Slowdown Farmstead

In this episode, part 1 of 2, we cover:

* weightlifting programming and goals

* cod liver oil

* the things I did as a young mama that served me well

* sunscreen

* preparing for motherhood

* fasting and carb cycling with your cycle

* drinking orange juice/sugar

* so-called diagnosis… or is it a curse?

* nausea with beef liver

* smoking and other addictions

* mold in da house

Resources I mentioned in both part one and two of these Q&As:

I had it suggested to me that a day-in-the-life type essay is about due. I must admit, I do like a good day-in-the-life. It’s fun to see how other people cobble their lives together to excavate the meaning and pleasures in a day. So, I’ve agreed to the challenge. I thought this might best be done with pictures and commentary.

My intention here is to be as real as possible. I wasn’t going to save up some unusual outings or events to make things more exciting or dramatic. Those are things I’m happy to avoid for the most part anyway. What I share here is a typical day in the life of me, a homesteader and writer living on a farm plunked firmly on the Canadian Shield. A rock. I live on a big, frozen rock. And hallelujah for that! I’m going to include in this day the things we do for our health and wellbeing because they are a part of our lives, as integral and routine as eating and sleeping. 

I’m going to try to do these types of essays seasonally so I can show how much our lives change throughout the year. Over the course of the next year, maybe two, I will put these together so they can be read in succession to illustrate how woven our lives are into the seasons. This is the connecting thread throughout the book I’m currently writing.

I’ve been asked to show how I combine my “bullet journal” with my “deep work” schedule by a few of you here. Nothing happens in my life without the structure of my schedule. I’ve included this peek as a little thank you perk to my paid subscribers. You can access those pictures and explanations here.

So without further ado, a day in the life of Slowdown Farmstead:

Winter on our little farm is about rest. It doesn’t mean we don’t work or move or have tasks to do, but everything is decidedly slower. Chores are quicker because we don’t have to move cattle every day. They live in their winter area complete with their winter barn to keep them sheltered from fierce wind, wetness, and the cold of our winter seasons. Chores are also done later than they are in summer. Everything of summer rustles and bustles us to get moving, from the sun that rises earlier and earlier, the days that stay longer and longer, the frogs that peep and the whippoorwills that sing from dusk to dawn, and the chorus of songbirds that usher in every day, singing to raise the sun.

In spring and summer we raise, grow, forage, and plant all of the food we eat. That means we must milk, dry, can, store, butcher, culture, ferment, smoke, cure, freeze, and freeze-dry all of the food by autumn. The pace is demanding but we always build pleasure and calm into every day. Life is perspective, after all. Still the reality of the demands on one’s body remain. We are always, always so grateful for the arrival of the slowness of winter. Winter is a good friend, one that comes up quietly alongside you, slips an arm around your shoulders, offers a steaming mug of something lovely and says, “Enough now, come with me.”

So here we are, with winter on our little farm in the woods.

0600: Wake up. Start fire(s). Troy starts a fire in one room and I get the kitchen wood cookstove going. Drink solé. Meditation and prayers in front of the fire with a sleepy Great Dane.

Because this is winter and the land is dark, and the days very short, we need to do a little more work to protect our circadian rhythm in the mornings and evenings. That means a few things for us. First, we wake up later and go to sleep earlier. It’s interesting how this is what our bodies ask for after the mammoth push of spring, summer, and fall. Longer nights must mean we need that sleep, right? 

We wear blue light blocking glasses when we wake up in the morning and once the sun sets in the early evening. We use candle and lantern light throughout our house at these times for the most part. We stay off screens, but if we have to go on something, our glasses are on. Firelight is what we try to rely on the most. We also use red incandescent lighting.

0700: Work out (weight lifting with 1-2 times interval training/week). We cobbled together a home gym over the years. It took a good long while, but now we’re pretty happy with our set up. Before we had a home gym we worked out in military gyms or, if we were somewhere without one, we used commercial or university gyms. I remember one year finding out that a hospital, which had a free-weight gym in it for the use of their staff, was going to be closing the gym due to insurance reasons. Troy asked if we could buy the equipment, which consisted of dumbbells, a squat rack, and an olympic bar/plates. They sold it to us for a few hundred dollars. What a score! The problem was getting all of that heavy equipment down from the sixth story, to a loading bay, and then into our little Toyota. Happily, a friend loaned us their truck and we employed our daughters as pack-mules for the endeavour. A royal pain to be sure but long forgotten when we get to work out in our own private gym.

Our gym is in an outbuilding that also houses our freezers, meat cooler, and butcher shop. We finally insulated it this year so I don’t have to work out in an oversized parka anymore. Luxury!

0745 (or whatever time is sunrise): Step outside and watch the sunrise for five minutes. This ensures my circadian clock is in rhythm with where I am. This affects every facet of my health. If any of this is new to you, you’ll find the couple of references at the bottom of this post a good jumping off point to understanding how essential light is to our health.

0800: Change into warm farm clothes and start chores. In winter, chores consist of the normal feeding and watering of animals, but all tasks are condensed in and around the barn instead of in pastures all over the place. The geese and ducks aren’t out in their pond in the field. The chickens and turkeys live together in their winter house. They share a fenced in area with the sheep who get locked up in the barn at night and live around the barn during the day, most certainly dreaming of green grass and wool shearing day. The cattle live a bit further up from the barn. Their lives surround their hay feeders and a lovely, three sided structure Troy built for them to keep them out of the wind and freezing ice.

Where we live, we go through multiple freeze-thaw cycles every winter. It makes keeping animals dry and sheltered a challenge. Last week we saw some -28c days and then, overnight, we’re just below zero degrees celsius. Then it will start raining which turns to ice, which turns to snow, and the temperature plummets. The cows will be wet, coated in ice and frost. I know in the dry cold of the prairie, cattle get a vertical wind shelter and that’s it. But getting cold and staying cold is, in many ways, easier on these lovely beasts than what they endure in our winters.

Along with watering, and there is always a sigh of relief when the frost free water hydrants haven’t frozen overnight (because that involves an incredible amount of extra time and energy to sort out), I top up the various animal’s minerals and supplements. The cattle get Redmond salt, humates (fulvic acid), bentonite clay (not every time), chelated minerals, and kelp from the east coast. The sheep get something similar but with their own mineral mix specific to sheep, higher in copper.

The cow’s have three feeders, two for round bales, one for the enormous large squares which weigh close to a ton each. I check those and feed them a new bale if necessary. If the hay has frozen or there’s been a big dump of snow, I will crawl up into the large square feeder and spread out their hay. I love this job. It’s an incredible workout and the cows all swarm the feeder and jostle for position around the weird two legged creature doling out the goods. Sometimes I just sit down in there and listen to the sound of them eating for a spell. One of my favourite farmer perks.

The sheep are then let out of their nighttime confinement and fed their hay and a treat of alfalfa pellets. The turkeys and chickens get their pre-soaked ration from the night before. Their shared waterer is checked and the ice on top broken and removed. The ducks and geese are let out of their area, fed their grain and hay, and watered. Ducks and geese eat a good amount of hay in the winter. They’re more interested in hay than their grain. Chickens and turkeys, on the other hand, will only nibble on hay and far prefer their guts (saved from ruminants butchered earlier in the fall), trim, and clabbered milk soaked grain concoction.

Feed, water, love-up barn cats. Put feed in a back corner for the old barn cat the others are mean to so she can eat in peace. She’s earned it. 

Collect branches and twigs with buds on them for our meat rabbits. Feed and water rabbits, add extra bedding because they have, as sure as day, started to dig another tunnel in their never-satiated need to dig. I foil their plans again by evening out the ground in their house and quietly whisper a prayer of thanks to my man who had the forethought to cover the entire ground and up the walls with welded wire hardware cloth. “Nice try, wascally wabbits, you ain’t going anywhere!” Give them each a little mountain of hay to carve out into a bed, or to eat, or a little of both.

0830: Make breakfast. Breakfast is usually leftovers or a steak. Whatever it is, it’s high fat and protein. Feed dogs before I eat lest they create a pool of slobber at my feet. Eat a relaxed breakfast with my dreamboat. Talk about our day to come. Clean up after breakfast.

0930: Walk dogs in forest. If I do this right, it will take me an hour. If I do it wrong, I will be done in thirty minutes. This is a time where I do some grounding as well. In winter, that looks like hugging a tree for ten minutes or so, however long it takes for my heartbeat to align with the pulsing flow of sap in the tree. Sometimes I lay on the frozen ice of the lake or beaver pond and watch the ravens put on a show. Slow and methodical, that’s what I’m after in the wilds. Too fast, too distracted, and I miss all the things I’m being told.

1030: Feed dogs their after-walk bones. Have a shower. Make a pot of tea.

1100: Sit down to write. This is book writing time.

1300: Get outside and move for a bit after sitting. Today I restocked our tinder supply.

1330: Sit down for an afternoon meeting with hubs. If it’s warm enough we do this outside. We just sit and talk. I will often read out of a book that we’re reading together. In the summer, these meetings are usually an hour long because they need to be with the volume of work and length of days at that time. Pleasure must be built into every day. No exceptions.

1400: On this day, I reviewed my saved seeds and reorganized it into this time block of my schedule. My seed ordering has been dramatically streamlined over the years. We don’t eat nightshades so no seeds needed for them other than the potatoes, but we keep our own seed potatoes. I don’t grow high oxalate vegetables so no spinach, swiss chard, or sweet potatoes necessary. Mostly, my vegetables are now things that I like to ferment, can, or store over winter or things to delight in, fresh, during the growing season. Things like five or six varieties of radishes, heavy-leafed, substantial lettuces, herbs of all sorts, a multitude of summer squash varieties (which I love fermented for winter eating), winter squashes (which are the bulk of any carbohydrate we eat in winter), sweet shelling peas, etc..

