Three Things NFP Has Done for Our Marriage

Last month we celebrated our three-year wedding anniversary! And just this week we celebrated seven years since we first started dating.

Seven years ago during our first summer of dating <3

Seven years is a long time, and I think I love our relationship more today than at any other point in that time. I think I'm pretty blessed to be able to say that, too. There are days or moments where I have to sit down and wonder, "Why do I deserve this?" I haven't figured it out yet, but whatever it is, I know my husband was created for me and vice versa.

One of the best things we ever did for our relationship was switch from contraception to NFP. I think that switch has created permanent guardrails for our marriage so we can avoid many of the ravines other couples fall into. It certainly wasn't something we ever planned for and it meant a lifestyle change for us both, but it was worth it if it meant making our marriage more like what God wants it to be. And as a way to keep my thoughts going in a coherent direction, I've decided to list three things that NFP has done for our marriage, one for each year.

It's Created A New Level of Respect
If NFP does one thing, if applied properly in a marriage, I think it is creating a level of respect that wasn't there before or at least supporting that level of respect on a day-to-day basis. I've heard a lot of women say they don't want their husbands to help them chart because they don't want their husbands to know about their cycles. Yes, pretend they don't exist. I'm sure he'll never notice .... All joking aside, I can't tell you how appreciative I am that Ben knows how my body works as well as I do. A woman's ability to grow a life inside her is incredible and all the functions that support that are equally so. My fertility is not something to be ignored, rejected, or suppressed, but celebrated and worked with.

You also can't help but feel a sense of wonder over the body when you understand how perfectly it was designed and how perfectly they were designed for each other. It helps you look beyond the outer shell and not want any kind of substitute, and goodness knows the world has created a lot of substitutes that have readily been accepted into marriage.

It's Called Us to Be Sacrificial
Though having used both NFP and the pill and not seen a huge increase in difficulty in application (I think the copious amount of benefits far outweighs the few extra steps of NFP), it is a sacrifice-based system since you need to abstain during the fertile periods (about 7-10 days on average) if you want to avoid pregnancy. I'm not sure when marriage became more about what you can get from of another person and less about what you can give another person, but it definitely has in our society. Practicing NFP is a daily reminder that we must make sacrifices for our marriage if we want them to flourish and that translates into more than pregnancy or not. It reminds a spouse that the other person in the marriage is there for more reasons than to satisfy their needs. And it has reminded me to sacrifice in other ways like doing the laundry when he's having a busy/crummy week. Sacrifice is necessary if you want to make a marriage work. Too often people give their worst to their spouse and expect the best in return. No relationship can survive that.

It's Made Our Relationship Less Self-Focused
For us, NFP goes hand in hand with our faith and responsible parenthood, where we are asked to be open to life and pray about God's plan for our family constantly and not just when the prescription for birth control runs out. I've never been the best at prayer. I'm more of a doer, and silence often causes my mind to wander. However, with the daily reminder of the gift of my fertility, I suddenly found I was talking to God more about what His plans were for me. And it wasn't just in relation to children. I was suddenly talking to him about work, family relationships, future goals,  and on and on. Ben and I were also discussing faith more frequently together and getting the opportunity to share with others. It's just made us aware that there's a bigger picture than our individual selves and sometimes that bigger picture is our marriage. I think one of the best examples happened when I found out I was pregnant. I was in a flurry. I couldn't even sit down. And Ben came over to me, grabbed my hand, and pulled me down to sit with him on the couch. He closed his hands around mine and started praying out loud. For him it had become habit to talk to God about new life. It might be one of my most favorite moments ever.

Thank you Benjamin for being the husband God has asked you to be and being willing and open to grow as a couple.

Wedding day :) Photo by Deidre Lynn Photography

You Are So Brave

When I started this blog I wasn't sure where my voice would go. Either to be lost in the vastness of cyberspace or by some miracle perhaps someone might hear it. Regardless, this blog has given me  several opportunities I never expected like the opportunity to talk to several hundred teens and young adults through local events and when I was blessed to have my story published on LifeTeen.com. So I know people are hearing my story, but what I am just over the moon about is the number of women who have since contacted me with questions, comments, etc. So this post is dedicated to them.

