Unplanned Parenthood

I’ve got all these thoughts on babies and “openness to life” floating around in my head. Having two kids so closely together has sort of lumped us into the “large families” category, even though two isn’t really that large. But of course if we managed to crazily produce two within 12 months of each other, who knows what madness we’re capable of!

Although I’m passionate about natural family planning (NFP), going into long explanations about trying to live a life, to have a marriage, that is open to life is never something that I’ve wanted to get into in the fleeting situations that bring up most of the comments about our intended family size. I usually just smile and say something affirmative when people assume we’re trying for a lot of kids, but lately I’ve started to be honest. And my honesty seems to be putting people into a position of not knowing what to say next. How many kids do we want?

We don’t know.

Crazy, isn’t it? In a culture that is so heavy about planning your [perfect] family, we’re operating without a plan.

Sure, numbers get bandied about. I always liked the idea of having four kids. Two girls and two boys. David, meanwhile, teases me about double digits. But we’ve never come up with a number at which we’ll look at our family and say “now it’s complete”. I don’t think we ever will. It sounds like the opposite of everything my organized, plan-loving heart wants, but it’s actually very freeing to not have this all planned out. I am too easily trapped by my own plans. I don’t shift gears that well and often have to remind myself that a change is ok. So planning NOT to have a plan actually works great for me, because it makes it easier for me to handle reality.

My pregnancy with Emily did rock my confidence with how much I thought I knew about my body. I’d had a choice to make – follow the advice my instructor had given me, prior to Walter’s birth, if I wanted to keep using the method to prevent pregnancy during that tricky period after birth/breastfeeding, or take a gamble in assuming things were back to normal before they were. But you know what? A surprise pregnancy at a time in life when most people would’ve said having kids was the dumbest thing ever was NOT the end of the world. There are moments when being a mom is so utterly exhausting and thankless that it feels like the end of the world, but now that this first year and chapter of “two under two” is drawing to a close it’s getting better & better. I’m glad that God had other ideas to my more rigid plans on child spacing. Emily took all the broken pieces of last year and made them work together, providing our family with a way of staying together while giving David the chance to finish his PhD. When I look at how everything has worked out so far it is so clearly God’s planning, not ours, just in the perfection of each little event that had to happen at just the right moment in time.

Crazy, messy life but totally worth it -- and hard to believe that was almost a year ago!!

a growing family

The relatively short space of time between Baby #1 & Baby #2 has made me particularly sensitive to all the negativity surrounding large families, NFP, and generally anything to do with the subject of kids/pregnancy. It got to the point that I had to tell my mum that I was tired of telling people I was pregnant, because I just couldn't deal with the comments ('that was fast'; 'are you crazy?'; 'NFP fail?'; 'it'll be almost as bad as having twins'). As Anne Shirley so wisely points out in Anne of the Island, 'it's all the worse when it is people one likes who manage to say the things that 'seemed to take the color right out of life and leave it as gray and dismal and cheerless as a November morning'.

Talking about baby Hope, as we're calling 'her' (hoping for a girl, this time) is something I'm most comfortable doing with close friends or with women who have large families. In the case of the former, our close friends have been supportive and excited. In the case of the latter, although they will honestly tell me that it can be difficult with two little babies, they can also tell me that it's worth it.

I am annoyed that having a second baby on the way has launched me into the 'women with large families' club, simply by virtue of the babies being close in age. If David and I continue to have children in this devil-may-care fashion we could end up as contestants for a reality TV show! We are serving to over populate the earth, and being negligent/irresponsible, and we clearly need a basics lesson in contraception.

Suffice to say, it's been nice to read the blogs and articles and opinions by other families who have chosen to go the route of NFP. It's encouraging to read how it becomes more and more of a complete and total lifestyle & mindset adjustment. With both pregnancies I've had, at least one person has said, or strongly implied, that this was the result of not using a more reliable method of contraception. With Walter, as I've written in the past, NFP left no surprises. When we needed to avoid pregnancy, we did, and when we felt it was time to start trying, we got lucky right away. With Hope I can honestly say that this was not planned, but the important second part of the statement is that this was also not prevented. Restarting NFP after childbirth is always difficult, but we chose to be less rigid in adjusting to it than we could have been if we really needed to avoid pregnancy. To be honest, by the time Walter was 2.5 months I was already thinking about having another one, and wondering how long we'd wait. It was hard, when I found out, to be gracious about this gift because life was in such turmoil, but we have had to trust this baby's life to God, and our own lives, and in the past few months we have really seen how our little Hope has given us cause to hope for the future. God knew best, as He always does.