Note: this time block is usually reserved for working on my “year of the house” projects, but I had to get my seeds squared away. “Year of the House”, as I wrote about before, includes both the house that is my body and the brick and mortar one that we live in. Normally, at this time of day, I am painting, sanding, tearing apart or building up something in the house or I am in the sauna or doing light therapy. Yesterday, I finished painting the walls in the summer kitchen.

1500: Make supper. Depending on what I’m doing this is an hour or fifteen minute process. Today I’m cooking up some lamb chops with potatoes roasted in duck fat for the other two eating with me. I skip them potatoes. While the chops are cooking, I do my second, twenty minute meditation of the day. We use the Ziva meditation methodology and love it. It’s the only meditation we’ve been able to consistently stick with for years.

1600: Eat supper. We eat twice a day and try to always eat while the sun is still up. We also avoid eating three hours before sleep. That’s been a practice of ours from the very beginning. Now, we’re scooching that up, trying to get closer to four or five hours before bed. Supper is leisurely. We light candles. We talk. We dawdle. We enjoy. We slurp. We use our fingers.

1700: Evening chores done at sunset year round (timings shift as the sun goes down later). This way we get those signals to our brains (nighttime is here) and it’s easy to lock everyone up. The animals who don’t have the bad fortune of being controlled by clocks and electric lights, know when it’s bedtime better than we do.

Evening winter chores are the easiest of any chores in the whole year. We’ve already addressed anything frozen or needing of more bedding in the morning. Everyone is fed. This is just tucking everyone in, but they really do that on their own. When we go outside, the ducks and geese have left the yard and are all hunkering down in their house. We just shut and secure the door. The barn cats get a second meal because it’s cold and they need it. The chickens and turkeys are all roosted, again we just shut the door to their home. We feed the sheep some alfalfa to get them into the barn where they sleep, safe from coyotes. The cattle get blown a kiss. They don’t get anything else. No milking for us in the winter. Thank goodness. The rabbits get their frozen water switched out for something fresh. 

On the way back into the house, we grab the food we will need for tomorrow’s meals from the root cellar and freezers. This is where I decide what we’ll eat the next day. Some people ask me to show them my meal plans. I have never had a meal plan in my life. Here’s my meal planning: look in freezers the night before, “hmmm…. what looks good? Lamb, yes, I could go for lamb. What should we eat with the lamb? In my case nothing, but I’ll get some of that minty herb sauce I made in summer and grab a couple potatoes for Troy that I’ll roast in duck fat. There’s duck fat in the house. I’ll grab some potatoes from the root cellar.” I almost always grab a jar or two of bone broth from the bone broth freezer. 

1730: While one of us was doing chores, the other was cleaning the kitchen after supper. After jointly finishing that, this is the time when I return to writing, answering comments, and researching things. This is also the time when I write my schedule for the next day. Troy will work on various projects he has going on or answer some emails. Blue blocking glasses on and screens void of blue light with f.lux.

1800-2000: Play a board game, read, work on a rug I’m making. Troy carves wood and is working on a wonderful super secret project I cannot divulge less the recipient’s eyes fall on these words. It’s good, that’s all I can say. Sometimes we hang out in the wood fired hot tub. Tonight we did just that. Nothing quite like being in hot water when the air all around you is freezing and the stars are clear and brilliant. It’s magical, that’s the truth of it.

2000: Night time ablutions. Read or mess around for awhile. Bedtime.

I’m hoping I can put these together as a series so the cycles and shifting demands of a year can be better understood. I’m starting with winter, a time of rest and slowness. Recovery. So this is only part of a story and tells little of the whole. This is the time we think about when we are being run off our feet in spring and summer. These early bedtimes and warm winter fires are the things our dreams are made of when we’re butchering our third steer, preserving everything we can in some form or another, setting up electric fencing every day when we move the cattle and sheep, and milking cows and then making sure we honour the gifts of our benevolent bovines by making butter and cheese.

All of that will come again soon enough, the blooming of life. Some of us will be here to witness the blooming of those spring flowers, some of us won’t. Songbirds will return, bringing that bright, verdant green on their wingtips. Spring Peepers will sing their relentless chorus. The endless dandelions, each crowned with a fat bumble bee crashing about. And of course, my favourite, the return of cows onto the sweet grasses. Oh, to witness the joy! Even my old gal, Bea, running and doing her best bucking bronco routine, kicking up her heels in sheer bliss at the return of the sweet and juicy. What can a farmer girl do but plunk herself down amongst those beautiful beasts and listen to the sound of them eating. Nothing like it in the whole wide world. All of life conspiring to usher in spring.

Whoever makes those white sound machines has really missed the boat by not including the sound of cow’s eating grass in their repertoire.

But that is not now. And in every season, joys of its own. The being here means we are here, now. When we were not tied to what the seasons brought, we spent great chunks of our lives looking forward, planning, strategizing. That’s important too, but not as a way of being. As a way of being, that trait can be torturous. We are here, in these moments living with an eye to the future and an appreciation of what’s past, but immersed in the present. In everything hardship and beauty. That’s a certainty. They are inextricably woven together. You can see it in everything if you’re here for it, too. Those are the gifts that the seasons bring to our lives. 

There are thousands of books on the topic of circadian rhythm, the effects of certain types of light on our bodies throughout the day, sun gazing, and aligning ourselves with the rhythms of our days and the seasons. Start researching with those key words. Podcasts are a great place to get started. Here’s one to start the fun.

Early on in our lives, we decided that the health of our family was going to be one of our guiding values. If a value guides, there are obvious requirements of adherence. It was with this open declaration of the need for health to be prioritized in our family that we, even in tough circumstances, remaine…

Authors note to paid subscribers: Should you choose to listen to the audio version of this essay, don’t forget to take a look at the end of this written essay where you will find an “in my kitchen, around the farm” update.

Earlier this week, I found myself chatting with a fine lass at a local tattoo parlour. She was the piercer and I, the piercee (I know it’s not a real word, Sir Autocorrect, chill out). Like much else of me, my ears, pierced some forty-two years ago when I was nine years old by an elderly, elegant lady at the Hudson’s Bay jewellery counter, decided that they had enough during covid lockdowns. My poor little ear holes just packed up and headed out for greener pastures. 

My piercer was telling me that she’s been quite busy and expects to be even busier in the coming weeks. When I asked what causes rushes in piercings, she told me that it was the soldiers from the military base, just down the road from where we were. “Oh yeah”, she said, “I just got a call this morning from a guy who told me he had to take out his “industrial” piercing fifteen years ago when he got in the military and now that they’re changing the rules, he is finally getting to put it back in.”

I was astounded. The military is allowing piercings? That too? It was only earlier in the week that my husband had heard through a still-serving friend that Canada’s top brass had now wildly rewritten the dress and decorum regulations for service members. Gone are short, tidy haircuts for men and tight, perfectly manicured hair-buns for long haired women. Face tattoos are now okay so long as they don’t say or depict anything that would fall into the “hate content” genre. Along with their long hair, men can also wear any type of facial hair they want. No more shaving every day and “high and tight” haircuts. The parts of regulations that involve not putting your hands in your pockets or chewing gum or holding hands in uniform have also been removed. Earrings can dangle. Nails can be long. Hair can be fuchsia pink, in any sex.

Another wonderfully progressive addition in the military dress regulations, or is it a subtraction, involved de-gendering clothing. No, that doesn’t mean they have gotten rid of the purses and skirts in dress uniforms, it means that men may choose to wear them. They wrote it as if it’s all gender neutral, but the truth is, women could always opt to wear pants instead of skirts so the only difference now is that men can dress as women.

In other words, soldiers have been liberated from the constraints of conforming. Yes, yes, there’s still the whole bugaboo around uniforms in general, but now there’s individual expression and allowances around how clothing is worn. This is a new military, one that has brought in critical race theory (CRT) and antiracism to address the “systemic racism” that pervades its every tank and trolly. Soldiers sit through hours of forced indoctrination, just as they always have, only this is about making them see their role in oppression and how to sniff out the slightest waft of racism from the comrades in their midst. And to help them along the way, the military has installed CRT guides into the pastor/minister positions in bases across Canada.

I wonder if the full length mirrors in the mess halls, the ones with “check yourself” written across the top have been removed. Because, what exactly are you checking yourself for? How pretty or handsome you look? If your nose ring is free and clear of debris?

Say what you will about the military machine. I’d happily join in with you there. But we’re missing something when we don’t understand what the military offers to someone who, like me, found myself applying at the ripe old age of seventeen. I was living alone at a young age and, having been kicked out of school and my home a few times over, I had little options. I worked nights at a truck stop one summer. I had the typical fast food job, flipping burgers, for a bit. But when my mother suggested I join the army, out of exasperation I’m sure, my immediate thought was that I didn’t have what it took to do something like that. It was too hard. I wasn’t good enough, physically fit enough. I had no discipline, just ask my teachers or my principal who told me graduation wasn’t a possibility for me.

