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Photo from FabOverFifty.com does NOT show Kelly Kazek's mom.

When you're a kid, you trust your parents to make the best choices for your health and safety. It's not like I knew to tell my mother I wasn't of legal drinking age when she gave me a shot of bourbon and honey to soothe my sore throat when I was 8. But it was the 1970s, the era of living dangerously, when we rode in cars without seat belts, took bike rides without benefit of a helmet and had a shot of liquor every now and then, as needed.

It was the Before time. Before airbags. Before nutrition labeling. Before surgeon general warnings. Before anyone knew what ultraviolet rays were. Before we were told excessive tanning was not healthy, even if it made us glow like Farrah Fawcett slathered in radium.

And in that innocent time, our mothers sent us out to play without any sunscreen. At. All. But for my mother and her best girlfriends, being tan wasn't good enough. They wanted to be the most tan. The tannest. The queen of the tan. Tanny McTanface. There were no commercial tanning beds, at least in our world, but my mother did have a sun lamp, which was a way you could concentrate those cancer-causing rays directly on one part of your body until it was the crispy brown of bacon - or led to a third-degree burn and a trip to the ER.

But when using the sun lamp, my mom knew how to prevent her skin from getting too crispy - she would slather herself in a mixture of baby oil and iodine. This was also the time Before Hawaiian Tropic, or other commercial tanners, which came into popular usage in the early 1970s. The baby oil-and-iodine mixture promised a quicker, darker tan and most women we knew swore by it. The mixture itself wasn't really harmful. It was the fact that it drew all those rays to our unprotected skin that was the problem. Putting it on us kids was like buttering Hansel and Gretel before they went into the oven. But who knew?

I was coated in it every summer from the time I was 7 or 8 until I was a teenager, when all my illusions were shattered by the knowledge that everything about my childhood might have killed me, or at the very least infused me with toxins that could have turned me into some kind of mutant. Like Godzilla. Or Gary Busey.

For instance, my mother treated all of my brother's and my scrapes and cuts with Mercurochrome. Some moms preferred Merthiolate, and most kids would come to school covered in one of the red-orange antiseptics at some point, wearing it like our very own red badge of courage.

Kelly Kazek's parents, Gayle and Charles Caldwell, vacationing on Jekyll Island, Ga., in the early 1970s.

We went through lots of Mercurochrome when we were kids, and it wasn't until I had Baby Girl that I realized I hadn't seen any red-kneed kids in ages. And it wasn't until I went to type "Mercurochrome" into Google to find out why, that I noticed the spelling. Yep, the antiseptic we were coated in almost daily as kids contained mercury. I learned that in the 1990s, the FDA classified it as "not generally recognized as safe" and banned its sale, which is the government's passive-aggressive way of saying it could have killed us all but admitting it would leave the FDA open to lawsuits.

Somehow, we survived those years when we didn't know any better. But it makes me wonder: What am I doing, right now, that is hazardous to my health? Besides eating all that triple fudge brownie ice cream, which I categorize as an "acceptable risk."

Are the "natural tears" I use more dangerous for my eyes than regular tears? Could the underwire in my bra give me lead poisoning? Or just poke me to death when it breaks through the lining? Are scrambled eggs good or bad for your health at any given moment, or does it depend on if the chicken that laid them lives in a barnyard or a penthouse? And what harm might I have unwittingly inflicted on Baby Girl?

I need answers. But I suppose like all those mothers before me, I will have to wait until Baby Girl has children of her own to find out everything I did wrong when she was a child. It's the natural order of things.

Tell me your childhood memories or unusual cures or potions. Email kkazek@al.com.

Kelly Kazek's humor columns appear regularly on AL.com and in The Huntsville Times, The Birmingham News and The Press-Register in Mobile. Find her on Facebook or follow her humor columns on Pinterest here. You can also follow her Odd Travels and Real Alabama boards on Pinterest.