I want to tell you each how brave I think you are. Each of you is struggling with things that would be so much easier if you just popped the pill, but either for health reasons, moral reasons, or a combination of the two you have decided to starting asking questions and researching your options. That takes a leap of faith that I know is incredibly difficult and can be so scary.

I want to encourage you and try and shout above the waves of people or your own self doubt that you are doing the right thing. Even if you haven't already signed up for a NFP class or started converting your friends, just looking at options is an awesome first step. It's the only first step really. I was my own worst enemy and if one person backed up my own self doubt then my resolve crumbled. It took weeks and weeks of discussions with friends to get me to finally climb the wall I had made out of my birth control pill packs to take that first step in following God's plan for me as well as a healthier lifestyle. 

So I just want to say again, ladies, you are so brave. So BRAVE! I've seen your faces, or at least ones like them, in the rows of women at pre-cana classes. I can see that inner struggle. I so know that inner struggle. But I'll tell you what I tell them. NFP is not the same as taking a pill everyday. It's a lifestyle change and that takes determination, knowledge, and support. There are difficult aspects of NFP that you don't have when you simply take a pill and forget about the rest. But I wouldn't trade those difficult aspects for the control I feel knowing my body and peace I feel when I know I'm aligned with my faith and understand why. So start researching, keep asking me and other resources questions, determine your reasons for staying on birth control and the reasons why you are even considering NFP. I found that the reasons I was considering NFP were reasons worth fighting for to make NFP work. And once I made that switch, I suddenly have even more reasons to stick with it.

And I know support isn't out there in droves for your decision to switch to NFP for family planning or even to just understand your cycle, so please never feel like a burden or a bother to email me with questions. I WANT to be that support!

Again, I am so impressed with all of you amazing women!

What About Miserable Cycles?

I recently received a comment to my page, "My Story: A Recovering Birth Control Addict" that said, “What about girls who have miserable cycles...? Not everyone's problem's can be solved with  'vitamins, diet, and exercise'.... what advice do you have for young Catholic women in that situation? I agree that birth control is not a 'miracle pill' but what other options are there for ovarian cysts, 10-day periods, and severe PMS/PMDD?."

What an excellent series of questions. Though each portion of your question could be an entire paper, I'll attempt to address them as best I can from my training as an NFP instructor and personal experience. 

I hear you on the miserable cycles. My cycles were miserable - like longer than 10-day periods (a LOT longer), horrible pain (to the point of vomiting and never leaving my room), and cycles of all lengths (do I hear 65 days anyone?)! So I know from my experience that diet (cut out things that have hormones added to them! You are messing with your body’s natural hormones!), exercise (I’m not a marathon runner. I'm a 30-40 minute walker.), and vitamins (fish oil, Omega-3s, fatty acids) do in fact help get your cycles under control. I’m proof!

But I do completely understand that for women with severe conditions, such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and endometriosis, the pill can seem like the only option. In fact most doctors will tell you something to that effect, but that's unfair that a doctor would make you feel like that. The pill DOES NOT CURE the problem! It masks they symptoms. 

For example, premenstrual syndrome (PMS) symptoms, such as anxiety, water retention, weight gain, bloating, fatigue, headaches, and even depression, most often occur during the post-ovulatory phase of a woman's cycle also known as the luteal phase, which is the timeframe right before a woman begins her period (usually 11-15 days). The cause for this is thought to be an imbalance of the proper amounts of hormones (estrogen, progesterone, etc.) and often manifests itself in a woman's cycle as a short luteal phase. However, if you are on the pill, you'd never know that because the pill tricks your body into a perfect 28-day cycle. You never fix the problem; you just mask it. If, however, a woman was charting she could see that her cycle had a poor temperature rise (an indication that ovulation has occurred) and fewer than necessary (for fertility reasons) days between ovulation and the beginning of her period. This is an indication that her progesterone levels are too low and estrogen is too high, something that can be fixed with nutrition and vitamins. How so? Take more B vitamins. A lack in B vitamins means your liver cannot "effectively inactivate estrogen, and estrogen rises." Also by eating dietary fiber, which comes from plants, estrogen is also blocked and helps hormone levels return to normal. Hello possible cure to PMS! 