But there was something there. Some sort of flicker of possibility. In those days, university was reserved for those with very high grades. Those who didn’t have them, or didn’t aspire to the jobs a degree would bring, went off to college or trade schools. I didn’t even finish high school so I certainly didn’t have much in the way of aspirations towards anything beyond. I went to an open house night at our local armoury. Instead of the 6’4” mountainous towers of muscle with chiseled jaw soldiers I expected to greet me with a scoff, I was greeted by friendly enough soldiers. We walked about in an orderly mass, all of us “civilians” getting peeks into a foreign land with strange human like creatures displaying odd customs like saluting and forming themselves into measured lines and rows.

None of that interested me or impressed me much. What I was amazed by was the clear parameters of hierarchy and respect I saw. It was a curiosity. Why did a mark on a lapel warrant more respect than another? Everyone had boots shined to a gloss and uniforms crisp and tight. They walked with their backs straight and strong. Men, just a little older than me, answered questions with “Yes, Sergeant!” I felt a little embarrassed even witnessing it. The women had their hair pulled back so tight the corners of their eyes stretched in resistance. Not a single strand out of place. They too, moved about, spoke with confidence, wore the same uniform as the men, and walked with that same sense of purpose.

I didn’t know what that was then, but I wanted some.

I know what that was now. I know because I ended up serving in the military after going through the hell that is boot camp. As a raw recruit, I stood at rigid attention at 0500 hrs every morning, waiting for my Sergeant or Captain to work his way down the row of us until he came to me and stood inches from my face examining every little nook and cranny of my body, of my uniform, and my cubicle which included a bed and a locker. I steeled myself to look right through him at the wall beyond. Every hair was examined, every piece of clothing I wore. My nails and my boots. My collar and my laces. He would move around me looking to find that one little thread I didn’t burn off from a wayward seam or the edge of my combat pants escaping from the boot bands that held them tight against my calves. If all else failed, a piece of lint dangling from the wool of my bed was justification for him to rip it apart.

Every morning there would be something. There had to be something. If it wasn’t on me, it was in my cubicle where my bed was made so tight you could bounce a quarter off it. My locker, with its contents arranged with a ruler, was also full of possibilities of failure. And fail I did. Every morning. That is the name of the game. For weeks, I failed. We all did. We were the dregs, sloppy and hopeless. Mama’s forgotten children. Every morning our leaders inspected and every morning we found ourselves on the linoleum floor doing push ups in recompense. 

I can still vividly remember the first time my Sergeant walked up to me and said, “Nice turnout, Couture. Good bun.” Sounds a bit trivial maybe, but that first little drip of you-did-something-a-little-right-here, still evokes a rush of pride in my guts. I know how hard I worked, I perfected, I diligently poured myself into my tasks to earn that praise. I knew it was hard earned, yes, but I also knew it was genuine. I deserved it. I worked for it. It meant something. 

And so it went, for years. I, a girl that grew up without any type of sport participation outside of school gym class or outdoor play, discovered that my body was strong and capable. In the military, I placed in the top of all of my classes and courses. I was awarded a commendation for physical fitness. I, for the first time in my life, felt like I could be more. Parts of who I was that lay dormant were liberated. And those parts of me, stagnant and hidden, only bubbled up through the alchemy of discipline and structure. A discipline that was imposed initially, but adopted soon enough.  Even if I didn’t see what I was capable of, even if I thought what was being demanded was beyond me, someone else knew it was in there. There was an expectation of me. A demand of me. A standard. And somehow I met it. Again and again.

Of course, this is the military we’re talking about, not the totality of life. The military was shaping us into what they needed from us. Soldiers, pieces of a whole. But it was in that whole that I, and many, many others like me, were able to find something we couldn’t in “the real world”. I didn’t need to know what I was doing or where I was going in life. I just needed to be lined up at 0600 hrs for physical training and run and heave my way as good as the next guy. I didn’t need to know what I was going to do to get my grade twelve diploma finished, I just needed to be where I was supposed to be, looking sharp, and ready to work my tail off. And I did.

Break them down, build them up. Even when you knew that’s what they were doing, it worked. It works because the things that are getting built up on the outside, the soldiering qualities, pale in comparison to what is being built up on the inside.

I can still fondly remember the people I found myself thrown into platoons or units with. My fellow soldiers, there for their own reasons too. There were Newfies with their hilarious sayings and generally lighthearted way of making even the most treacherous tasks seem fun. There were the athletes that struggled to learn to work as a team and were constantly chastised with the biggest of insults from the higher ups, “What do you think you’re an individual?!” Ouch, that one cut deep. “No, Sergeant!” There were the uncoordinated and the physically weak, pushed into physical competence by shame. Hard and fast repercussions found every morning, at every physical training session. For the weak, the rest of us did extra pushups or ran extra kilometres as we double-backed on our runs, again and again, to pull the stragglers back into the fold. On weekends, while we rested, it was common to see those same “stragglers” pushing themselves with extra runs and gym sessions, determined to avoid the ongoing humiliation. 

There were the tough guys and gals, those that came from poverty and abuse, that worked harder, it seemed to me, than anybody else. They thrived in that environment. At last, for the first time in their lives, understanding a system. Order. Answers. Structure. A formula where once there was chaos. With discipline comes reward. There were slobs whose uniforms and rooms ladened us all with their laziness. When they were inspected, they didn’t get flack. We did - the collective pays. “Get your fellow soldier together!” We did pushups while he/she stood red faced. Were we mad? Heck, yes, we were mad, just as designed. From then on out, we prepared ourselves for inspection and then headed to the troublesome soldier to square them away. We were impatient and disgusted and our fellow soldier was embarrassed. We, the society in this world, expected more and the sloppy soldier, the target of our dismay, had two choices: rise up or be shunned. And you know, almost always, they rose up. Either that or they were done. But when they did, their pride replaced their shame. And that’s a lesson too oft missing in today’s world. 

The officers were the smart ones. The ones with the degrees that ruled from on high. We were not that. And so, they passed down their orders while our leaders, raised up from the lowly ranks like us, directed. Our Master Corporals and Sergeants and Warrant Officers knew us and, the best of them, would pull from us what needed to be pulled and pushed us in ways that challenged our weaknesses. Always, in everything, you can be better than this. You can do better than this. 

That never leaves you. At least, it’s never left me. They’re too good, those master brainwashers. It was too masterful, that implantation into my brain. I can’t even make out the edges anymore. I can be better than this. I don’t know how or what it takes to get me there, but I am a wellspring of untapped potential. That is what I left the military with. I went in a lost young girl with no direction. I left knowing that the life I was returning to had answers and direction and I was capable of taking all of it on.

Huh. Me, capable. Who woulda’ thunk it. 

Isn’t that what the great gift of challenges and hardships are all about? There is no teacher or guru capable of giving you what life’s hardest moments can. Sure, there are words and platitudes and lessons to read about, but it is only through actually living through something that we are shown what stuff we’re actually made of. That was the gift the military gave me. In hindsight, I’m not sure I could have ever learned those things about myself, given the me I was. I had no idea that what I was doing when I stood at attention on black asphalt for hours on end, skin blistered by the sweltering sun, had anything to do with discovering who I was or what I was capable of. My determination and grit. I didn’t have determination and grit going in. All I knew was that I was lazy and hopeless and yet, there I was on that asphalt standing still and turning and slamming my foot down at the bark of a Sergeant in front of me. Dumb and meaningless suffering, that’s what I was thinking then.

Wax on. Wax off. Left turn. Right turn.

Nothing in this world could have changed my perception of self other than moving through the darkest of cavernous hellholes and coming out the other end. It remains that way still as I continue to evolve and grow. I’m a stubborn sort. Through the hellholes we go. Forward ho!  There was no therapist or kind confidante that was going to find the words that would pull me through to the other side. No, some paths need fire and brimstone.

But we’ve changed our bent in this brave new world. The institutions that once held us to something greater are fading under ideologies that purport to usher in a new era of inclusivity and equality for all. Children’s sports teams assert that winners and losers are damaging and so there will be no score counting. Work as hard or as little as you like, we’re all winners here. Universities have dramatically lowered entrance standards. Today, most kids can get into some sort of university and thus, degrees have become quite meaningless. Cashiers at the health food store and uber drivers are full of university qualified humans all struggling to pay off their student debt. Fire departments and police too, have watered down expectations. It’s everywhere, yes, but what you lose when you apply these principles to the military wounds me personally. 

Who joins the military as an enlisted man? Oh, oops, enlisted person? Is it still enlisted? Pundits and experts from around this country have weighed in with their opinions on why the military is bleeding, more aptly hemorrhaging, personnel. Get rid of the archaic ideas, they say. “Nobody wants to work in an old, tired, organization that draws its culture and values from a museum, people want to be part of an agile organization that rewards modern values.” Really? You sure? Because I don’t see that at all. 

Yes, there are the ideologues that call for, and have well succeeded as I’ve already mentioned, in bringing far-left ideologies into the framework of our military, but these are mainly people at the top setting the cadence for the people below them. And those people at the top are products themselves of these far-left ideologies that have completely infiltrated and saturated our institutions of “higher learning”.  And so, where they go, so go these ways of looking at the world. But, the very gears that make a military work are drawn from segments of the population who are a little closer to the realities of life. The blue collar workers. The folks that understand that ideas are all well and good, but there is a real world where real work calls for brushing away of ideologies. Those ideas don’t work on the ground and nobody likes to have values shoved down their throats. 

I like to think that I have a pretty good looking glass to peek into the minds and motivations of younger people today. Yes, there are the parrots squawking radical notions on repeat. Let’s leave those to the side while they figure things out in life. It’s the others, the young women I know through my grown daughters and the others I have had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with through my writing. They are tired of the unstructured, anything goes, promiscuity and excesses of their time. Young women wondering if the men around them will ever rise up and expect anything more than a one night stand. And young men, told their worth is in their compliance to a woman, in the softening of their masculinity, in how many dollars they earn. It’s everyone for themselves, no rules. Just keep your judgments to yourself and repeat the mantras as given.

