When I first saw our home, I was absolutely blown away. The 4,500 square-foot 1906 Detroit house boasted giant historic windows, two staircases and so many doors that little kids could run circles through every floor of the house. There were nooks and crannies, tons of closets to hide in and a spacious yard.
Little did I know this house would invisibly and unflaggingly poison my future children, changing my family’s lives forever.
When my wife, Jess, and I decided we wanted to conceive at the same time for pseudo twins, we knew we would be signing up for a hard (albeit beautiful) first several years if we were successful.
When we decided to co-parent with our future babies’ biological dad, we knew we would be living a family life very outside the norm.
And when I conceived twins, giving us pseudo triplets due 10 days apart, we knew the infancy stage was going to be rough.
But we had no concept of the nightmare coming our way.
The twins, Arden and Conall, had colic, so sleepless nights and bleary days incessantly ran together. Miko (our singleton) watched as Jess and I paced the house, sang lullabies and nursed the twins incessantly.
Finally, after six months of yoga ball bouncing and noise-canceling headphones and crying right along with my babies, they started sleeping for two, then three, then four hours at a time.
The light at the end of the tunnel looked more like hope and less like an oncoming train.
Suddenly, at eight months, sleep worsened again. The triplets had a hard time falling asleep and staying asleep. They needed help resettling every time.
Their best night was 21 wakes, and their worst night was 55.
I became so sleep-deprived that I hallucinated cobwebs and shadow spiders while awake, and my therapist had to talk me through when the voices in my head were (mostly) benign, and when I should be worried.
And the triplets all became insanely irritable. They cried so much that our gentle part-time nanny — a professional day care worker who only took care of one baby at a time, while one of us parents managed the other two — cut her hours because she couldn’t endure the constant screaming.
I was dissociating, using headphones to block out the screaming so I could still comfort my poor babies without losing my mind. Guilting myself for not enjoying their fleeting infancy only compounded my stress — a vicious cycle I couldn’t escape.
We went to specialist after specialist. I researched every pediatric concern that could cause their symptoms: sleep difficulties, irritability, abdominal pain, delayed growth, anemia.
“Stop breastfeeding,” one doctor said. “Then they’ll sleep.”
“It’s because you respond when they cry,” another doctor said. “Just let them cry themselves to sleep.”
But I knew this wasn’t because I was doing gentle parenting.
And at their 12-month appointment, my intuition was confirmed.
Concerned, our pediatrician told us the babies tested high for their capillary lead blood level test, and we needed to go ASAP to a hospital and get a venous draw to verify.
In a few days, the results arrived.
Arden, Conall and Miko had lead poisoning.
To be honest, I didn’t know lead poisoning was still a thing.
I knew old homes probably had lead paint, but I thought, as long as you made sure the paint wasn’t peeling and you didn’t let your child lick the walls, you’d be totally fine.
Now that I’ve learned how pervasive and insidious lead still is, I’m stunned at how wrong I was — and stunned that the information I have now wasn’t readily available to me then, as a parent with kids in the prime risk group (under 6 and in a pre-1978 home).
I didn’t know that 50% of American children and 78% of Michigan’s children have detectable levels of lead in their blood, and that there is no safe level of lead in the blood.
I didn’t know that high-friction areas (like windows, doors and floors) can’t be safely encapsulated — lead can still come through intact paint. Half of my house’s doors had lead paint, buried underneath a layer of safe paint, but it still exposed the kids to lead dust.
Even if someone’s home is new, construction season can kick up leaded dust. My kids’ lead symptoms began before they began crawling, and their doctors think it’s because they were exposed to construction in my neighborhood.
Caedy Convis Photography.
You may think that once I had an answer as to what was wrong with my kids, I could jump right into fixing the problem.
It took months to schedule a professional lead test to ascertain all the lead hazards in our house.
Then we found out the abatement would cost between $100,000 and $200,000 (a staggering sum that we frankly did not have). And finding resources was a nightmare. I knew there were grants and loans available for families, but getting into one of the programs felt like hunting for a unicorn.
I called and emailed every lead program I could find in my city, my state and the country. I called my state representatives, I called my federal representatives, I called my city council, I called my governor. I even hunted down the emails of my city and state health department leadership.
