Honey See, Honey Do

As I mentioned in my previous post, for us adults, most of our carefree days are taken up by such small details as work, bills and mortgages/rent. And for you parents out there, your carefree days are probably completely gone for the next couple decades. Because when I got pregnant, holding that stick with two lines back in 2004 after a night of general drunken fun, I had to drop everything I was doing - drinking, going to the smoky bars - and start to learn what was going on with my body. All of a sudden, my body didn't care much about me, as I found out after those first 14 weeks of nausea and only eating mashed potatoes and dill pickles. My body only cared about the little human it was manufacturing, a little bean of a human that eventually grew into a beanstalk of a girl, gently breaking my skin into little rivers of reddened stretch marks and making my butt and boobs sink into the swamp. (Yes, Monty Python fans.)

But then I found an online community at iVillage, a group of women who were all expectant mothers, due in May 2005. Can you imagine? Dozens of pregnant women talking about the most incredible, disgusting, scary things that would probably send college students home to Mom and Dad, vowing never to look at the "perks" of college life the same way again, if they truly knew what pregnancy would do to a woman's mind. Women talking about how garlic can prevent a yeast infection if placed, um, at the source of the problem. (Ew.) Women who, by May 1, were dying to have baby out and asking if nipple stimulation was really the way to go to jump-start labor. (Um.) Teenage moms who had absolutely no knowledge of what was going on and eventually made iVillage their gynecologist, mother and Divine Intervention source. (Yikes.)

To be fair, I came away with 10 other women from that group who were quite sane-minded and we have our own little group, and there were plenty of other sane women. But for every woman with her head screwed on right, there was someone else waiting to stoke the fires of unfriendly controversy, to bear the claw of catty misconception, or wave the flag of self-righteousness.

But then once those little squirts were out of the womb, I remember a different conversation that wasn't all that gross - honey. As some you might know, honey is considered dangerous, nay, even poisonous, to babies under 12 months of age because of the risk of botulism. Some mothers were concerned about eradicating allergies in their babies, because local-made honey has all the local pollens in one convenient bottle, thereby allowing the body to build up immunity. Their doctors would wag their fingers and tell them absolutely not, until that first birthday, and then they would beg someone in the iVillage community to tell them that it was probably worth the risk.

But now, what with all the hoopla about those children's cough remedies and how they actually might be dangerous for children under six years of age, a study by my alma mater found that honey is actually a better OTC (over-the-counter) solution to suppress cough. Perhaps it's the sugary sweet, thick-coated relief that it provides for a raw throat and chest; perhaps it's the antioxidants and antimicrobial features that helps heal things quicker. Nonetheless, it's a sigh of relief for most parents who don't like pumping unnatural remedies into their kids and might want to try honey as an alternate the next time Junior starts hacking.

Granted, those parents who also view immunizations as "unnatural remedies" and refuse to immunize their kids are threatening the return of such devastating diseases like polio, but there's a reason why I don't frequent that mommy's place in iVillage any more. Alliances, enemies, trolls, and women shoving garlic in places other than their mouth. It was just too much. Even for a woman.