Do I think these young people would join the “new” military en masse? Of course not. I don’t think they should either. Why would they? For more of the same with crappy pay and the abject disrespect and devaluing from their higher ups? To grind yourself for an institution that now also thinks it’s within their purview to fill your mind with their political bent? For the weakened camaraderie and morale that comes from these ideologies that are determined to highlight our differences and magnify our, supposedly well-needed, shame? Why would I ever tell someone to join such a place? I wouldn’t. Don’t do it. Everything that was good is gone. 

A young, strapping lad that lives near us once expressed to me his desire to join the military. He’s a farm boy, always working hard on some side hustle. He fells, bucks, splits, and delivers firewood. He clears driveways of snow in the winter. He cuts lawns in the summer. He did well enough in high school but he’s itching for something more. Always, he’s good natured and funny. He was liked by all on his hockey team, a good team player. But he wants out of this little country life. For now. He’s like a coiled spring ready to pop. Decades ago, I would have said something different to him, but now I tell him, “No, don’t do it. The military is not what it was. You’ll hate it. You’re too good for them.”

This is what happens when our institutions start to disintegrate. Those decision makers at the top of the hierarchy are making decisions that would appeal to a group of people that would never join the military in the first place. Those entrenched university students, savvy with the lingo and the ideas of critical race theory, are never going to join the army as a soldier. And the young people that would are baffled by this new military that has replaced pride with equality. They’ve confused expression and inclusivity with values and their right to determine them. These ideologies insist. They offer nothing. It’s a slippery, shadowy, insidious decline of expectations. Purple hair with face tattoos and men with long hair wearing women’s skirts, yes. But don’t you dare utter a word of wrong-speak. 

It’s the “soft bigotry of low expectations” showing up. Again.

Here’s a thought: what if tradition and high standards are exactly what’s missing from what the world offers our young right now? What if the very things that make the sacrifice of military service worth it are now being erased? Has anyone asked the rank and file if critical race theory training and men wearing skirts will keep them around longer? Has anyone bothered to look at retention? They weren’t doing that three decades ago when I served. They had a “this is what you get, take it or leave it approach”. Seems that’s remained, only the what you get part of the equation has dwindled. What if the military dropped the idea of competing with the likes of social media companies and other jobs with low standards, and put their focus on what they can offer that very few other institutions can. Kind of like they used to. Pride. Discipline. Camaraderie. Discovering that you are so much more than you realize. It may just turn out that more soldiers, serving with pride and honour, paid well, with some thought to their families and homes would keep more people around. And that would mean less deployments and burdens for those willing to tough it out.

Or we could tell soldiers that their whiteness is a shame to be purified and their masculinity a toxic, ugly thing. Either way…

My husband and I know serving members, ones that have been in the Canadian Armed Forces for decades, career soldiers, who are now counting down their time to retirement. “I’ve never seen morale so bad”, they’ve said. “Every young person I meet who has dreams of joining, I redirect”.

It’s a toxic work environment, filled with suspicion and dread. Not because the work is indescribably tough. Not because they have to present themselves with extreme care, slicked and polished to within an inch of their life.  Not because they are chastised when they don’t meet the standards in dress or physical fitness. But because none of this matters anymore. 

Thinking back now, to that young girl I was over thirty years ago, I wonder what today’s military would be able to offer me. Had I gone into that armoury and found women walking around with painted long nails and flowing blue hair or men with long hair and face stubble slumping about, I don’t know if I would have understood that place to be any different than what I knew. Where is that pride that was always drilled into us back in the day?

The pay, the benefits and the deployments have only worsened as the mass exodus continues. And as people leave, those left behind are demanded to do more to patch the holes. Families suffer as a result. The glue that kept it all together, the stuff that offered, in return for the hellish conditions, something far greater than most could get anywhere else is now going or gone all together. We’ve traded honour and tradition, virtues that build, for untested ideologies that erode and degrade. Will what’s on offer be enough in trade for the call of sacrificing one’s life for their country? Either way, it appears for now that the weakening of our fundamental structures marches on. Almost like it’s by design or something. 

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

in my kitchen, around the farm

This week has been all about snow. My daughter and I ended up getting caught in a total white-out blizzard, driving home from a trip we had to take into town. One of the perils of never listening to, or reading, the news is that the weather is always a

Oh boy, I wish we could have found our way to all of the questions asked. Hopefully this off-the-cuff session has some little gems sprinkled within that might, in a roundabout way, offer some answers to questions not addressed directly. If not, please ask again next go around.

Here we chatted about what held us together when we were young and full of piss and vinegar (ego, really), enduring love, humility, the time I shut down an entire military base (oops), and decisions we made along the way. Also, Troy answers the question on how he sets up his workout routine by the year, changing things up seasonally and I make my best eat-your-protein pitch.

I thought I should probably submit a little report on what’s happening with our decision to eat solely from our farm, but to be quite honest, there’s not much to say. It’s no different than any of the last few years with the exception of my awareness of what’s dwindling.

I’m cognizant of how many steaks were eating because when they’re gone, I’m not going to buy some from my beefy farmer friend. All that lives in the root cellar is all that will feed us. There are plenty of onions and carrots and potatoes and parsnips. We don’t eat much of those. I have a whole wall of shelves full of summer made fermented veggies. There are many jars of pickled whatever and canned summer fruit. I have whole sections dedicated to animal fats in my freezer and cupboards. Those foods all seem abundant. It’s the things we really like that I’m rationing.

The fatty, drippy roasts like beef blade roasts and bone-in whole lamb legs remain untouched, squirrelled away for something special, or just something made special by their appearance on our table. We made the decision to eat chicken once a month because a.) we’re not huge fans of chicken meat and b.) we don’t have more chicken than that. That’s how chicken used to be eaten - it was special, not common. We eat more rabbit, duck, and turkey than we do chicken. Goose, too, is that special meal, pulled out for some romantic dinner pour deux.

Ruminant meat is definitely our staple and one that we would prefer to eat every meal, but we can’t. We just can’t raise cattle made of ribeyes and porterhouses. There is much more to an animal than favourite cuts. Raising them means honouring their lives by honouring the nutrition they provide us with - all of it. Still, I’d be happy to just eat all of those ruminant cuts and forego all other meat sources. I’d say we eat somewhere around 80% ruminant meat. Maybe it’s the PUFAs in omnivore meat

I write this now with rabbit simmering in rabbit bone broth on the stove. I browned them first in duck fat, then added some rosemary and thyme, linden and dried

It was many years ago now that I found myself standing in a dingy corner of a laundromat, toe-to-toe with a raging woman, steeling myself for a fist fight. Her daughter, I’d guess around six years old, was sitting under the folding table, quietly picking at the peeling squares of linoleum. I couldn’t take it anymore. Better a fight than standby and listen to another word out of the mother’s mouth. For half an hour, I had shared space with the two of them as we waited for our clothes to be washed and dried in the industrial sized machines. During that time I watched and listened as this woman berated her daughter. Every word, every single word, she directed to that little girl was dripping in disgust and rage.

“Mommy, can I…”

“I told you! NO! Get out of my face! Go sit down!”

The little girl went to the plastic chair and quietly played with two Polly Pocket dolls she held in her hands. She made one of them stand on the ledge of a washing machine.

“What the hell are you doing? I told you not to touch anything!” The mother grabbed the chair the little girl was sitting in and violently pulled it forward so there would be no more touching of the washing machine.

“STAY THERE! Don’t touch a f*****g thing!”

My whole body jumped. The little girl barely flinched.

This went on and on. Relentlessly, despite her best efforts, the little girl’s mother found all manner of thing to yell at her for. She was humming and her mom told her to shut up. She got off the chair and her mom told her to go to the other corner of the laundromat so she could have some “peace and quiet”. When the little girl said she needed to use the washroom her mom said, “Well then go find one.”

“Mommy can I put in the money?"

“NO!”

“Mommy can I press the button?”

“NO! I told you to stop so STOP! Go sit down or so help me!”

Throughout it all, I could feel my blood going from a low simmer to a rolling boil. I had tried all the passive aggressive stuff - the dirty looks to the mother, the quiet shaking of my head. I probably threw in a few tsks. I made eye contact with the little girl and smiled. She smiled back. I remember thinking how desperate she was. No matter how many times her mother rejected her, insulted her, chastised her, she would still take her chances with the possibility of another outcome.

I wanted that little girl to stop, to hide, to protect herself. But she wouldn’t. Better something than nothing, I guess. Worth a shot. 

There was a time when I was innocent to the wickedness of people. I know the day that changed. I was nine years old and I was playing hide and seek with some kids in our neighbourhood. It was dusk in our townhouse complex by the river. We had moved there when our house in the country burned down. Kids were different in the city than they were in the country. When we played marbles, I had to be on guard for the cheats. When we played hide and seek, the seeker had to count out loud, really loud, so we knew they wouldn’t short us on time. There was an air of suspicion I had to wisen up to pretty quickly.

But on that evening, an otherwise, soft, warm summer evening, a girl I met only once through another friend, encircled me with her older sisters and their friends. The kids I was playing with left, obviously understanding what was happening more than I. This group of girls started calling me names. I wasn’t used to hearing those types of words. My alarm bells went off a little too late. Not that I could have done anything if I realized what was about to happen earlier. After a few minutes of pushing and slinging vitriol, the girl I had met one time before, slapped me across the face. Everyone laughed. I stood frozen.

