyGreenest.com was taken (but nothing with that name appeared on the web).
I also started the proceedings to trademark both names and threw up two splash pages, having learned something about protecting intellectual property from the discussions with NatGeo.
A few weeks later, I did another search and lo and behold someone else had put up a site called MommyGreenest.com! I emailed the info@ address and got a very nice email back from Lisa Yashar in Chicago, who told me that she was taking a break from a career as a lawyer to raise her two kids and had planned to blog as Mommy Greenest but wasn’t sure she’d have time.
We talked on the phone and I told her that I wouldn’t do MommyGreenestOnline.com if there might be a future conflict with her site. She told me that if she ever decided to stop blogging, she’d let me know. We hung up; I put my ideas in a box, and started working on EcoStiletto.
PSYCHIC FRIENDS NETWORK
Am I boring you? Keep reading. This is where it gets good.
During a writing seminar in October 2008, I resolved to get back in touch with Lisa and see if she’d continued her blog. The next morning, I kid you not, there was an email from Lisa saying she hadn’t had time to write Mommy Greenest and she wanted me to have it. Is this meant to be or what? I started blogging the next day on Wordpress and launched the MommyGreenest site in May 2010.
The wait was so worth it. (Hopefully, so was this long-winded post.) Thanks for reading!
xo,
