There Is No Wealth But Life

How To Raise A Happy Housewife

By Rae October 28, 2011 The Feminine 10 Comments

Apparently there are people out there turning to the internet to find out how to raise their daughters so that they will grow up to be happy housewives.

Because I am incredibly wise and experienced in this area I would like to fill in some advice which is missing from the world wide webz.

Don’t.

No, really! I mean it. If you want your daughter to be a happy housewife, do not raise her to be one. Keep her busy with the normal activities of American children and pretend that you care about her mind and furthering her education. Then someday she will perchance happen upon the concept of being a housewife and find it intriguing, appealing, and just a tad exotic (though goodness knows she won’t admit that last one to herself!).

Sure, she won’t be competent at first, but struggling through those first few homemade dinners and figuring out what to fill her linen closet with will be an adventure. As her confidence grows she will find it all so fulfilling!

If your daughter is raised to be a housewife then chances are, since she is your brilliant daughter, that she will be good at it. And if she is good at it, then it isn’t going to challenge her. And if it does not challenge her, she will be bored.

And a bored housewife isn’t going to be a good housewife, now is she?

Of course she might be one of the rare ones who finds ways of coping by making everything just a bit more challenging than it needs to be. She won’t just make her own laundry detergent (that is so housewife 102!), she’ll grow her own organic soap nuts. She won’t dream of asking you to babysit because she would never neglect her precious babies by leaving them with anyone, including their grandparents.

Alternately, she might spend her days teaching other women about homemaking in order to save herself from the mind-numbing boredom.

And this isn’t what you really want for your daughter, is it?

So, if you want your daughter to be a happy housewife take my advice: whatever you do, do not train her to be a housewife.

Let her discover the depth of pleasure that can come from housewifery when she is old enough to learn it herself. She won’t thank you for it, but she will be happy. And you might even get to play with your grandchildren while your daughter perfects the art of canning inferior lemon curd which she made in the microwave.

NaPro? Not For Me

By Rae October 26, 2011 Endometriosis 19 Comments

There are few times in life that I have been thankful that I am not an especially helpful person, and this is one of them. You see, if I were the helpful sort then I would have countless people to apologize to for ignorant advice regarding NaPro. You know the sort of flippant “oh! Don’t worry about that gynecological issue! We have a Catholic answer to all of your problems and it is called NaPro and and and!!!?”

Oh wait, you don’t know NaPro? With greatest apologies I must ask you to excuse me. This is one of those annoying posts that is only readable by a very limited audience.

Furthermore, even though I won’t try to explain NaPro here, I must say that this post is about why NaPro is not the right choice for me. It could still be perfect for you, and that is wonderful. I strongly believe that we need more options for every area of women’s health, and NaPro could be a great option for some people. One of the things I have learned from exploring CrMS is that I am an unusually challenging health case. But that just means that NaPro can provide a good resource for those who are a bit more “usual.”

Despite the fact that NaPro isn’t a good fit for me, I hope that those who believe it to be worth their time will continue working well with it in every aspect, whether as a physician, teacher, or patient. This post isn’t about you, it is about me. It is about me, my body, my religion, and what I’ve learned since the first time I saw those women in white running along the beach.

As recently as this past May I thought that NaPro could be the answer to all of my gynecological health issues. My hope in NaPro was one of the many reasons I did not make a mad dash to a pharmacy for the pill as soon as I got health insurance. After all, I wasn’t just suffering from a childish belief that somewhere out there was a magical non-pill natural cure for me: I knew there was a real system of medicine which could address all of my concerns. All I had to do was save up something like $1,000,000.00 and I could be on my way to Omaha for salvation. ::Cue chorus of angels::

Of course I wasn’t quite that naive, but NaPro makes some pretty big claims, and it is easy to overlook otherwise glaring issues when you so want something to be all that it could be.

But then a bit more exposure to NaPro info and CrMS made me realize that it just isn’t for me.

To understand why NaPro is not (for me) worth seeking out, one would have to understand what would be worth such great effort.

A cohesive healthcare system that is truly distinct from the options available to me at my local hospitals.

“NaPro” is…? I still can’t find the answer to this. Perhaps I just don’t understand what a “women’s health science” is, but “NaPro” seems like it is its own patchwork of random things, much like the treatment I can get from local doctors completely covered by my health insurance. I do not need a special name to make me feel better about surgery, the typical hormones, and experimental uses of various drugs.