All I remember after that was running into my house and throwing myself onto my bed. It was shame more than it was anything else. The other kids, my pals from the neighbourhood had watched from safe distances. They saw me get slapped. They saw my weakness. They saw my pathetic prostrate yellow bellied shame.

I spent the next couple of years in that housing complex, hyper aware of the kids around me. I stopped going to the marble holes because I was worried this girl gang would find me. I spent most of time trudging along, “down by the river” and climbing trees where I could see the whole world from my vantage point. I paid my little sister to go to 7-11 for me to buy me my hits of Mr. Freezies and straws full of coloured sugar. She laughed at my fear of “the teenagers”. 

But something happened along the way. My fear transmuted to a quiet rumble of fury in my guts. As I got older, I grew taller. I wasn’t a skinny little bean sprout anymore. I was 5’9”. I got picked up for basketball in junior high and learned the sheer joy of aggressive sport. I specifically say “aggressive sport”, because that really was the funnest part for me. The basketball was fine but it was the shoving and the pushing and the elbowing of our opponents that delighted me the most. I was strong! When we played against the other Catholic schools, we looked forward to the all-girls schools the most. “Rich b*****s”, we used to say. Those games were always laden with penalties and after-game trash talking.

I grew into the typical headbanger in junior high. We smoked at the outdoor ice rinks. We got drunk whenever. My friends all smoked drugs whenever they could get their hands on them which wasn’t all that often. Me? Never did like them. All of us, for some reason or another, were angry. Fist fights were a regular occurrence. There was always some slight to pay for, some offence to rectify. People threw around cutting insults with ease and just because someone was your friend today, didn’t mean you could count on that tomorrow. 

Girls that would bother my little sister would find themselves face to face with me. I remember pushing a girl off the drama stage once - a little warning to her after she teased my sister on the school bus. With another girl, it was a fight in the school hallway. And as I grew up, my confidence in my ability to physically back myself up, came with it. Most people, just like I had been that night when the girl gang surrounded me, are cowards. There’s a psychology to that. You learn, pretty quickly, who is all talk and who puts their money where their mouth is. It’s the animal instinct, the street smarts. It’s meeting the demand that you drill into that instinct, instead of ignoring it. Or else.

Of course, life softens rough edges, or at least it should. Or, at least, mine did. It might seem odd to say that the military softened me, but it did in some ways. It taught me an authentic confidence in self and what I could offer as part of a cohesive team. It gave me opportunities to challenge myself in ways I could never find in the civilian world. I came to know the force of my will. I didn’t need to use the debasement of another to know the value of myself. I could use my determination to achieve something instead of always rallying against.

But, I’d be lying if I said the instinct doesn’t remain. That streak in me, call it what you will, holds fast. I am smarter now, older, and I have better tools at my disposal. I left the scrappy Tara in the 80s, but bits of her are still bits of me. How could it be any other way? And so, when I found myself in that laundromat with a little girl, so vulnerable in the hands of her mother, it was that Tara, the one that instantly, instinctually, knew what this woman was all about, that understood that confronting her was going to end in a fight. She was looking for it, needed it, I knew. Her brazenness, unabashed in her flagrant display of meanness challenged every person in that room. “What are you going to do about it?” she seemed to ask with her every exhalation.

And there I was, washing loads of damp, sandy sleeping bags from our camping trip, plopped right there in her line of fire. It was the kid or me. The drumbeat, or was that my heart, pounding through my whole body. My adrenaline whooshing through my eardrums with each pound of my heart, growing so loud I could hardly take another second of her, not another hateful word out of her mouth. I couldn’t stand to witness anything more. 

This is the part where I confront the woman, every muscle in my body a spring of tension, waiting to pounce. This is where I start pointing and raising my voice, telling her how and why she is a miserable excuse for a mother. “That beautiful baby!” That’s what I’d say. “Your beautiful baby and you are destroying her! You monster!” I would yell my words and rub them into her skin, syllable by syllable.

But that’s not what happened. What happened is, admittedly, probably a given for some of you. It would just be how you operate, where your life had brought you, but it wasn’t what I knew. In fact, I knew nothing of how I was about to talk to this woman because it didn’t come from me at all. I just simply paused. Instead of doing what I knew, I opted for another tactic. I said a quiet, simple prayer. “God, please show me what to do and I will do it.”

And that’s what happened. I was shown what to do. 

Be love. 

There I was, facing my grade school bully all over again. This 5’11” woman wound like a taut cobra, belittling her own daughter. What would she do to me? These are the types of people we must meet head on with aggression, it’s the only language that they know. And you’re asking me to “be love”. I didn’t even know what that meant. How could I possibly do that?

But I had said in my prayer that if God would show me, I would listen. That was the deal.

I walked up to the woman, my heart pounding, and I took her hands in mine. “Are you okay?” I asked. I didn’t ask with sarcasm. I didn’t ask with hostility. I asked with a love that moved through me but didn’t come from me.

Was I really holding this maniac’s hands?

She stared at me, the two of us face to face. Her hands limp in mine. We both just stared into each other’s eyes. I don’t know how long we were there for but whatever it was that moved through me, reached her. Infiltrated her defences. Flowed out through my fingertips into hers. The two of us, standing there, somehow understanding something. Both of us the same. Both of us being loved.

“I just can’t do this anymore” she sobbed. I pulled her into me and she bawled on my shoulder. Her whole body collapsed on my shoulders and I held her, my hands against her back and neck. 

I know. I know. 

“I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I don’t want to do this anymore”

You have to do it. Look at that beautiful little girl and how much she adores you. 

I don’t remember the details after that. We sat down together, knee to knee. I held her hand. She cried. She told me about her life, about the lousy man that she had just left. She told me about her world. I shared some of my own. We talked about kids. We talked about parenting. She told me about her parents, their rage and violence. She told me how she could see that ugliness in herself. She spilled out her confessions and I tried to be worthy of her vulnerability while still holding her to task.

What else was there for me to do? That’s the part I have no control over. There are forces much bigger than I to take care of the rest of the story. I was just a chapter, a couple paragraphs maybe, in a much bigger story. I sat with that woman for an hour or so. The whole time, I struggled with what I was doing. I wanted to be mad. I was still mad. I wanted to shake her at times.

At one point I asked if I could buy her daughter an ice cream from the little snack bar in the laundromat. She agreed. I told the little girl that she could pick out any ice cream she liked. She chose an ice cream sandwich, “Because then you get a cookie and an ice cream” she said. “You’re so smart, I never thought of it like that” I told her. She beamed. That was all I could give her.

I gave her an ice cream and she introduced me to her Polly Pockets. We talked about their outfits. I wanted to bring that little girl home with me. “I’ll take her. You can come visit”. That’s what I wanted to say. I will love her and be gentle with her and make up for your anger, loving spoonful by loving spoonful. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I still want. I still think of that little girl. She would be a young woman now. Where is she and who has she become?

Eventually, her clothes were washed and dried. She was speaking to her daughter with more care. She even let her daughter crawl up on her lap at one point. I’m not so naive that I believe that this one little interaction changed everything. In all likelihood, it changed little. Maybe just a reprieve. Maybe just a few moments with someone that would listen, a complete stranger that saw something in her that she maybe didn’t see herself. Maybe nobody else ever did either. I told her why I went up to her, about what I was thinking, that I thought we’d end up in a fight and she said, “Yeah! I can’t believe I didn’t smack you for that! But something weird happened there...”

“I know. To me, too,” I said.

We hugged goodbye. I said a little prayer as I walked out of that laundromat. “Dear God, please bless that mother, fill her heart with kindness and mercy. And please cover that little girl with your love.” 

I threw our cleaned sleeping bags in the trunk of our car and got in the passenger seat.

“How did it go” my husband asked.

“I don’t understand what just happened” I said.

Today, I understand what happened. I know it because I know what followed. And because I know what followed, I understand the wholeness of the gift. That moment was an awakening for me. It was a wrenching, ugly moment transformed through love in a way that I was not capable of doing alone. I left that laundromat forever changed. I came to understand that my power is not in my ability to control a situation, but in my surrender to be used in ways that are beyond my limited capacity.

I appreciate the part of me that needs to do what she needed to do to survive during a certain time of her life. That toughness still serves me well in many ways. My daughters call me “mama bear” for a reason. I’ve heard them say to others, “Oh, hell, no, you don’t know my mom” when it comes to addressing some injustice or another. I cannot suffer a bully, no matter the form. I just cannot do it. I would rather be in the ring than meekly cheering on a champion.

But I also understand that our power lies elsewhere. There is a time for speaking up and there are times that require our softness. We all have our tendencies - the places we go that have the deep ruts of our way of being. Some of us retreat to silence during confrontations, hoping to diffuse with avoidance and distraction. Others might employ those passive aggressive type antics. Others complain loudly behind the other person’s back, breaking them down to lift themselves up. 

Whatever it is we tend towards, maybe a little prayer, a request for the wisdom to see what is being asked of us with a promise to carry through. God, or the universe, or the energetic field, or whatever you call the spirit that moves through and enlivens all of us, will show you. My guess is it’s going to be uncomfortable. It always is for me. It’s so much easier to be righteous in our rightness than challenged in our perspective. But the time we have moved into requires our courage and our voices. Pray or meditate or inform yourself, yes, but none of that matters without action. And if action is comfortable, there’s probably not a lot of growing going on there.

