Healing Owen’s Body and Brain

Owen Detoxes

wystansimons10 Comments

 

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You haven’t heard from us for a while. We have been submerged. Health protocols of Dr. Mark Hyman. Owen has been dragged along with his mother and father into a new world of vegetable and fruit smoothies, serious water consumption, and relaxing Epsom salts and baking soda baths.

Generally speaking, over the years anything that one member of the Simons family has explored has impacted the rest of us.  Things I tried out for Owen’s health always tended to trickle over into the way I cared for the other kids, to Bronwyn and Freya’s annoyance. Wellness initiatives I began for Oskar or Edward have ended up changing how I eat, and helping me. The positive thinking philosophy The Secret that Scotty brought home with him was usefully deployed for parental sanity. And when Daric left Rich Dad Poor Dad by financial guru Robert Kiyosaki lying around the house, it resulted in our garage apartment and a new revenue stream. We are just those kind of people — not as skeptical as some – willing to go boldly into new protocols. And drag everyone else along for the ride. 

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Owen is happy to have PGX packets added to his ever expanding collection, and he has taken to salads with great interest. Smoothies and hot baths are always fun. But detoxing isn’t always easy.  And it isn’t always pretty. 

Detoxing Owen is uphill work.  Just for starters, remember his love of plastic and tubbing. Turns out that not only is a nice hot bath filled with plastic not a brilliant idea for detoxing a body (since the warm wet very likely accelerates the release of chemical substances by one, and their absorption by the other), but turns out the tub itself could be releasing lead. Yes, lead. I assumed a porcelain tub was dah bomb for chemical stability — I had been worried about our acrylic tub! For whatever reason, some makers of cast iron porcelain tubs incorporate lead into their manufacturing process. Madness. Idiocy! So now you know. Aren’t you glad? Another thing to worry about. There are kits that can test your tub for it. Maybe I will buy a lead testing kit.  Maybe I don’t want to know.

It turns out that the real uphill work of detoxing may not be physical. Even getting a sluggish bowel functioning is easier than decreasing STRESS.  Or, to be more accurate, moving of bowels seems to be Owen’s particular detoxing challenge, but removal of toxic levels of psychic stress and worry from my life/mind is my own. How much does a breast cancer survivor want to know about the possibilities for toxicity in the environment? Or how many more wonderful plant products should be consumed to boost the body’s ability to fight cancer?  Whether the concern is improving mental function (and that means bowel function, they are deeply connected), or fending off diabetes, or beating cancer’s recurrence, a person can only eat so many kale salads and veggie smoothies, or swallow so many supplements. My research and reflection over the past weeks shows me one thing:  the most toxic thing really has to be anxiety — that is to say stress, and its buddies fear, tension, and anger.

Well, Owen has me beat for coping with stress. He does not do stress, as far as I know.  Maybe I cause him stress. But at stressful moments, his natural reaction is to laugh. And aggravating as it is for me in that moment, laughter has to be a far healthier reaction to the poop of life than anger and frustration.

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Last week I caught Owen listening to French President Emmanuel Macron. I had been busy finishing dinner and getting it to the table when I looked up to see Owen on pause, all movement stopped. He was listening. His whole face lit up into a grin. Of course I stopped everything too, to try to hear what he was hearing.  President Macron was speaking English with a heavy French accent on the National Public Radio news. As far as I could tell this cracked Owen up. His eyes twinkled, his face grew bright, his laugh was infectious. Owen has always loved accents. And here was this guy, sounding like Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast, right in the middle of Mom’s radio news! What a hoot! 

I don’t think Owen is Nationalistic, but his uses as a diplomat for peace could be limited to his capacity for infectious laughter. Maybe that would be enough. It is very healing.  And it is when I sit down to write about my life with Owen that I most benefit from the laughing, able then in reflection to see what is delightful or life-giving in what was just maddening or aggravating before. So maybe the best detoxing for me is here, at the keyboard, searching out the words to describe the essence of my life with Owen for you.

Namaste, dear readers. Here’s to your health.