The thing is, fertility (or lack thereof), is almost always a surprise. Time after time I come across stories of women who have waited to have children, or who have done the norm by going on the pill only to come off it and try to conceive and get the incredibly negative surprise that things aren't working as they should -- and I also know personally couples who have been told that they would never be able to have children yet have ended up with large families (an incredibly wonderful surprise). I grew up very conscious, always conscious, of my own parents' struggle to have children. It is a long, hard, and sad road for people to walk. So yeah, life may be crazy for the next few years with these little kids, but I cannot overlook the immense blessing here and treat this pregnancy like a catastrophic accident. This baby is an actual human being, with her (or his!) whole future still to unfold, with a little personality that is going to begin growing and developing from birth onwards, and with his (or her!) own way of adding something good to humanity. If you have kids, especially if they're driving you nuts, just take a moment to pause and think about how absolutely freaking lucky you are. I know too many people who would give almost anything to be driven bat-shit crazy by some kids of their own.

Some thoughts on Natural Family Planning

I wrote most of this a week ago, saved it in order to add more, but can't seem to get around to it. So it's either post now or never. Just some of my thoughts on natural family planning:

I'm 36 weeks pregnant--it's crazy! I just had my first meeting tonight (I was meeting with a lovely woman who teaches NFP on a regular basis until pregnancy put things on hold. Having her support and advice has been crucial in learning how to listen to my body, and I am quite grateful that she is willing to spend the time teaching people) about stuff post-baby, namely getting back into the swing of the regular natural family planning routine once the baby is born and the breast-feeding hormones are making everything a bit complex.

So far our success with NFP has been 100%, meaning pregnancy when we wanted it and no pregnancy before that. It wasn't until it worked both ways that I could be certain it was the method and not just a problem with fertility.

NFP is a subject I mostly enjoy discussing with fellow Catholic friends, as they tend to have a similar outlook about it. It's not just about not using birth control and ending up with ten children because God keeps letting you get pregnant, and it's also not about using pseudo or antiquated methods (like the rhythm method) based on generalizations about fertility. In my experience it's about being in tune with what your body is telling you. I wouldn't say it's always easy, because it involves patience, organisation, and being open to change (your body can change its fertility pattern without you planning for it to change..and that bit of uncertainty that comes with each month means you can't just establish a pattern and then follow it forever). But I find it incredibly empowering to be in tune with my body and to feel a little more in control of the situation than just putting faith in manufactured contraceptives. I love knowing that I'm making decisions that are working with what my body is telling me, rather than trying to work against it.

People put so much faith in contraceptives that they tend to think anything natural is automatically going to fail. Sure, it can fail, especially depending on the accuracy of the method used and the accuracy of the person using the method... but condoms break and people conceive while using hormone-changing types of contraception. It's like they taught us in Junior High -- if you want to 100% avoid getting pregnant, don't have sex.

Having a large family doesn't mean that NFP doesn't work, just as having a small family doesn't mean that the people are using contraceptives. As one of my friends pointed out, people just assume that the only reason Catholics have more than two kids is because they don't use birth control, rather than assuming that some people might actually want more than two kids! As a Catholic I take the promise I made to be open to life very seriously. It doesn't mean turning myself into a baby factory, but it does mean recognizing that all life is a precious gift and that the ability to create that life is not something to be taken for granted, squandered, or messed around with.

Having support is crucial, and I wouldn't like to give the impression that because it's natural it's the easiest thing in the world. Personally, I haven't found it to be a great difficulty thus far, but I am also very organised and for the first 28 years of my life have been blessed with a cycle that has little variation. So I'm not exactly working against the odds. But it's precisely for people with irregular cycles that it gives it's greater gift, because it's often turned to by couples who are struggling to conceive so that they can figure out when, and for how long, ovulation is occurring. Being able to meet with someone on a fairly regular (every three months or so, I think) basis as I was getting the hang of things helped answer a lot of my questions and helped keep me on track so that I didn't start making assumptions about my body instead of looking at the evidence. It also meant that when we made the decision to start trying for a child we had someone ready to support us if we faced any difficulties. Teaching myself the method on my own would have been really stressful and it would have been difficult to tell if I were applying the 'rules' correctly. It's nice to have someone to weigh in with their opinion.

I don't know how it's going to work going forward, when my body throws me a new loop of regaining it's cycle after pregnancy and during breastfeeding. We may end up with a surprise, or things may just continue as planned. But I'm kind of excited to get to know my body through a new phase of life. Learning about fertility and cycles and things like that just make me marvel at the wonder of the human body, this creation made in the image of God... we really are fearfully and wonderfully made!

Freedom from Contraception

This is a great guest-blog posting on one of the blogs I regularly follow. I hope to write more of my own personal views, and experience, on contraception sometime in the future, but I found this to be just a beautifully written piece: Does Contraception Bring Freedom?