I still think of that mother and that little girl. They are indelibly written into the fabric of my life. I am grateful to her - the biggest, baddest gal around with traits I found so deeply abhorrent. It had to be her and it had to be that little round eyed girl sitting in the plastic chair, bruised and battered, playing quietly with her plastic dolls. My two angels in the laundromat.

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

One of the questions that came up in the Q&As that wasn’t farm related, but I thought a nice question this time of year, was about Christmas traditions. I love Christmas, it’s my favourite time of year although this year, admittedly, we are going into the season with a great deal of trepidation and feeling somewhat deflated. This will be the first Christmas in 30 years that I don’t have a child to celebrate with. Christmas was also our beloved Mila’s favourite time of year and so that, too, brings a lot of saturated feelings from all the corners and cracks in our hearts.

I grew up in a French Canadian and a Slovak home. My Christmas memories from that time are my most treasured childhood memories. On one side of our family it was small rooms filled with boisterous French Canadian folksongs (I still can’t resist dancing a jig to this one), tobacco smoke, and whiskey filling the air. Each of my uncles and aunties and grandparents would be in a big circle, playing an instrument from guitars to banjos to fiddles, harmonicas, and accordions. Everyone raucously clapping and stomping their feet. We kids would dance about wildly, calling in Santa who would burst through the door throwing oranges at the adults and telling us little

“I didn’t get the Covid shot, but I’m not an anti-vaxxer.” The proclamation with the caveat, the qualification, the exception. In other words, “I didn’t take this vaccine this time, but that was a decision made with due course.  A decision made out of caution in the face of something novel. Normally, I am a proponent of vaccine science. I didn’t make this decision because I am one of those people that rejects all vaccines, out of hand, with nary a thought. In fact, I am PRO vaccine, just not this vaccine. Just not now. We simply don’t know enough.”

I didn’t get the Covid shot, but I suppose I do qualify as an “anti-vaxxer”, that is if we want to dub people with definitions coined by the same industries we are questioning now. Apparently, as an “anti-vaxxer”, I hold “unacceptable views”. I make irresponsible decisions around “life saving” technologies. My knee-jerk reaction towards all injected medicines is one of “hysterical fear and paranoia” as reported by the mainstream media and repeated by the many. I’m a simpleton with a lack of nuanced understanding. I know nothing of science, incapable of wading through the decades of literature that prove, without a doubt, that the reason we’re even here is because of the life-saving technological marvels that are vaccines. 

Over the last couple of years many people came to the decision not to take the injected covid therapies on offer, even after a history of vaccinating. Their reasoning was sound. This was a new, rushed “vaccine” (arguable by the original definition of such) with little robust science behind it for a disease that, for most, was not dangerous. But I noticed something happening in those that made the choice not to vaccinate with the various covid shots on offer. They were, and often still are, careful to delineate themselves from those that had historically chosen not to vaccinate for other things. The oft stated, “I’m not an anti-vaxxer but this is different” with the explanation of why to follow. Commonly, the preface of “I’m not an anti-vaxxer” or “I am a proponent of vaccines” is used as a legitimizer of what’s to follow. Oh, yes, okay, this person has some merit to their argument. It’s a tidy way to build some scaffolding around a position that is, by and large, seen as irresponsible and ignorant.

I think most of us, vaccinated or not, can agree that the covid vaccines are new. “Novel” if you dare. But what is novel? How long before our bodies catch up to what’s on offer as we march willy nilly into a technocratic utopia? Do we care? Do we ever even stop to ask? And if grains showing up in our tummies some 10,000 years ago are still causing hiccups biologically, how the heck can we pretend that what we’ve done in the last 100 years is even understood, never mind benign? In the last 100 years or so, we’ve removed the real foods of our traditional diets and replaced them with artificial flavours and seed oils, sugars and processed flours. We’ve pasteurized, refined, synthesized, modified, and hydrogenated food that can be stored in boxes and cans. We’ve made clothing out of oil, created plastics, mass produced cars and covered our earth in asphalt. We’ve stopped moving and started controlling our interior worlds with fake heat and fake light and water that couldn’t even be drunk without the chemicals added to it to keep us from getting sick - in the short run. We’ve used antibiotics for sore throats and to make our pigs get fat fast so we can eat them cheap. In just three generations of my family we have gone from no vaccines at all to calling them ‘proven’.

I was the tender age of 21, alone and isolated on a military base, far from anyone that loved me, when my vibrant little baby got very ill, very fast. She was four months old and had just received her first set of vaccines the day before. She developed a very high fever just hours after being vaccinated but I wasn’t alarmed. “To be expected,” the doctor told me. But then she began to have intermittent seizures. “Tylenol,” the doctor said. But then the screams began. It wasn’t a cry I had heard before. More a shrill, incessant screech in a pitch that left me frantic. It was more animal than my baby. I drove us to the Emergency Room where they admitted her to the paediatric wing of the hospital.

It was in that hospital that the most astonishing thing happened (especially so considering the narrative around vaccines today). The paediatrician that came to see us in the morning asked me questions, including when our daughter had been vaccinated. She was late getting her first “series” of shots because I had moved from one province to the next. After a lengthy conversation and examination that elderly paediatrician looked at me and quietly said, “If I were you, I would not vaccinate this child again”. 

I was shocked and horrified, sure that this maniacal doctor was committing my daughter to death! What followed can be read in previous essays. Here, what I want to try to capture is how I went from someone that never gave vaccines a second thought, I was responsible after all, to someone that became suspect of them all. In fact, I became, and solidly remain, suspect of every offering from any major corporation driven by profits. Whether that be the entertainment industry, the clothing industry, food processors, pharmaceutical corporations, the wellness industry, etc…

A profit driven corporation is, by definition, profit driven. There is no altruism in dollars despite the comfort of thinking so. But, there can be mutual benefit. The trick is in teasing out the value and cost of everything that’s on offer. Most people aren’t interested in doing that and so the costs can take them by surprise. It doesn’t matter whether you know or not, agree to it or not, for everything we pay.

There are vaccines that have been around for a long time. Vaccines with a “proven history”. I think after these last couple of years, most of us could agree that there is no such thing as “proven” in science unless you’re in need of silencing questions. But look at me, identifying myself as a heretic and I’m not even into the guts of the matter yet. But, then again, I’ve already exposed my scarlet letter so what does it matter? For all those vaccines that have been around, that have saved “countless lives”, there is information available. Information from different sources with different questions and perspectives. You would think that with the internet we would be able to access all sorts of information for a wide understanding of differing viewpoints. Alas, it seems to me we’ve raised a generation or two that’s never learned how to research outside of the internet. There’s a dependence on something that, with increasing censorship, is proving to be altogether undependable. But look at me, would ya, writing this essay here on the internet. Maybe hope remains.

So, when that wise paediatrician told me not to vaccinate my child again, I had to figure out how to keep her alive! I needed to understand what I could do to protect her from the diseases lurking all around her. It was 1993 and we didn’t have a computer, never mind the internet. I’m grateful for that now. It forced me to really read and research in a robust way. I went to the library and looked through the yellow pages for the biggest city near us, two hours away. I wrote down phone numbers for all of the book stores so I could call them that afternoon while my baby napped. I called store after store asking if they carried “books about vaccines” until I found one that did. That very week, I loaded my babe into the car and drove to the city. I found myself in an incense burning, chime swinging, pipe flute playing, honest to goodness hippy store with books on everything from vegetarianism (they only  eat vegetables??!!!), to the dangers of circumcision (dear God - what’s the alternative?!). I still remember the kind woman that owned the store offering to rock my baby while I dove into their selection of books on vaccines. 

I leafed through the books, flabbergasted. Some seemed absolutely nutty to me. Some seemed more measured. I remember picking out three that I thought were more “balanced”. One gave the pros and cons of each vaccine and the others seemed to have information that wasn’t as inflammatory as some of the others. I didn’t want to be “scared”. All of it was still new to me and my radar was acutely tuned to any information that seemed radical. I didn’t need more fear. I had enough of that. I just wanted to better understand. 

As I was leaving the store, I saw a magazine called, “Mothering”. I picked it up and returned to the cashier to buy it. That magazine, with its focus on bonded parenting, breastfeeding, and natural childcare, became the only friend I had in my desire to parent a certain way. Those books, that magazine, and eventually the forums of that magazine, opened up a whole new world for me. While the books themselves were helpful in my understanding of the vaccines on offer, it was the references in the back that drew me in. I wrote out those references in a note pad and went to our little library. If they didn’t have what I was looking for, they would order it in for me. At first, I struggled to understand what I was reading. But as I learned, context developed. I started to understand that all was not agreed upon. There were dissenting voices, wise voices, with questions that I was never allowed to hear. 

As I walked down this lonely road, life did what life likes to do, some wonderful teachers and allies came strolling along my path. I met, and became friends with, a physician from Germany who had a robust understanding of different healing modalities and the strengths and weaknesses inherent in western, allopathic medicine. He taught me about my body. He taught me about how I could support the health of my children and my family. He introduced me to other healers that worked to strengthen our immune systems and eliminatory organs instead of focusing on symptom suppression. “Symptoms”, they taught me, “are the messages from your body. Never tell your body to shut up.” It seems so obvious now, but it was radical to me then. I started trusting my instincts and building confidence around my choices.

