When I was a child in France, the remedy for all minor scrapes and cuts was mercurochrome. The liquid, applied with a little brush like on a nail polish bottle, would leave my knee or finger candy apple red with a golden metallic sheen, and it would stop the bleeding almost immediately. It was in the medicine cabinet of every home and you could usually see mercurochrome red spots on the bodies of at least a few kids at school each day. Mercurochrome is no longer sold in the U.S., France or Germany because it contains mercury (thus the name). I didn’t know this until recently, when I looked it up to see why I’d never encountered it in the 11 years I have been a parent.

Mercury? Really? I was an active kid and I got a lot of scrapes. I vividly remember watching the bleeding stop as the mercurochrome dried on my knee. That’s at least seven years (possibly longer, as I’m pretty sure a bottle of mercurochrome made its way with the rest of our belongings when we moved from France to the U.S.) of mercury regularly making its way into my bloodstream through open cuts. Great.

I’ve never had a desire to have my levels of heavy metals measured. To be honest, I’m pretty sure I’m walking around with heavy metals in my body just as most of us are. Lead from the old paint in that gorgeous Victorian I lived in during my mid-twenties, and the gasoline in cars when I was little; mercury from mercurochrome and dental fillings and tuna salad and sushi and probably some of the vaccines from when I was little and they hadn’t changed the formula yet to avoid thimerosal. I can only imagine what the process is to eliminate these metals from our bodies – if that is even entirely possible (I’m dubious). I got my share of cavities when I was younger and those mercury fillings hung out in my molars for decades, until I had them replaced with white fillings as they began to wear and crack during my thirties. I know that’s not a benign procedure, that dentists can only do their best to keep that mercury from getting into your system as it is being removed with a drill.

Every time I take my daughter in for a cleaning, the dentist brings up coating her very back molars with a plastic resin to prevent cavities. And each time I let him know I’m not interested – that I don’t like the thought of her slowly absorbing the chemicals in plastic without knowing the possible effects. Since it’s a relatively new thing in children’s oral hygiene, they don’t yet know what they now know about mercury fillings. So I remind my daughter to spend a few extra moments on those back teeth each time she brushes.

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When we moved to the Midwest from California in 2009, I met the head of neonatology of a major children’s hospital. We sat in his office for over an hour and I told him about Tikva, how she had been diagnosed with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) in utero and lived for two months after she was born. CDH is less rare than many other congenital conditions, but it is less researched than it could be because few babies survive, and those that do are often too fragile to have their bodies poked and prodded any more than they need to be to support them. As I sat with the neonatologist, he told me about CDH research they were participating in with a university in Australia. The research was being done on sheep, and diaphragmatic hernia in fetuses was induced by injecting a concentrated amount of a regularly used herbicide into the amniotic fluid while the sheep were in utero.

An herbicide. A chemical that is toxic to plants and is used in gardens to destroy unwanted vegetation. Injected into the amniotic sac of a fetal sheep, it quickly induces the forming diaphragm not to form correctly, completely or at all. 

Shortly after I met the neonatologist, my husband was bemoaning the growing amount of crab grass on our front and back lawns. He wanted to spray it with some kind of weed killer and replace the crab grass with new healthy grass seed. I listened to him complain about that crab grass for the entire four years we lived in that house, but I wouldn’t let him spray. Instead, my head spun with thoughts about when my body could have unknowingly taken in enough herbicide chemicals to eventually cause my baby’s diaphragm not to form completely.

I had hoped to get a job at the children’s hospital during our time in the Midwest; give meaning to my daughter’s short life by putting my management skills to use on behalf of others like her and the medical staff who care for them. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t. Sometimes knowing too much is not helpful.

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So what do we do with all that information? What do we do with all those lists of things that are out there, all those things that are or might be bad for us, that can harm us? What do we do with the fears they bring up? Can there be a balance between fearing everything and making the best choices we can with all the things we know and the exponentially larger number of things we don’t know?

I have no idea what caused the hole in my daughter’s diaphragm. It wasn’t the shingles I had while pregnant, the doctors assured me, because by the time I got my first blister her diaphragm had already formed. Was my body not ready to grow a healthy child because I had struggled with an auto immune condition and taken medication for almost two years until my symptoms healed just before getting pregnant?

Shortly after Tikva died I read something in the book, Healing With Whole Foods, that really angered me. Among other prohibitions to ensure successful conception and healthy pregnancy, the book instructed: Do not conceive if either partner is weak or sick. That hit me like a brick on the back of my head, and I almost threw the book across the room. I have barely picked it up since, and this is why: I think it is completely arrogant to think that we have much control over any of it. I used to think that the reason my older daughter was born so healthy is because I did “everything right” while I was pregnant with her. But I was wrong. She is radiantly healthy because that is the constitution and the spirit she brought with her into this life. Would she have been born as healthy if I had been an IV drug user while carrying her? Doubtful. But beyond not ingesting knowingly addictive and harmful drugs while pregnant, beyond eating enough good food and drinking a lot of water and getting good rest – to take care of both my unborn baby and myself – I think the rest is just random luck. Nobody warned me about avoiding deli meats while pregnant, and I spent a good month of my first trimester eating turkey sandwiches daily. I ate soft cheeses daily for five weeks as we traveled through Turkey during the second half of my pregnancy. And she turned out completely fine. (And honestly, do women really avoid sushi in Japan when they get pregnant?)

A babylost friend I met shortly after Tikva died wrote about the random shitstorm of life, and how when our babies died we were caught right in the eye of the storm. I know, now, what an incredible random miracle it is when everything goes “right” and a baby is born healthy and easily. I know more about the thousands of ways babies can die than I wish I knew, and yet there is something freeing in that: Because I am not in control. I know that for every one danger I can try to protect my children from, there are ten I cannot even imagine or predict.

I hope more than anything that my children always remain as healthy and strong as they are now. I hope they will thrive free of illness and challenges. I hope tragedy stays far away from them and those they love, and I know that about 99% of that is not in my hands. I will continue to feed them well, good and healthy food, teaching them healthy habits that I hope they will embrace as adults. I will make sure they wear a helmet when they ride a bike. I will take them for their pediatrician and dental checkups regularly. I will sign them up for softball and soccer and (gulp) even football. I will kiss their booboos and hug them when they fall, carry bandaids in my purse at all times, bring home popsicles when they get sick. I will give them their vitamins and, if they need fillings, get the white ones. I will teach them self-care and self-love. And I will love them unconditionally.

Beyond that? I’m not so sure any of the rest is in my control. And to be honest, I find that liberating. Something about knowing I am doing my best as a mother, as a human being, and that is enough.