Which brings me to the second thing that would make NaPro valuable:

Ultimate expertise in the conditions with which I need help (like maybe endometriosis?)

Simply put, treating endometriosis for endometriosis’ sake is not a focus of NaPro. If one were going to the effort to find an incredible expert in endometriosis, then it would make much more sense to seek out the type of experts who make the treatment of endometriosis their entire work.

I could find no evidence that NaPro doctors have more success than other specialists for surgical treatment of endometriosis in terms of pregnancy, much less pain reduction.

Which brings me to my next issue:

Gynecological health, and not merely reproductive health.

Don’t get me wrong, reproductive or “procreative” health (the ability to conceive, carry, and give birth to a healthy child) is incredibly important. But completely aside from the fact that this is actually a comparatively small part of women’s health time-wise, it is not my primary concern. My largest issue is getting my body to function with the most basic tasks, not obsessing over fertility treatments.

Because of NaPro’s hyper-focus on the procreative, it does not appear to have much to offer me other than fertility drugs for the sake of seeking pregnancy. This was the part where I finally began to understand why all of the other “NFP only” doctors prescribe the pill for women with chronic pelvic pain. It just does not make sense to always go around prescribing pregnancy and fertility drugs which are in themselves at least as harmful as the pill.

And speaking of fertility “treatments” and things I can’t dance lightly enough around:

A Catholic healthcare practice where I could relax my moral alertness and not question anything offered.

NaPro encourages, and apparently sometimes requires, things which I believe are immoral. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that they are violating the clearest of the Church’s teachings. In fact, I don’t know of anything they do that directly contradicts the explicit directives of the US Bishops. So it is all good, right?

But my conscience isn’t ruled merely by how up-to-date the bishops are on all nuances of the lived reality of fertility treatments. To borrow from the hackneyed example: abusing indulgences was wrong even before the pope wrote my bishop a letter telling him to clean things up.

I realize that there must be broad disagreement about what is moral in these areas, particularly when the Church has not had time to catch up with current practices. But the point remains that NaPro holds no advantage for me over any of my local Catholic hospitals. It is not (and most likely cannot be) some bastion of perfect Catholicism. This is not a reason to reject it out of hand, but it does mean that it is not especially worth seeking out for moral reasons when there are many other Catholic resources.

Yet one promising thing about NaPro is that it is so closely connected to CrMS. And who wouldn’t respect Catholic healthcare that places a large emphasis on fertility understanding that enables people to follow the Church’s teachings?

This is precisely why I value:

Healthcare based on a profound understanding of not only the theoretical fertility cycle, but also my unique body.

Unfortunately CrMS does not work for me. I can see how it could work for most women, and would be well worth its existence simply to serve women with a certain personality type, if nothing else. But it is insufficient for my body for the purpose of avoiding pregnancy, and somewhat silly for other purposes.

This was very hard for me to accept at first because I have never thought of my fertility cycle as especially challenging. I have many troubling issues, but a few of these actually lend themselves to making fertility awareness easier. Because of this, the greatest challenge of learning CrMS was the effort it took to see why my FCP could not see what was so obvious to me. The simple answer is that the CrMS obfuscates my fertility signs by zeroing in on precisely the wrong aspects of my symptoms.

Again, I realize that this system is quite adequate for most women. But the fact that it is so ridiculously inadequate for me does not give me reason to put faith in the health system which has grown up with CrMS. I have even more issues with CrMS in general, but the most essential is the question of why I would want to follow a system which declares itself superior to other forms of NFP, and then, without adequate instruction for their correct application, turns around and requires me to utilize tools perfected by other methods?

Lastly, something which isn’t a criticism of NaPro at all, but more of a reflection of where I am at this point.

I want healthcare which treats me as efficiently as possible without being unnecessarily invasive or experimental.

It is good that NaPro tends toward the experimental side of things. After all, if no one ever tried anything new… BUT at the same time, I am tired of being a lab rat. Also, I had just a little dose of the NaPro approach this summer and the invasiveness is the last thing that I need at this point. I was quite willing to have surgery because I needed it, but the fact is that the NaPro style seems heavily geared toward invasiveness in every area. This goes along with the experimental aspect and makes sense for figuring out new treatments, but my body has been through enough without subjecting it to pointless over-treatment.