I left voicemails with screaming babies in the background and wrote emails while jiggling two baby bouncy seats with my foot. And even with me bending over backward to advocate for my babies, it still took four months to access a grant. And then it took four months for the abatement to actually start.
“How do other families do it?” I wondered, angry and disbelieving.
Anyone working a 9-to-5 job would have found this sort of advocacy so hard. Anyone working two jobs would have found it impossible.
Rich families who could afford the price tag to abate their home — sure, they could move forward. Minority families — queer like mine, or families of color, with disabilities, who are living in poverty — are at greater risk due to systemic inequities and discrimination.
And they are precisely the families who cannot usually afford this sort of abatement and need these grants and loans the most. Yet, they are the ones most likely to be working jobs that are more inconvenient, lower-paid, don’t include PTO or have other barriers to badgering their representatives with phone calls every day.
Jess and I both grew up poor, with MacGyver-style dads, and we put those creative skills to work.
We ordered our own lead tests to identify the biggest hot spots.
I interviewed nurses, read dozens of articles and found temporary abatement methods, like removing some doors, wrapping the others in wallpaper and duct tape to create a barrier that lead dust couldn’t migrate through, and painting our windows shut. I bought a HEPA vacuum and learned how to wet-clean everything.
Everyone took off their shoes before coming inside; we washed the babies’ hands constantly; we didn’t let them play in the dirt.
Once the lead abatement finally began, it took three more months to complete. But when we moved back into a lead-safe home, even though everything looked mostly the same, I felt like it was a brand new house.
Only when the crushing weight of my home’s deadly neurotoxin lifted did I realize how horrific it had been to be forced to keep living in a home that was actively poisoning my babies.
The anxiety of knowing that one skipped spot on the floor, one unwashed hand at the wrong time, one tiny peel of paint could skyrocket their lead levels was obscene.
And it had deeply affected my relationship with my body, driving me into an emotional detachment to try to keep my shit together around my kids and not just break down wailing with them every day.
I started crying in therapy again. I started processing the sickness of my babies, the difficulty of experiencing traumatic births and triplet infants, the desire to feel joy and be simply in the moment with them.
And by acknowledging I hadn’t been feeling that joy, I began experiencing glimpses of it.
Caedy Convis Photography.
What now? Are we in the clear?
Not really. I’m far crunchier of a mom than I ever wanted to be — I only buy my kids the processed foods that have tested safe for lead and only buy toys that are lead-safe.
And behind the crunchiness is fury.
I’m furious that the only warning parents get about the dangers of lead paint is one paper among many to sign when you buy an old house, demurely saying there might be lead here, we don’t know, just don’t lick the paint.
I’m furious my doctors didn’t take my concerns seriously. If the kids had gotten lead-tested when we first started going to specialists, we could have saved months of exposure.
I’m furious that I didn’t know lead poisoning was something that could happen in 2025, not just pre-1978.
And my kids’ brains are affected for life.
Lead poisoning at a young age permanently alters the neurons in the brain. In many ways, it mimics ADHD and autism so perfectly that kids with lead poisoning are often misdiagnosed. The scientific community isn’t sure how to categorize the relationship between lead and neurodivergence, but they are sure that the behaviors are often identical and the neural brain changes are very similar.
Caedy Convis Photography.
Now chaotic toddlers, my kids put my gentle parenting to the test every day. But they are also full of such joy, such life, such vivacity. They brim with the wonder that all children carry in their hearts. And now that their lead levels are going down and their bodies and minds start to heal, I see their true natures more clearly, more often.
Yes, there’s still lots of irritability. Yes, they’re still waking up 10+ times a night.
But I see the brightness in their eyes as they experience nature; I hear the delight in their laughs as they play peekaboo together. As their bodies detox, their happiness grows. And as their lead levels go down and their sleep improves, my sleep also improves.
Before, as much as I read Instagram posts about the importance of calm co-regulation and desperately tried to be present with my kids, I still found myself frequently repressing my stress by lapsing into dissociation. Now, I’m getting to feel the joy they have, and not just see it from a dissociative distance. I’m finally feeling motherhood in my body again.
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