Today, I have a question. For those that didn’t get vaccinated with the covid vaccine, but qualify it with the “I’m not an anti-vaxxer” I would like to know what, or maybe it’s a whom, you are delineating yourself from? What is it about people like me, a mom who has questioned the veracity of the information provided and took that isolating road because of conviction, that is so abhorrent that you stretch to make sure you aren’t mistaken for one of the gang. The “thems” to which you do not belong. Could it not be that, just as it is this go around, there have been other offerings from a profit driven corporation that have not been for the betterment of all? Do we even know the long term effects of these medical treatments injected directly into our blood stream? Again and again, they add new vaccines, new combinations and adjuvants and schedules that grow. And for how long have we been doing this? And for how long has our species been on this planet? What are the long term effects and is there anyway of ever really knowing? Like really being able to point to these things and, like in the great old board game, “Clue” confidently affirm “Aha, I know what killed Ms. Peacock! It was the MMR in the right arm with the MS and twenty years time!” Will the cows ever come home?

We all know we’re riddled with ill health now - the autoimmunity and the cancers and the decades of inflammation that precedes them all. Who can tie such things to one thing? Nobody and it would be foolish to try. There’s too many things to choose from. All sorts of tomfoolery in everything from our food and water supply to artificial light, sedentary living, a profound disconnect from meaning and connection in our lives and on and on it goes. But, to pretend that there hasn’t been a monumental change in how we view our health on a systems level is simply a wilful overwriting of reality. Widely, allopathic, disease model medicine has won. It’s won so mightily, we mostly forget to question the model and go along with their decisions for our bodies.

I have been to conferences where I have met mothers and fathers of vaccine damaged children. These are not crazed tinfoil hatters running around to desperately find something to consume their lives. They are normal human beings that have been put in tragic situations that demanded their fortitude and exhaustive efforts in exchange for societal scorn. Nice deal. I have met countless people who, just in casual conversation, have told me stories about how their children, even now as adults, were “changed” after vaccination. Story after story erased with a smug label - “anti-vaxxer”. “Anecdotal!” they yell. “Anti-vaxxer!” The uneducated, the foolish, the irresponsible. 

When our middle daughter was in Grade 8 her school sent us a curious “permission form” for the Gardasil vaccine they were unrolling. We had to return the form “opting out” of the vaccine instead of in. Because of my background and my knowledge of how to access resources, I was already aware of the problems with the Gardasil vaccine. On the day of the vaccine, the school nurse came into the classroom and called out the names of the young girls who were to get the vaccine. All of them lined up in front of the classroom, looking at those who remained seated. In the end, there were only two girls remaining in their chairs, my daughter being one of them. As the girls were marched out of the classroom to get their shots, the young girl seated across from my daughter sheepishly said, “I think my mom just forgot my form”. My daughter replied, “Not mine! My mom said they can give you that vaccine when hell freezes over!” The pharmaceutical propaganda is nothing new.

In just a few short generations we have gone from a basic understanding of our immune systems and how to support them to now scoffing at the sheer ignorance of anyone mentioning such a thing. Immune systems are passé. The real intellects know where it’s at and anyone that doesn’t follow along in rote songs of praise need only remove themselves from civilization, if you please.

Here’s the thing - I have respect and admiration for people that have traditionally accepted vaccines but paused at the unrolling of the Covid shots. “Hmm…”, the logic seemed to go, “this is different. I am not an anti-vaxxer, but this is novel. This is new. There is no literature or long term studies.” I get it because I still don’t think we have long term studies on any vaccine. I also think it takes a lot of insight and a deeper stretch for someone that has been a proponent of vaccines to come to this position this go around. I understand why people need to qualify their positions on these ‘novel gene treatments masquerading as vaccines’. To openly admit to not having accepted other vaccines makes one’s voice moot. You are immediately identifying yourself as one without merit. “Oh, I see. You’re in that group.” Instant disqualification. I actually think there’s validity to adding the qualification, but I don’t think that’s where our thought and work should end. There’s more to chew on here.

Maybe what we do have here is an opportunity to step back and ask each other ‘why’, to have conversations. A moment to be able to receive information your positions disallowed before. A little crack in the armour, if you will. But I guess what I was hoping for, still hope for, is that there could be a little more care about using the derogatory language being championed by those that look to divide. By now, should we not all mostly agree that it’s imperative that we question the veracity of information being put forward by pharmaceutical corporations who wilfully and aggressively manipulate information for profit? And if we can agree on that, could we then agree that using degrading labels like “anti-vaxxer” is only a boon to these same corporations who benefit from cleaving off a whole segment of the population as ‘other’? The ‘other’ that must be kept in check.

It’s an oddity. Many of us have come to see the pharmaceutical industry for what it is. The veil has been lifted. But still, we are manipulated by the division and ‘othering’ that they sow. Why let them have that? Why let them have anything? They take enough. They control enough. Screw them. My allegiance is to my fellow human, not to a greedy machine. Shouldn’t all of ours be? And if it is, maybe a bit more time and care with how we classify each other?

We’re now told that cancers are rising at astronomical rates in ever younger populations. Autoimmune diseases continue to grow year over year. Autism rates continue to grow. We are obese and inflamed, dulled and exhausted. Everywhere we look, evidence of our ill species. We’re on the decline, no doubt about it. Sometimes, I look around at this homestead, at the enormous rock piles, cleared by hand when all here was still wild, and I think, “We just don’t have that in us anymore”. We’re not as sharp, not as robust. Go into the city and take a look around. Now, tell me, with a peer reviewed double blind study, why that is. Not going to happen. And that’s why I trust instinct and common sense over “the science”. It doesn’t mean science is bad or useless, it means it’s being used to advance very powerful corporations to control our very lives in both form and substance.

We still live like our lives are normal, but the truth is that we are surrounded by novel-everything! Should we even peek under the hood? Entertain all possibilities? Or are we forever trapped in some possibilities not being possible at all? And now, for those that have come to question the latest offerings from big pharma, do we keep our scope dialled in tight and narrow or can we pan out a bit? mRNA injections are novel to us, new in our lifetime, but they won’t be novel to our kids and our grandkids. It will be old hat to them just like the mmr or polio shot is to us. They will be conditioned. Will they even question? Do we?

Here’s my proposition - a little more care for one another and the sniffing out of manipulation in the words and labels we can use a little too casually. Perhaps a little more time in sharing our stories and in the listening thereof. Faith in the instincts of mothers and fathers. Awareness of the propaganda, not just in the here and now, but historically, too.

I have never cared to convince anyone of anything. My conviction does not rest in another’s acceptance of my position. It never has. I don’t know why, it’s just not part of my make up. I am confident in my choices regardless of an army shouting in front of my face or a family member spitting doom and gloom. It just has no effect. I understand that as a gift in my character and I see many people I love tortured by the actions and resistance of those around them. But if we could come to a place of putting our effort and reflections into solidifying our own decisions, we are freed. In that sense, I am not dependant on anyone coming around to my point of view. But it is also true that we remain a community, connected souls that need one another. In that way, having these difficult conversations, looking for places where there might be room to let some sun in, is always, in my estimation, worth it. Not with the goal to convince, but to build understanding, even, in the end, if you still disagree. Don’t make agreement the mark of success in conversations, make listening and sharing with vulnerability your goal and you will always come out successful.

At the very least, could we just drop that dumb name already? I am not anti-anything. I don’t live my life that way. I wouldn’t waste a single unit of energy, pouring it into anti-anything. I would much rather be woven into the thread of creation and to do that, I need to be aligned with what I am for. I am for the sacred. I am for God’s design for our lives. I am for nature and her rules and gifts. I am for the wild imperfection of us, here, now. I have been given this life and I take it on with a deep sense of responsibility. I am responsible for the quality and substance of my days. Nobody will ever care for my life as much as I, and my beloveds, do. Nobody will live with the consequences of my decisions to the depth that I will . This life, my life, a precious gift in my hands.

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Further reading from previous essays:

Years ago the chemical world was abuzz with the newly discovered, smell neutralizing attributes of a chemical known as beta-cyclodextrin. Scientists in the development lab of Proctor and Gamble learned that this known chemical could actually wrap itself around odiferous offenders and decrease the stink. They thought they had a winner on their hands. The problem was, nobody wanted to buy it. Apparently no smell isn’t as good as synthetic smell for the consumer. So, Proctor and Gamble inserted synthetic fragrances into their product and called it, "Febreze". An incredibly successful marketing campaign was then implemented to convince legions of humans that even if they thought they didn’t stink, the rest of the world sure did. And a chemical darling was born.

Odour erasure became a new expectation of a civilized human being. Heck, not just a human being, the stuff is everywhere now. Hotels fill their rooms and halls with the stuff, hoping to mask the stinky carpets I suppose. Garbage bags infuse it into their plastic. People spray it in their kid's hockey bags and have a constant drip dose of the stuff emanating from little plastic heaters in their cars and homes. It's on everything, most horrifically, the people! I don’t think I’ve been to a sports game, a store or even to a hiking trail where I haven’t smelled the telling cloud of chemical before I’ve even seen the human sporting it. 

Following the trend set by the wildly popular Febreze campaign, the grand-daddy chemical peddlers have ramped up their eye-watering, olfactory-assaulting wares. Increasingly potently-fragranced laundry detergents promise the eradication of your human stink with the smell of a soft alpine breeze or tropical windswept honeymoon. The reality is the delivery of thousands of unknown chemicals all interacting in unknown ways in our bodies and environments. I have had people visit us that left a literal scent stain that lingered for days on the furniture they sat on. The Tide detergent my mom used when I was a kid barely had a scent. Today, laundry detergents are absolutely dripping with synthetic fragrances. Why not? They’re already full of synthetic everything else.