And this, my dear readers who have skimmed to the end, is why–even if I suddenly turn into a helpful person–I will not indiscriminately recommend NaPro as the Catholic cure-all for women’s health issues.

If those of you who are dedicating your lives to NaPro wish to comment to clear up any way in which I may be misleading a hypothetical interested but ignorant reader, please do so. I won’t take offense, and will indeed be flattered that you imagine my writing to be so fascinating that any but the most ardent devotee of NaPro would bother to read this post!

Hubris

By Rae October 23, 2011 Failure 23 Comments

The thing I love about the word “Hubris” is that only people who embody it use it. Life would be so much simpler if all words worked that way!

And I can’t help but thinking that it is the perfect word to describe why people post about not posting. Meta-much?

I really do try not to laugh at myself while blogging

No, really. As much as I love to read others’ interesting explanations for why they were blogging less, or exuberant declarations of all the engaging posts they have planned, I still think that there is something incredibly arrogant about assuming that there are people pining for new posts. Sure, there have been countless times when I have checked others blogs for nonexistent updates, but it is not as if their apologies for absence are actually directed at me. Which I guess just brings me back to the fact that I secretly believe that others all blog for themselves, even as some find it impossible to believe that I ultimately blog for myself er, I mean for Josh.

And yes, I do talk to myself in my head in precisely the same way that I write here.

But back to why I haven’t been blogging. We all already knew that, right?

I’ve been sick pretty much forever. Before being hired for my current job one of my fears was that I wouldn’t be able to work because of all of my health issues. As it turned out I was incredibly blessed with a job which I could handle quite well most of the time and with only minor difficulty a few days of the month.

And then my responsibilities changed. And then they changed again. And now I can’t handle anything. Add in the fact that I am an Introvert with a capital “I” and I am impressed that I can even talk to Josh for a few minutes at the end of a work day.

Surprisingly enough I have been content and–dare I say it–mostly happy. There is peace and relief in the realization that there is ultimately no need for me to be alive. Because of that, even if my life does not meet my standards, it is entirely alright.

I realized recently that if asked what I did this past year the only thing I could say would be “I wasn’t on the pill.” Basically I’ve just been sick and not done the only reasonable thing to remedy the situation. And yes, my dear sane, non-psycho-Catholic readers, I do realize the insanity.

Josh counters that I also managed to work and pay off debt, but really? I’ve done nothing.

I suppose that I can celebrate lessons learned, but that sounds rather active. And at the moment all I’m up for is periodically pretending that I am fine. Because if I can make myself believe it, then it will be true. Right? Right.

And now I guess this is the part where I tell you about all the fabulous posts I have planned. As it happens I have been sitting on some pretty great guest posts. But otherwise? Um. Well. I hope you like posts about chronic/women’s health issues and marriage, because that’s all I’ve got.

Now, about you. If you happen to read all of this I would love to hear about how you have been these past few months. If you have a blog then there is a good chance that I have kept up with reading it but remember aboslutely nothing. And, um, that’s not a joke.

Using Contraception with a Natural Family Planning Mentality

By Rae September 9, 2011 The Feminine 7 Comments

Guest Post by Jackie of Blueberries for Me. I am quite pleased to interrupt this blog-silence with a guest post from one of my favorite bloggers with pretty much the best blog name ever.

Put down your cups of tea, ladies and gentlemen, for I am about to hit you with a shocker. This is a post on Natural Family Planning from someone who does not, I repeat, does not, practice it. And it’s not even an argument against it.

Barely two months after getting married to my wonderful husband, I was diagnosed with a myriad of problems involving most of the organs between my knees and my belly button. I won’t bore you with all the details, but in short my symptoms are frequent urination, painful sex, and a constant cramping sensation that is analogous to feeling as if you were on your period 30 days a month. Among the many treatments I am undergoing, one is the birth control pill. I’ll say this flat out: this post is not about whether or not it is acceptable for me to be on the pill. Just like you and your family planning choices, this one is between me, my husband, my doctor, and God.

