Sometimes I feel like everywhere I look, there’s some toxic chemical infiltrating our food system, water, home—even our cars. Something is always off-gassing, leaching, or shedding. It starts to feel overwhelming as a mother. How do you live in this world and not be of this world? How do you do things the old way and not dip your children into the toxic soup that surrounds us?
My husband and I often joke that we try to do our best 90 percent of the time and totally give up the other 10 percent, so our children can live in the world and have the occasional exception. One area in which I haven’t been as strict as I’d like is clothing. About 60 percent to 70 percent of their clothing is made of natural fibers such as cotton, wool, or linen. But the other 30 percent is poly-cotton blends.
My mother was a fashion designer who created Flax, a natural-fiber line of clothing. I grew up walking through fabric warehouses and could tell natural from synthetic just by touch. She is a purist. I used to be a purist, too. But then you have one child, then two, then four, and somewhere along the way you start accepting gifts, buying something in a pinch, or keeping an item even when the label quietly reveals itself to be synthetic. Slowly, I slid from 100 percent natural to something much less.
Recently, a few experiences pulled me back. One was shared by a lovely couple visiting The Barn restaurant at Sovereignty Ranch. Both worked in the medical field in San Antonio. We ended up talking about modern life and toxins. The husband shared that he had been struggling with low testosterone. He’d read that certain plastics might act like estrogen in the body—or at least be perceived as estrogenic. He looked down at his expensive performance underwear and realized it was made almost entirely of polyester.
We don’t usually call it plastic. We call it polyester.
Then he thought about how we draw toxins out of the body through the feet—yet he stood in polyester socks all day.
He decided to stop wearing polyester underwear, socks, and clothing for three months. He didn’t throw out his whole wardrobe—just wore certain items more often and avoided synthetics, in case the change didn’t help. But sure enough, after just three months, his testosterone levels went from below 250 to above 525—without medication. That stayed with me. I thought about it when I went to bed, and again in the shower the next morning.
Then another realization hit me. I had never really thought about polyester clothing dumping microplastics into the water. I knew what my mother had taught me: Polyester is cheap, petroleum-based, doesn’t breathe, and doesn’t belong next to skin.
Then one day, I saw a brand advertising a wash bag that could keep microplastics from entering the watershed. I actually said out loud, “That can’t be real.” Are we really dumping plastic into the watershed every time we do laundry?
And then something else. A few months back, I was writing about Texas cotton farmers and the price of cotton. I explored the paradox of farmers promoting cotton over polyester, while cotton farming itself can involve heavy chemical inputs. During that research, I stumbled on something surprising: Old fertility studies linking synthetic clothing to serious reproductive effects.
Scientists speculated that the issue might not be the fabric’s chemistry alone, but the electrostatic field generated by polyester against the skin—interfering with ovarian function or spermatogenesis. Others pointed to lingering chemical additives in synthetic fibers that could leach out and disrupt hormones.
We’ll never be perfect. But clothing—the fabric that covers the largest organ of our body—is something we can control. By choosing natural fibers, perhaps we can also support real cotton farmers and help increase the value of their work. The price paid to cotton farmers hasn’t risen since 1978, even though inflation has skyrocketed and the buying power of the dollar has dropped by roughly 90 percent. Without crop insurance, cotton farming in America would be nearly extinct.
Maybe synthetic clothing is just a metaphor for how synthetic, fake, and ungrounded everything has become in our modern world. Whether the issue is electromagnetic disruption or hormonal interference, it’s worth looking into. We can no longer assume that what’s presented to us is safe or effective. In fact, we almost have to assume that it isn’t—and do our own research.
This is not medical advice. I’m not telling anyone what to do. But sometimes, life brings you a few data points you can’t ignore. Especially when you’re a mother, a wife, and someone who’s eager to understand how things really work—you listen.
So for my family, from here on out, we will be choosing natural fibers.