So you can see that when I say diet and vitamins, I don't mean just anything. You have to learn the root causes and the dietary supplements that help correct those causes. And it's not hard. I received all that information from Marilyn M. Shannon's book, "Fertility, Cycles and Nutrition." It is my go-to resource! She has whole chapters dedicated to PMS, endometriosis, and so much more. A whole section of her book is dedicated solely to good nutrition, specifically nutrition related to a woman's reproductive cycle. And that's what we need ladies!

Obviously some problems go further than this. So what are your options. I’d say find a doctor willing to work with you. So many of us go to the same doctor and just listen to one point of view. I’ve been there, and especially as a 13-year-old girl, I had no idea I could ask to see a different doctor. But under most health care plans you have several options of doctors. Unfortunately, you don’t always have a NFP-only or NFP-open-minded doctor. I haven’t found one in my local area, but I did find a woman who was willing to hear my point of view and work with me. Find someone who at least is willing to do that or better. And if you need to go even further, there are options such as the Pope Paul VI institute and NaPro technology. Look into them if you've exhausted all other options. These are both dedicated to fixing a problem and not just masking it.

Finally, you have to commit and become knowledgable about your body. Popping the pill everyday is super easy, but it's not worth the costs. A woman shouldn't have to choose between the nasty side effects of a crazy cycle and the nasty side effects of the pill, not to mention the serious abortifacient properties. I pray that someday our medical community will put more effort into finding ways to help women overcome these serious issues without jeopardizing other parts of their health, but until then we do have other options. It's more than "diet, exercise, and vitamins;" it's about knowledge and the power that comes with to change your health for the better.

Life Teen: Addicted to Birth Control

Today marks a little bit of a dream come true for me. I've been published on LifeTeen.com!

I was shocked when I received an email from LifeTeen.com asking if they could reprint my blog page "My Story: A Recovering Birth Control Addict", and I of course immediately said yes. LifeTeen.com is an awesome online resource for teenagers (specifically Catholic) regarding all things "faith." It's a true honor to have my story posted to its pages.

I have an idea of how they ran across it since I'm friends with one of their authors who also recently wrote a great post about birth control for LifeTeen.com and is a frequent author for the site, Alison Griswold. Check out her work! It's informative, quirky, and right on target.

This month on LifeTeen.com they are focusing on birth control so check out some of the other posts and check back all month for more information about birth control in general, the church's stance on contraception, and more. And more importantly pass this information onto teenagers and the parents of teenagers because it is so important. If this was a topic that had come up more during my teenage years I might not have stayed on birth control for as long as I did (I'd like to think that anyway haha ;) ). Spread the word because there is a lot of bad information out there about what the church teaches and the moral, healthy alternatives to birth control! Let's spread the positive message that natural family planning, responsible parenthood, and chastity have to offer, which is one of hope, commitment, health, respect, and love.

We've been Published!

We've been published! I was so excited when approached by CCLI to have our witness talk published in their Family Foundations magazine. I was even more excited that our talk was chosen for the wedding and marriage issue, which is highly distributed. I'm praying that God uses our words to help others in their journey to using NFP or strengthening their current practice of NFP. Both are so important. 

What is kind of fun about this is that it is entirely in our words ... except for the title, "NFP helps us see the bigger picture." I didn't provide a title when I submitted our talk, but I think it's perfect. I'm thrilled that after reading our talk the editor came to the conclusion that NFP has helped us see there is a bigger picture for us than the one we paint, God's picture.

A few weeks ago my husband and I were blessed enough to be asked to speak about Theology of the Body to a group of confirmation students. For most of them, it was the first time they had ever heard about Theology of the Body so I wanted to make sure we hit the really important parts. By the end we were giving them examples from our own lives and I concluded with, "What's really cool about all this is how quickly your will aligns with God's will when you are truly open to it." It's just so true! For years I was fighting God's will. Truly blocking it from my life and in effect from my marriage by clinging to the false promises contraception makes for a couple's future. I was so sure that I knew what was best for my marriage and my life that I told God each day I swallowed that pill that I didn't need to place my trust in him or that the freewill He gave me wasn't strong enough to follow His perfect plan.