There are many wonderful parts about practicing NFP, some of which flat out beat the pill. No, the pill is not free and it is not natural. NFP wins on those front. But a lot of the other benefits of NFP can be incorporated into any marriage, even one with a contracepted sex life.

More communication

One of the benefits of NFP is that it inspires communication between spouses, especially in the “not tonight, honey” and the “yes please tonight, honey!” fronts. While we are 95% guaranteed that on any given night we won’t conceive a child that doesn’t mean our sex life is devoid of communication. Dealing with chronic pain, there is a whole lot of “not tonight, honey.” We have frequent conversations about my health, how I am feeling, if my husband’s needs are being met, and what we can do to help the other person feel more loved. While our talks don’t center around the possibility of conceiving when we discuss sex, they do center around how to build up our relationship and serve one another. Whether you are dealing with chronic pain or other disorders, attempting to avoid or achieve pregnancy, communication should always be part of your sex life.

Prevents husband from seeing you like an object

I hear this reason as a benefit from practicing NFP often. All I’ve got to say is – I would never have married someone who would treat me like a sex object. And you shouldn’t either.

Trust God

NFP requires you to put a lot of trust in God. While the practice can be quite reliable if you are very good and very regular, the truth is there is always that chance, and thus you must trust that God is fulfilling his plan for you and his family when you conceive or don’t.

Having a chronic condition has forced us to put a lot of trust in God. We need to trust that this is his will for us to undergo this trial, to believe that he has a plan and that we must hope in him. Knowing that we have a small but larger than average chance at infertility, we also must trust that God will give us children. Perhaps one day I will be feeling better enough to go off the pill long enough to conceive. Perhaps he will lead us into adoption. But in the meantime, we will just have to trust.

Respect for life

Can the being on the pill give you respect for life? I think so. I don’t believe that being on the pill necessarily closes you to the possibility of life. I know that while there are people out there who will avoid having a baby at any cost, I definitely wouldn’t say that most people who are taking birth control are doing so with the hopes that it might abort any fetus conceived. Otherwise my little sister wouldn’t have been born.

Being on the pill makes us realize even more so what a gift life is because we realize at what great expense and with what effort it can come. We also realize that the pill, like any other form of family planning, is not 100% fail proof. And so every time we engage in marital activities, we realize that we are potentially creating a life. And while that life might be 95% less likely to happen, we are still open to it happening. Any child we have, be it an oops baby or a planned one will be welcomed with open arms.

Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder

Married couples who use NFP say that taking some time off helps them appreciate their spouse more. While any day might be technically a green light one for us fertility-wise, my body sees it differently, giving us more red lights than green ones in any given month. Every couple will have periods of abstinence in their lives, be it due to avoiding pregnancy, pain, physical separation, work, stress, or emotionally trying times. And hopefully whenever those times end, it helps us to appreciate what we do have.

In Conclusion

The aforementioned benefits of using NFP are part of any good sex life no matter what medical treatment you are undergoing or family planning tools you are using. Whether you are using NFP to achieve pregnancy, to avoid it, if you are on the pill, or if you are infertile or past child bearing age, sex should be about loving yourself and your spouse. And that’s going to look a little different in every relationship. So here’s to you and your journey in figuring that out.

And don’t forget to follow Blueberries for Me on Twitter!

3 Years

By Rae August 16, 2011 Relationships 18 Comments

This month we are celebrating three years of marriage. And by “celebrating” I mean I wrote most of this while lying in bed wondering how on earth I got through pain even worse than this on our wedding day. Is it really possible to have such an adrenaline rush? Amazing.

I still maintain that there is only so much you can say about your marriage in particular before your seventh anniversary. But there are already a few things I now know which would have surprised me three years ago.

My life is incredibly–perhaps completely?–Josh-centric now. I never would have guessed that.

I thought of complete absorption in the other as a shallow risk of new infatuations. Little did I know it can also be the result of marriage.

It is perhaps most dangerous at this phase. I instinctively consider Josh in everything, but I cannot possibly know him well enough to have these subconscious considerations always match well with his reality.

Another aspect of this is that I now know what loneliness is. Marriage has enabled me to be more than I ever was by myself, and that means that I am now incomplete in an entirely new way.

The most peculiar thing of all is that this is apparently health rather than dysfunction. Who ever would have guessed that health–and indeed happiness–would have so much in common with the sickly obsessiveness of youthful romance?

