The day I learned that I was pregnant, I quite smoking, gave up drinking coffee, and stopped taking the various psychotropic drugs I had relied on to stabilize my mood for years. I proceeded to allow only organic, unprocessed foods and herbal and homeopathic remedies to pass my lips. The baby I carried was going to be pure and perfect, damnit!

Remarkably, I survived my pregnancy with only one incident that might be attributed to a lack of pharmaceutically-enhanced mental stability and gave birth to my baby at home with no drugs, no glaring hospital lights, no newborn shots, and nobody (God forbid) taking a knife to my son’s perfect little pink bud of a penis.

After having been gently brought into this world by a wonderful midwife who looked and acted like the Earth Mother personified, my son was suckled at my detoxified breast and swaddled in a 100% organic, undyed cotton hat and t-shirt and, of course, a teeny tiny cloth diaper.

Thus it continued for roughly the first year of Thomas’s life. We could have appeared on the cover of Mothering magazine, as fresh-scrubbed and pure-looking as any hippie mother and love child delivered by Ina May on The Farm in Tennessee.

Somehow, however, in a scant four years, things have changed. As I write, drinking my first morning cup of nuclear-strength coffee, my four-year-old son sits in front of a Batman cartoon in his 100% polyester Spiderman pajamas, eating a bowl of cereal complete with brightly colored marshmallow shapes and including such ingredients as “mixed tocopherols,” “yellows 5 & 6,” and of course, lots of processed sugar. I am quite sure the word “organic” does not appear anywhere in the ingredients list. He has been injected with any number of toxic substances to keep him healthy, and, while he still retains all of his penis, it is now enclosed within disposable diapers at night.

What happened? Well, it’s a slippery slope. I think the first concession to the fact that we live in America in the 21st century occurred with one of those innocent-looking jars of Gerber baby food with its artificial ingredients and it’s been all downhill from there. From breast milk to neon pink, strawberry milk in a box. From organic rice cereal to generic Lucky Charms. From that first “educational” Baby Einstein video to Batman. From slings hand-woven by indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin to a nylon jogger from Amazon.com.

We still shop for produce at the Farmer’s market (not that my son allows any of the locally grown, organic vegetables to pass his lips) and buy organic whenever economically feasible, but my son is now sometimes fed on artificial ingredients and clothed in synthetic fibers. He watches (gasp!) commercial television on Saturday mornings.

Have I failed? Well, I don’t look at it that way. As a parent, I have learned that expecting perfection—of yourself, of your child, of your partner, of theworld—is impractical, if not downright harmful. Like it or not, we swim in the processed soup of 21st century American culture. Imperfect, not terribly deep, sort of warm and murky.

Come on in, the water’s fine!