I can't tell you the celebratory feeling I have inside of me when I think about how we are open to God's plan for us each day now compared to how closed we were in the past. I'm not saying we're perfect or that we have any real idea of God's plan for us, but I feel like we are much closer. Plus, it's been a year since we kicked the contraception habit for NFP and it has so radically changed our lives for the better  that I can't help but see God's hand everywhere! It's strengthened our marriage, our faith in one another to want the best for our marriage, our trust in God and his future plan for us, and it has opened so many doors so that we might evangelize to others about God's beautiful design of our bodies but also of his unfathomable love for each and ever living cell! It gives me goosebumps!

NFP isn't always easy and sometimes it brings about the unexpected (like how differently I view my world!), but it is so entirely worth it. Truly, as the article is titled, it has helped us get a better glimpse of the bigger picture and it's a beautiful picture.

Redefining Life

Once upon a time I was a birth control user and called myself pro-life. Little did I know that made me a hypocrite.

How so you ask? Don’t women by taking birth control prevent unwanted babies and thus possibly abortion? Nope. But don’t ask your doctor that because you’ll get a different answer. I know. I asked.

Prior to 1965 conception was considered to occur at fertilization or when the egg is fertilized by a sperm thus creating an embryo, which has all the necessary DNA of a human being.

In 1965 the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (per Planned Parenthood’s suggestion) redefined conception as the implantation of an ovum, or when the embryo attaches itself to the uterine lining.

Why’d they do that? Because this newfangled pill was coming out, but people weren’t jumping on the bandwagon because it ended pregnancies. How many times are we going to be fooled by semantics?! The pill works like this:

First it releases a synthetic version of progesterone. Progesterone naturally occurs in a woman’s cycle only after ovulation (when the egg is released to be fertilized) to prepare the body for a potential pregnancy. By releasing this hormone earlier it tricks the body into thinking it’s pregnant and therefore does not ovulate. No ovulation means no chance to make a baby.

Thanks 1flesh.org for the graphics!

However, because the pill originally had extremely high dosages of progesterone that were causing serious issues in women (like cancer and death) developers of the pill have cut back on the amount of progesterone thus allowing ovulation to occur (though we still get many of those nasty side effects). If ovulation happens, the egg can become fertilized. Ovulation occurs 28 percent of the time with regular hormonal contraceptives (that means the pill, the patch, IUDs, and other contraceptives that use synthetic hormones to trick the body). Ovulation occurs 33-65 percent of the time in progestin-only mini-pill cycles. *

So backup function of the pill is to thicken cervical mucus and slow tubal motility so the two halves of a whole person can’t meet. But still, that might not be enough to prevent new life from forming.

The pill has a third function and it’s abortificant in nature. It thins a woman’s uterine lining, aka the “embryo food”. So, if an egg and sperm were to meet and create a baby, the pill makes a woman’s body inhospitable to that life continuing, thus causing an early term chemical abortion. That means hundreds, thousands, millions of babies have been aborted due to hormonal contraceptives according to the definition of life that starts at fertilization.

Don’t believe me; ask your doctor. Ask, that if your definition of life begins at fertilization (and science has proven that it does), if the pill (the patch, IUDs, etc.) causes the embryo to be unable to implant (aka die). Their answer should be yes and that means that hormonal contraceptives can have an abortificant effect.

I asked my doctor at the age of 18 if the pill caused abortions, and I got ‘no’ for an answer. I didn’t know that her definition of when life started was later than mine. And it was because of that answer, and my own unwillingness to investigate into the issue, that I went a year and a half on birth control while married. That devastates me looking back and wondering about the possible lives I might have ended because the pill seemed somehow easier and more effective than the other options out there. I thought I wasn’t hurting anyone, but I had no idea I was potentially ending life … life that my husband and I created … my own children. I don’t know if that happened and I might not ever know until I leave this world, but that’s my burden to bear. I just hope I can help others realize this truth so they can embrace life when they are ready and exercise responsible parenthood and make adult decisions before they are.

If you are pro-life, you don’t use hormonal contraceptives. That’s that.

Want to learn more about this from an NFP doctor or teacher, visit www.onemoresoul.com to find one in your area.

* Larimaore W Standford J. Postfertilization Effects of Oral Contraceptives and Their Relationsihp to Informed Consent, Arch Fam Med 2000; 9:126-133