And on a more obvious note, we are childless. I would not have guessed that 3 years ago. Sure, I would have said that it would most likely be wise to wait, but I do not recall ever claiming to be wise. And you know how other people somehow find ways to justify buying a house before they are ready, or expensive toys because they can make it work in the moment even though it really isn’t wise? I don’t think that I am better than them, just that I want different things. Oh wait, I just called a child a thing. Oops.

I knew that it was likely that we would not be ready in August, 2010, but I am not sure I have ever been ready for anything in life, and somehow it happened anyway. If nothing else, we certainly found a way to get married before it was wise, so why should I have thought that adding more people to our family would be any different?

One thing that does not surprise me is my body, though it is true that I could not have understood how much my sickness would cost Josh. In order to look smarter at predicting things that can’t be predicted, I am going to go on the record now with the expectation that my sixth anniversary will be spent without debilitating menstrual pain. Because who really needs to reenact the way they felt on their wedding anyway?

Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

By Rae August 6, 2011 Good to Know 6 Comments

So apparently I blog too much about sex. This is hard for me to believe, because I hardly think I blog too much about anything. Furthermore, I tend to think of NFP as being a whole lot more about fertility awareness than family planning, and even then I guess I’m just young enough to think that family planning isn’t exactly the erm ehem… exact equivalent of sex.

But whatever. The point is that I clearly need to blog more about Drugs and Rock & Roll. So instead of feeling badly for not publishing the other posts about NFP last week, I am going to feel good about not further hurting my sex:drugs:rock&roll balance. Now, don’t get too excited, I will be hitting “publish” eventually on those horrible posts about NFP sex. But in the meantime, here are my thoughts on drugs.

I know next to nothing about drugs. My ignorance is pathetic. I can’t blame it on homeschooling. After all, there are plenty of people who decide to homeschool precisely because they are high. And that isn’t an insult, it is a statement of fact (though we might as well laugh, because sometimes facts can be clever insults!). No, really. You should meet some of the homeschooling families I grew up with. Fun, fun.

I could, perhaps, blame it on college. I went to one of the least partying schools in the nation and stayed on the opposite side of campus as the dorm where someone was rumored to have smoked a clove cigarette. It was not uncommon for new professors to make drug reference in lectures, only to be met by the very bright-eyed stares of their students. You mean someone would actually stick a needle in himself for fun?!

In any case, I am ignorant. If any aspect of my education had actually turned me into the vaunted “life long learner” then I would probably ask you all to educate me–strictly in hypotheticals, of course. But apparently that didn’t happen, so instead I shall continue to tell you about what I don’t actually know about drugs.

Drugs stink. Literally. Drugs are best in pill form and for the life of me I can’t figure out why only suburban mothers get their drugs that way.

One day after picking me up from the train my husband gave me a warning. Knowing my all-too-keen sense of smell he thought it best to inform me that it smelled as if people had actually been smoking in the apartment stairwell rather than just outside.

“Oh, no!” I responded. “Please tell me it wasn’t tobacco!”

It was not tobacco, so I survived the sticky sweet scent as I hurried into our apartment.

Time went by, and the smoking in the stairwell appeared to become a regular event on rainy workdays. I continued to survive as only a bit of the smell was left by the time I got home in the evening and it was not all that different from people smoking outside.

Eventually our guardian neighbor moved out and with the heatwave came not only a strong scent each evening, but a mess which would in itself be enough reason for me to never smoke.

Then, one Saturday afternoon as I sat at home under the influence of my completely legal, socially approved, pill-form painkillers, I heard people talking.

She said something about going back to their apartment for the bag. HA! I was right, the mess-not-to-mention-SMELL-makers were indeed from a neighboring apartment and coming over to our space to smoke.

And a bag? To someone who knows nothing about these things that sounds like enough to be worth confiscating. More to the point, the fact that they were still missing supplies meant that there would actually be enough time for the police to arrive and catch them.

Of course I realized that my pain-induced stupor wasn’t exactly the best for making decisions about calling the police, so I decided to first call Josh to see whether he thought of something obvious that I was missing.

But I did not even get to my phone before I realized what I was missing.