We wash our clothes in this stuff and absorb endless unknown chemicals into the biggest organ of our body, our skin, all day long. We wash our sheets in this stuff and spend the other half of our life cocooned in the same, inhaling our way into a chemical soup slumber. Then we plug in and spray on. Every last pheromone annihilated off the face of the planet. Everyone a “scentsation” chemical slurry. We have no idea what this stuff is doing to our bodies, to our organs that receive them through our skin and blood stream, and have to figure out what the hell to do with it all.

These synthetic fragrances are full of a mysterious slurry of who-knows-what. They don’t have to tell us. They don't have to tell us what's in there or how much of it or what it's doing. Just like they don't have to tell us what's in the packaging wrapped around our food, or the gasses used for ripening produce, the antifreeze used in ice-cream, or the PFOAs, or "forever chemicals", phthalates, and various other endocrine disruptors in everything from our shampoo to our dish soap. Have you ever seen a warning label about wrapping your small child into an envelope of these chemicals? You know, as in dressing them in the clothes you just soaked in this stuff inside your washing machine. Of course not. Just like you won’t see warning labels on plastic water bottles that also sport those same forever chemicals and hormone disrupters, or on diapers, or on tampons that women insert into the most delicate of tissues.

Speaking of tampons, does anyone remember that vodka tampon craze with teenagers? Is that still happening? They would soak a tampon in vodka and insert it. A sneaky, direct to the blood stream way of getting drunk. Isn’t it something that we can wrap our minds around alcohol soaked tampons being a bad idea but that those same tampons, full of dioxins and glyphosate and genetically engineered cotton and PFOAs are magically non-absorbable through the same body cavity? What a marvel of engineering!

When I was younger and in the military I had a series of concerning pap test results that saw me being referred to a civilian Ob-Gyn in the town nearest our base. My fellow female soldiers had affectionately dubbed him “the butcher”. Nice. From his office I was sent to another specialist a few hours away. For a year I had repeat pap tests with the final recommendation of having a LEEP procedure done. For the uninitiated, that's a slice of your cervix taken off with a cauterizing device. I declined. Do you think he once mentioned anything to me about what type of products were hanging out next to my cervix for five or six days every month? Of course not, could have never been that. 

But I digress. I digress with the excuse that it’s pretty easy to do so on this topic. These chemicals are everywhere. They're in our food and the packaging it comes in. They are in the synthetic clothes we wear and the plastics that breakdown and fill the dust in our house with their contaminants. We are being bombarded. 

We are now nations of obese, unwell humans. People will say it’s the processed carbs or seed oils or sugar or laziness. Surely it is all those things but it’s also the breakdown of our body’s ability to process, eliminate, and detoxify the endless assault of environmental toxins. Endocrine disrupting chemicals are ubiquitous and being implicated in the alarming declines in sperm counts and rising infertility around the world. Sperm counts are at lows never seen before in our species. Fertility rates are abysmal and getting worse. Cancers of all ilk are commonplace.  Men sport breasts. Fish in polluted waterways change sex. And what of the people in polluted worlds? No effect? Well, politically correct discourse dictates we don't talk about such things. How convenient for the offending corporations.

So what are the chemicals found in our shampoos, soaps, laundry detergents, toothpaste, face wash, perfume, room deodorizers, plastic household goods, stain resistant materials and synthetic clothing, make-up etc..? Our knowledge in how they affect us is in its infancy and we don’t know all that is there. What we do know is that these products contain chemicals that the human body has never known before. Man-made chemicals meant for profit, not health. There are people I adore in this world that are so saturated in this stuff that I have to hold my breath around them. Little kids smooshing their little noses into pillows off-gassing estrogenic forever chemicals into their bodies all night long. 

We take so much so lightly. Too much that goes unanswered. I think that’s probably part of the plan. So many people stuck in the daily grind, exhausted by dissatisfaction, numbed by distractions. Work. Tasks. Distractions. Addictions. Poor health. Foggy brains. Empty spirits. Who the hell cares about fragrance or plastic or food packaging or seed oils?! Who has time for such things? It’s just one of a long list of things that’ll kill ‘me. Shrug.

Yes, true enough. But what kills us in the end isn’t the point. It’s the quality of our lives now and throughout. And the quality of our lives is dependant on our awareness and willingness to learn and then our decision to put in the effort to create lives as vibrantly healthy as we can. To the oft “It shouldn’t be so hard”. You’re right. It shouldn’t be, but it is. “Shouldn’t” is an energy sucker and that’s energy that could be put towards creating and building.

The good news is that there’s a solution to most everything. We can choose differently or find other ways of doing things. And, sometimes, the solution can mean surrendering to the impossibility of perfection with gratitude for the things we can make better. You know where that line is for you.

I’ve long been a proponent of eating as much of our food as possible that doesn’t have an ingredient list. Ingredient lists are bogus anyway. Do the ingredients labels for a bottle of water even mention the plastic bottle that has been breaking down its poisons into the water? Does the pasteurized cream or milk in the cardboard box tell you what that box is lined with inside, the stuff the cream is stewing in? What about a can of peas? Do you know what that can has contributed to your meal? Peas with a side of bisphenol, if you please. In every bag and box and wrapper - a secret. Know that and you can mitigate that.

So what can we do about it? Well, first and foremost is a shifting of our perspectives from “if it’s out there, it must be safe” to the grown up version of “if I want myself and my family to be healthy, the responsibility lies with me.” Face it, we’re more profitable sick and broken than we are robustly healthy.

There's a huge list of further reading and resources at the end of this essay to help you dig further into these topics, but a few quick and easy things you can do right now to start improving your home environment include:

* Food - seasonal, local, organic, and real. Water - organic, fluoride free and filtered. If on a rural well, semi-regular comprehensive water testing for chemical contaminants, including agricultural/industrial chemicals is a good idea. I have written about food, nutrition, and water on this site. All of those articles can be accessed through my archive.

* Synthetic fragrances and forever chemicals: swap out the toxic “body care” products, like the ones I’ve mentioned, for products with minimal, clean ingredients. Better yet, make your own. Check out the resources below for websites that have tested various products and offer reviews and recommendations.

* Fill your home with plants, open the windows, use smudges and resins and pots full of simmering, warming herbs and cedar leaves to fill your home with beautiful scents your body understands.

* There is no chemical cleaner you need- I promise! For your laundry, use soap nuts, or a brand vetted by some of the resources below, or just make your own. If things are especially stinky, add in some borax and pour vinegar into your softener cycle. Vinegar is my cleaning soul sister. The vinegar really softens and it takes out any smell. I also buy 35% hydrogen peroxide that I dilute down and use with things like sauna towels and other dastardly duds. If you’re weaning yourself from the heavy scents of chemical detergents and dryer sheets, you can use wool dryer balls with a couple of sprinkles of a good quality, organic essential oil on them. I don’t like my clothes or sheets to have a smell, but this is a decent interim transition if you do. My guess is you’ll start forgetting to even use it as you get sensitized to your environment.

I’ve written before about other areas to consider in order to have a healthy home. You can read about those in my essay “sheltered and held” and “on the skin, into the body”, and "next to skin, into the body." In those essays I get into everything I use to clean, EMF mitigation, and different things we took into consideration from paint to wiring to wall treatments. Below are further resources to get you going.

Now, onto you. I’m interested in hearing how you’re all building your healthy home environments. Please feel free to share natural product brands you’ve appreciated or, better yet, the things you’ve found you can make yourself from simple ingredients. Untangling from the matrix doesn’t happen on one front. It’s a multi-pronged mission. It definitely takes effort, but a time does come when you don’t even think about it anymore. I waste no time bemoaning what I have to do to live as healthy as I can. It has to be done so I do it and then I reap the rewards. I figure if I was lucky enough to be put on this beautiful planet, the least I can do is live as close to the original plan our Creator designed. 

Slowdown Farmstead is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Further reading:

Right to know: exposing toxic fragrance chemicals report

Risk of phthalates, the chemicals used to intensify and prolong the scent of products, are closely linked to health risks in children.

Why smelling good (debatable) comes with a cost to your health

Be mindful of the toilet paper you use. Dioxins, BPA, PFAS and even scents are added to many toilet papers. I never buy recycled toilet paper which contains BPAs. Those are some pretty sensitive areas to be putting such things. We’ve been using an unbleached bamboo toilet paper that works fine and is safe for our septic system.

Ten percent of breast cancers are genetic. Here's the rest of the story.

Phthalate exposure and human semen quality

Sperm count drop accelerating worldwide

The problem with fragrances

Book: "Countdown: how our modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive development, and imperilling the future of the human race"

Book: "Pottenger’s Cats"

Make your own laundry detergent 

Or check what’s in yours

For good/better/best recommendations on a whole host of laundry detergents

PFAS Chemicals (“forever chemicals”) as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. In everything from water to food to the packaging used in our animal’s kibble, baby clothes, and cooking utensils.

Obesogens: the chemicals making you fat

Phthalate’s found in blood associated with increased waist circumference and insulin resistance in adult males

Chem Fatale Report - Potential health effects of toxic chemicals in feminine care products

Cleaning products in breast milk

Another delight of covid - people going nuts on disinfecting their homes and themselves introducing ever more chemicals into their lives.

Avoid “anti bacterial” soaps and cleaning products

PDF link to a report, “Beyond the Label: Health Impacts of Harmful Ingredients in Cleaning Products” by Women’s Voices for the Earth

Mamavation testing results on common tampon brands This website does a lot of testing on consumer products of all types.

p.s. We had a little chat about some of the natural, real scents we like to bring into our homes through things found in nature. Up in this week’s chat via the Substack app.