Each of us is on a different journey. We are going a variety of directions with our “crunchy” living.
It’s always interesting to me the various ways each mom lives out her crunchy ideals. Equally interesting to me is learning how you arrived at the place you are in right now. I am intrigued by this question because I entered a crunchy-ish lifestyle by accident, a car accident.
While traveling for business in Texas one summer (pre-kids), I was overcome with intense abdominal pain. Veering off the interstate to the first exit with a hospital was dangerous and I ended up turned around the wrong way on the side of the highway. No other cars were involved and I wasn’t injured, but the danger of that experience is still imprinted on my brain.
After my ER visit that day, I was referred to my local doctor. She took one look at me and said, “You’re too young to hurt this bad.” For a few years my pain had been diagnosed by other doctors as heartburn, but that clearly wasn’t my problem. She sent me across the road to the hospital for an ultrasound which revealed a severe gallstone problem.
My recovery from emergency, non-laparoscopic gallbladder surgery was hard. So hard in fact, that when I was pregnant a few years later, I knew I would do whatever I could to avoid a c-section. The idea of having to keep up with a baby and deal with the pain and discomfort of recovery from another abdominal surgery was too much for me to comprehend.
This led me to investigate hypnobirthing, water births, and even a home birth. As these things go, if someone likes to talk about home, water births, they also like to talk about breastfeeding. Once you get hooked on the idea of breastfeeding, then attachment-style parenting isn’t too far away.
Before you know it, the idea of being a crunchy mom wasn’t that odd or unusual to me. I poured over sites like KellyMom and AskDrSears. It became my goal to try to do things as natural as I could now that I was going to be a mom. I’m not always perfect, but I still love seeing how I and those around me evolve in their natural ways of living.
I find it amazing how our circumstances can inform our future. What did your journey to becoming a crunchy mom look like?