These people weren’t smoking tobacco. There are crazy legal penalties for smoking things other than tobacco (and straight up peppermint leaves, I hear).

It was most likely that they were invading my space because they had already been caught in their own apartment building. And if they were on good terms with the police they wouldn’t be so annoying about hiding inside. And there are crazy stupid legal penalties for repeat smokers of things other than tobacco and peppermint.

Ultimately, calling the police would mean participating in an unjust system. And yes, the injustice of someone else going to jail because they annoyed me with their smell and mess is worse than the injustice of me having to deal with their mess and smell because their life stinks and is a mess metaphorically. Though, you must agree that being subjected to such smells is positively unjust, right? Ehem.

In any case, I am Catholic. And that means that even when I am incredibly grumpy and annoyed I am not allowed to forget about the basics of justice. And justice in many situations means avoiding encounters with unjust laws and questionable law enforcement officers.

So I sat back and congratulated myself on my clear thinking. Look at me! My drugs are not only legal, they also allow me to make reasonable decisions without even having to call my husband!

Since then I have gotten experience with such noxious scented drugs that my days are entirely filled with pondering how on earth someone could enjoy that… and what I will do if it does actually turn out to be a mini-meth lab outside my door. That would at least be something to round out my blog with more drug posts, right?

Now if only I could figure out what on earth there is to say about Rock & Roll other than the fact that I am pretty sure it is just another name for oldies.

So tell me, what is so wrong with blogging about sex all the time? Or would you really rather talk about drugs?

The man your man could chart like

By Rae July 26, 2011 Things of Which We Do Not Speak 9 Comments

Guest post by Josh. And I know that it won’t do any good, but will those of you with no sense of humor please skip this post? It doesn’t mean what you think it does. Unless you think with humor, that is! Thanks so much!

Yes, you heard right. When it comes to NFP, I do the charting. Why? What sort of question is that?

Ladies, look at your man. Now back to me. Now back at your man. Now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me. But if he started writing down your fertility signs he could chart like me.

Look down. Where are you? You’re on a blog with the man your man could chart like. What’s in your hand? Back at me. I have it. It’s a chart with your signs for the past six months. Look again. The chart has now helped you avoid or achieve pregnancy without any tension or misunderstandings.

Anything is possible when your man charts like a man. I’m already married.

. . .

I wasn’t always like this. At the beginning of our marriage I could barely even read a chart. What happened? I looked at my wife. She looked at me. Back at my wife. Back at me. Sadly, I wasn’t the man your man could chart like.

She handed me the chart. Sadly, I still wasn’t the man your man could chart like.

I forgot to chart. She reminded me. I forgot again. She looked at me. Exhausted one night, I remembered to chart. Look again. Now I was the man your man could chart like.

Why? Because I am married to a woman who is patient and persistent enough to let me chart things even when she could chart circles around me.

Look at my wife. Now back to you. Now back to my wife. Now back to you. Sadly, you aren’t she. But if you started being patient enough to let him chart things, your husband could chart like me.

Natural Family Planning: Liberator of Women

By Rae July 25, 2011 The Feminine 13 Comments

Guest post by April of My Feminine Mind. When I first found April’s blog I went back and read every single post. I love the passion with which she writes about her experience as a woman and the wisdom she has gained. And on this 43rd anniversary of that Church document which many see as oppressing women, I am thrilled to offer April’s post about natural family planning as the complete opposite of oppressive in her life.

I absolutely love Natural Family Planning. There are a lot of things that I love about it. The thing that stands out the most to me, however–the big, neon-sign, in-your-face-amazing thing about NFP is the ideology behind it. It begins with the premise that women are good. Because our bodies are good, we should not take what is wonderful and healthy and purposely induce a state of abnormality in it. Whereas contraception begins with the mentality that women’s bodies are flawed unless we give our bodies over to the medical and pharmaceutical industries to improve upon, NFP liberates women from this kind of negative self-talk.

I’m going to say something surprising and perhaps somewhat shocking. So be prepared. Here it comes: As the former queen of negative self-talk, (mixed in with some actual self harm) I firmly assert that NFP healed me from seven years of childhood sexual abuse. And I stand by my statement. I have written elsewhere about how profound and healing it was for me to experience pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding. It was these experiences that taught me about my inherent goodness. But the thing is, after I experienced these epic journeys in self-discovery, if I then ignored all these lessons and began using contraception six weeks after my daughter was born (as my OB/GYN suggested) I would have been like a slave returning to her chains. Though motherhood initially broke through the great wall of my low self-esteem, NFP completely tore the wall down.