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Owen the Plastic King

wystansimons5 Comments

 

 

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If you caught my last posting for Suburban Growing, you know that plastic has been much on my mind. How could it be otherwise, you might ask, when you live with a guy who is a plastic connoisseur?  A guy who chops up plastic for an occupation – a mission – a passion? Too true, Owen and I are both passionate about plastic.

Ok, ask the next obvious question: how on earth have you, a plastic hater, allowed so much plastic into your son’s life anyway? Until the floor of your house is gritty and lumpy with chopped up bottles and dismembered toys, and dissected plastic bags swirl by a the ankles (hey, only on a bad day) as you pass through the room?  Ah well, that is a very different kind of question, and the answer has something to do with fatigue and giving up in the face of the storm. Something any mom or dad gets.

Heck, until recently Owen’s morning bathtub could be swimming in plastic –  multi-colored hard plastic shards, or shimmering plastic bag ribbons and banners. Sometimes there was hardly room for him in there, if the baskets went in too. Owen enjoys taking things to extremes. I had to pick plastic out of the drain regularly to keep the water moving.

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But no more. After I listened to that pivotal NPR program about pervasive micro plastic pollution last November, I gathered steam to put my foot down. In a very nice way (of course!). It is one thing to allow a person to make a mess, but it’s another to hurt the environment and poison his body thereby.  I may be a hippy, but I have limits.

I told Owen, “Plastic is great for cutting, but not for baths. Plastic in your bath will make you sick. Wooden things can go into the bath.”  Owen was naturally not all in with this new regimen. Yet I have been amazed at how much he has accepted the new rule for plastics. He didn’t get mad. He didn’t stamp his feet. I was prepared for those things. Maybe designated chopping times and locations makes his life a little more interesting.  I know that his life is boring to him, an issue of much greater concern. The other explanation is that Owen understands when I say “This will hurt you.” That would be wonderful.

Every morning he brings his plastic basketful of plastic into the bathroom, and every morning I say cheerfully (of course!) “Oh plastics are great for cutting, but they don’t go in the bath.” It is easy to be cheerful when Owen is co-operating with me, when I getting things my way. It is a great relief to get those piles of plastic out of the one most sensitive areas of Owen’s life.  If only there were a way to get it out of our lives all together! Don’t worry buddy, no chance of that any time soon.

After putting my foot down, Owen and I took a trip to the local Goodwill, and perused the shelves for wooden objects. We had a good time. Owen loves wandering the Goodwill.  Besides a wooden rolling pin, and a weird wooden and metal agility toy, I found a whole set of wooden alphabet  blocks.  Apart from being non-toxic to Owen and the waterways, the switch to wooden bath objects has yielded an unexpected benefit.  Using some giant wooden letters I found at Target and the secondhand alphabet blocks I am taking a few minutes each day to talk to Owen about  letters and their sounds while he is in his tub. Keeping it fun. Am I imagining it or does he seem to be listening?

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You can’t do much to manipulate wooden alphabet blocks though, and manipulation is exactly what Owen loves about plastics (and aluminum cans too, if he can get one)  To be able to act your will on something and alter it –  the whole broken down to bits, ripped, chopped. Those large and brand new letters from Target are (were) more intriguing since they can be broken up. Now our E is an F, and the S has been deconstructed into two lower case “u”s. But I am not giving up – I sense cognitive receptivity in Owen that I do not remember sensing before.  Maybe his brain is maturing, on its own maverick arc? Maybe if you are bored enough with your life when opportunity presents itself you respond?  Could it be that standing up against plastics is the spark for an entirely new journey for me and Owen?

Or is it possible that by fixating on plastics so obsessively, Owen has been making that point all along?  Look at this horrible stuff that I am dragging into the house, and piling in the corners, and finding in the fields and in the woods, and the parking lots!  LOOK MOM! LOOK!! Isn’t this GROSS!?!

(Read more about impact of plastics on human health here Invisibles, Orb Media , watch here Drinking Microplastics?  or listen to an NPR program here Plastics Are Forever, November 1, 2017 .)