Epigenetics is real. But this stuff gets weird and roams far from common sense. Case in point: "electrosmog" is the idea that electromagnetic fields harm any living being who spends any time anywhere near electronic devices. "They give us all cancer! And make us infertile!" And I am not exaggerating those claims. (I'm not linking to the sites that make these claims, because I refuse to give them traffic. Google it if you must.) The World Health Organization's opinion about the possible health effects of electromagnetic fields is that more research needs to be done about whether having your cell phone surgically attached to your head will give you cancer. In the meantime, I refuse to live without WiFi, a cell phone, a microwave, a television, etc. Guess what? I love our XBox360! I do not feel anxious about my beloved iPhone. I do not feel guilty about using a microwave while trying to conceive/holding a baby. I have no guilt about my addiction to my MacBook Air and will not feel guilty about using it while a baby sleeps in a carrier on my chest. (Can I get an "awww!" from the Apple nerds/writers in the house?)

While I do not feel guilty about any of that, there are changes that I want to make but can't afford. This inspires anxiety and guilt, and I suspect that some of you feel this way, too. Or perhaps you didn't before and are only now beginning to feel guilty. If so, please comment on this post so that I can apologize to you directly and help you do whatever you need to do to feel less anxious/guilty/depressed about how toxic modern life seems to have become. 

Here are the top three items on my Green Guilt List: 

The Bed: Did you know that standard mattresses contain lots of chemicals? Formaldehyde tops the list of harmful chemicals that evaporate from your mattress into the air in a process called off-gassing. There are other chemicals that are healthy to breathe, but that's the big one.Yes, you read that correctly: formaldehyde. In your bed. The most-definitely-causes-cancer chemical formaldehyde. And, I must now include in this discussion the next best source offgas, the Furniture. Warning-- this one is the mother of all Green Pandora's Boxes, because not even the highest-earning family I know can afford 100% toxin-free furniture. They have looked for it. They can't find it. They would have to have it custom made. And they live in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan where hardly any furniture can fit. If they can't do it, it's not possible. But here's the biggest concern, especially with baby furniture: If it contains composite wood (aka "pressed wood," like particle board), then it's guaranteed that not just the mattress but also the crib has high levels of formaldehyde. Why? That's the chemical that holds the wood particles together. That goes for your bookshelves, your bed frame, your coffee table, your baby's changing table. You can actually ask companies if a product contains composite wood, and most will tell you. But you can obsess about the chemicals in the fabric, stuffing, plastic, metal and, mostly, the wood in every piece of furniture you own. Unless you're willing to hand craft all of it at great expense, just let it go.

But I can't just let it go when it comes to the beds. Babies spend so much of their lives sleeping! With their tiny airways breathing the air off-gassing from the mattress! And the crib! I know. Your kid or a kid you know sleeps or slept on a regular mattress and does not have asthma or cancer. I still feel anxiety and guilt because that kid you know is not my kid and neither of us can tell the future. How could I not feel guilty about formaldehyde? 

I don't feel too worried about the grown-ups. I worry about brand new, tiny lungs. And I want an organic mattress for us, because I want the baby to sleep with us, just like I slept in my parents' bed as a baby. (I dare you to leave a comment about the dangers of co-sleeping. Go ahead. Make my day.) I have found some good advice about how to protect us from an off-gassing mattress, but the guilt is still there. 

If I do end up buying a crib, my only non-toxic, in-budget option is from a big box store that I hate and will not mention here. I will mention the brand, because they deserve support for making a non-toxic crib for under $300: BabyMod. I promise, you will love them as much as I do. (Yes, BabyMod is only available from one store, so telling you the brand name is indirect advertising for the store, but I'm still refusing to name it.) The amount of money we would have to shell out to purchase organic mattresses for us, a crib and, eventually, a child-sized bed plus non-toxic bed frames and the crib itself actually made me cry. $5000 is an extremely conservative estimate. I'm settling for an Ikea mattress and bed frame (theirs are not organic but some are practically non-toxic compared with your average mattress). I will somehow buy a little organic mattress if we buy a crib. Or I might win one for free in a Naturopedic crib mattress giveaway!

The Plastic: The BPA scare has freaked me out thoroughly and, I fear, scarred me forever. I want everything that stores food for more than a few hours to be made of glass or stainless sleet. I want glass baby bottles. I want stainless lunch boxes with stainless bento-like containers inside them and little stainless water bottles. Lots of this is doable. Lots of it is too expensive. And no, the "BPA-free" labels do not entirely eradicate my fears, because before we knew about BPA, we didn't know about BPA. What else don't we know? I am willing to concede that this is a bit paranoid and will probably end up with those Born Free plastic baby bottles. As well as some plastic food storage containers. But I will be throwing out the containers the second I see a scratch on the inside.

The Food: I would feel more comfortable if everything we ate was organic. Pesticides? Bad for you. Obvious. Organic? Expensive. As it is, we go organic with the Dirty Dozen, which is easily accessible in a neat little app on our phones, and buy conventional produce for the Clean Fifteen (both lists are at the Environmental Working Group site I just linked to). Produce, I feel ok about. But the milk! How is it possible that organic milk costs twice as much as conventional milk? What is with that? My solution is going to be a combination of almond milk (that stuff is amazing--go try some right now) and only-for-the-kids organic milk. Meat, chicken, fish? Similar price issues. The solution to this is that we don't eat meat every day. Which, apparently, is good for the environment anyway. So, on the Guilt Scale, the food issue gets a pretty mild rating. But it rates a mention for coming up so often.