As I have written elsewhere, there’s an adage that states, “If you believe something but behave for a year as though you do not believe, you will not believe. If you do not believe, but behave for a year as though you do, you will believe.” My husband and I learned Natural Family Planning when our oldest was four months old. I was not fertile due to breastfeeding, but learning how my body worked and behaving as though my body were good and worthy of care and respect, convinced me that that was indeed true.

I should clarify that when I say that I am healed from the sexual abuse I experienced as a child, I do not mean that I no longer have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or that I never get sad about it or have bad days. I do. And I probably always will. But what I mean is this: I used to actually and truly believe–I absolutely KNEW that I had NO dignity. It is not an exaggeration to say that I believed I was the worst person in the world. I did not deserve respect; I was a horrible thing. Every action of mine was motivated by a fear that people would discover that I was utterly disgusting. But through practicing NFP for five years now, that is, living the truth that my body deserves respect, and that I am created good, I now have a deep and utter conviction that I am amazing. And I believe that everyone else is amazing too.

Though the culture is great at convincing women how flawed we are unless we spend large amounts of time and money tanning, waxing, lifting, plumping, dieting, altering, and changing our natural selves, I want women to really know that they are beautiful–as is. I want them to know it not because they repeat some daily affirmation saying it is so, but because they live it. And after living this truth they will truly know it from the depths of their person. And I’m convinced that our bodies can teach us this most valuable lesson. I invite women to live according to the rhythms of our bodies. Wisdom is to be found there.

NFP Awareness Week

By Rae July 24, 2011 The Feminine 7 Comments

This is NFP Awareness Week. I will be celebrating with some great guest posts related to NFP this week, and then a few more in the upcoming months.

Sadly, many people know nothing about this great evil that plagues a small minority of the population. Approximately 5% of 44 year-old women have at some point in their lives tried a method of avoiding pregnancy which has enabled them to do so with no side effects, and 97-99% effectiveness.

And that is just horrible and must be stopped! Right? Oh, wait. That is not what I meant!

What I meant to write was that it would make sense if many of you were confused about why I would celebrate NFP Awareness Week. Because when it comes to Stuff White People Like, awareness weeks or months or decades are typically dedicated to raising awareness about things that hurt us, like breast cancer or Down syndrome.

But someone out there decided that we needed to raise awareness of NFP as if it were a disease, rather than celebrate it and its great advances. And since I always go along with what someone out there once decided, I am here to raise your awareness!

Before we get started with the good posts, here is what you need to know:

Natural Family Planning (NFP) is an umbrella term used to describe several methods of avoiding or achieving pregnancy based on a woman’s fertility cycle.
NFP is often conflated with the better-known rhythm method. While only 5% of women will use a modern method of NFP during their reproductive years, 20% will use the significantly less reliable (but equally morally acceptable) rhythm method. (source)
People sometimes use the terms NFP and fertility awareness interchangeably.
NFP is can be very effective for most women, most of the time, but it can also be a royal headache for some women, some of the time.
- Significant gynecological health problems, the postpartum period/breastfeeding, and menopause can all make NFP more difficult for avoiding pregnancy.
- For the few couples with true infertility, NFP will not miraculously enable them to conceive.
NFP’s effectiveness for avoiding pregnancy varies tremendously depending upon a couple’s dedication to observing fertility, and willingness to abstain from sex.
- A simple method of NFP which requires no charting is 96% effective for avoiding pregnancy with correct use, and 86% effective with typical use. Compare this to the male condom which is 97% effective for avoiding pregnancy with correct use, and 80-90% effective with typical use (source) or the female condom which is 75-82% effective (source).
- More complex methods of NFP are 99.4% effective for new users with correct use, and 92.5% effective with typical use. One study with only experienced users found NFP to be 99.7% with correct use, and 96.1% effective with typical use. Compare this to the pill which is 97-98% effective with correct use (source) and 92% effective with typical use or the contraceptive patch or ring which is more than 99% effective with correct use.
A woman must chart her cycles for two years before she is considered to be an experienced user (with lower failure rates for avoiding conception). If she gets pregnant during that time (even if intended) then she will not count as an experienced user until she has been able to chart two years worth of cycles, and this could take quite a while given 9 months of pregnancy + postpartum infertility.
A typical couple who abstained from sex both on the fertile days of a woman’s cycle and on days of heavy menstrual bleeding would typically have to abstain 50% of the time.
Nevertheless, couples who use NFP to avoid pregnancy still have sex as often as those who use contraceptive methods of birth control. The NFP users simply have sex more often during the infertile times.

NFP: Not your grandmother's rhythm method

I believe that NFP is ideal for many reasons. And while I believe that NFP is better than hormonal or barrier methods of contraception, I do not believe that I am better than those who use those methods.

My point in posting about NFP is to enable others to understand a bit more about what NFP really is. After all, despite what you may have heard, NFP isn’t actually as bad as cancer.

TMI: I am a Woman

By Rae July 18, 2011 The Feminine 12 Comments

Is posting ultrasound images of your baby on your Facebook TMI? Is talking with a group of friends about the fact that you’ve been so stressed that your body just will not ovulate TMI?

Unfortunately, the answer to both of those seems to be a resounding “YES!”

At least that is what I read this past week.

The first question was brought up in the context of largely pro-choice young women. Most of them bought into the idea that one’s uterus is about the most private thing possible, and no one else should have to know what gross things might be going on inside it!

The second question was suggested by a mother of a large family who asserted that it was improper for grown women to discuss their fertility charts in group settings. This woman teaches that women should have such a reverence for our fertility symptoms that we should be shamed into silence.

While these two discussions probably seem worlds apart to those who started them, it is very clear to me that they are opposite sides of the same rat-poison pellet. Both groups have an emaciated understanding of what it means to be a woman, and both sides suffer because they have so little idea of what is sacred that they resort to taking their personal discomforts and declaring them taboo.

It is challenging to be a woman in a culture which can’t quite make up its mind about what womanhood is, let alone what should be expected of any individual woman. It makes sense that the result is groups of women who are incredibly confused about how to understand their own bodies, and how to relate to the rest of the world based upon their understanding of their bodies. We are left with young women who are appalled at the idea of recognizing the awesomeness of a child within her mother’s womb. And to match these young women are the middle-aged mothers who are horrified at the possibility of understanding their own bodies so completely that it would be absurd to conflate fertility charts with the most intimate of marital acts.

What is the problem with all of this? After all, I could just unfriend those who don’t want to see ultrasound pictures and ignore the pontifications of women who tell me that my charts are sacred and must be hidden.

The problem is that these women are hurting because of their confusion, and that they are in turn wounding others with their views. The young grad student who shudders at the thought of someone putting up a picture of her uterus cannot grasp the meaning of life growing within her. There is no chance of her getting support for motherhood when she cannot even see that the unborn child is indeed a child.

The exhausted mother who is embarrassed by cervical fluid cannot understand her fertility and maturely give herself completely to her husband while understanding the relative likelihood of pregnancy. She cannot ask for help from friends in her mistaken thinking that she is constantly fertile because she cannot even begin to differentiate the sacredness of fertility from the sacredness of sexual activity.

These women then perpetuate their misunderstandings by telling other women to live in the same darkness of fear of the devil of ToooooMuchINFORMATION.

I have some information for all of these women: appreciating the basics of what it means to be a woman is not too much information, it is the most basic of understanding. We should not be ashamed of ultrasound images or our fertility charts. What we should be ashamed of is having bought into the idea that that which makes us women is something to be ashamed of and only whispered behind carefully locked doors.

I am a woman. I have a uterus. I ovulate every four weeks or so. The purpose of my uterus and fertility cycle is to bring new life into this world. That does not define my existence, but it does shape who I am in the most profound of ways. So perhaps, after all, it is my very existence as a woman that is too much information.

Even if I did agree to keep ultrasound images safely tucked away in the doctor’s office and cry alone at home about my confusing fertility charts, it would not protect you from the horrible reality of the most pervasive TMI. Whether you shout it from the rooftops, post it on facebook, or whisper it only to your doctor, there remains the terrible truth of far too much information: I am a woman.

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