Rant Or Too Much Information From Me, As Usual

I read Simcha Fisher's Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning. It was thoughtful and insightful and helpful. But I think that I was hoping that it would include more whining and complaining and sarcasm.

The fact is, sometimes I just want to vent. And I don't see that as immoral.

Some people (not Fisher) just focus on the good part of NFP, which I'm sure must exist. (I think for Fisher, the best it gets is being a cross of suffering through which God can work, which is about the best it gets for me, too.) However, can we please also talk about how difficult and inconvenient it is? Or are we just scared to death that that will scare away the five whole people who were contemplating using NFP in the first place?

For the sake of allowing me to vent (this is overstated to increase the humor):

A) The time of the month that you're abstaining is the part of the month that women tend to most want sex. In fact, my husband is skeptical of sex drive from me: he thinks it must mean that I'm fertile.

B) It is tremendously difficult and inconvenient and, at times, impossible to wake up at the same time each morning. While the time I take my temperature is at 7 a.m. each morning, sometimes, for reasons I can't control, I have to wake up before 7. Or what if all week I have to wake up at 8, but one day a week I have to wake up at 7? That means that my morning wake up is an hour earlier than it needs to be 6 mornings a week just to NFP. That means that my sleep is interrupted while I shove a thermometer in my mouth and wait for it to beep. That means that while my husband stays up till all hours and sleeps in late, I have to wake up.

C) Some NFPing in day-to-day life is ok, but it gets darn (edited, because my mother reads this blog) hard when you're traveling--when you're stopped at an ill-lit, dirty gas station bathroom trying to ascertain whether or not there is cervical mucus. When you're hopping back and forth between time zones, trying to figure out what time in Central Time is East Coast 7 a.m. (And how does that correspond to when I need to wake up in order to present my paper?)

D) About a week out of the month, you can't have sex till after 6 pm, if at all. What about lovely Saturday mornings? Turns out, my husband is an evening person and I, by virtue of my schedule, am exhausted in the evenings. He can't wake up in the mornings to save his life. So our best time to cuddle and kiss is the afternoon. Well, one week a month, that doesn't work.

E) Not being sure. The way they write it up, it will be crystal clear to you whether or not you're fertile. But the truth is, even if you start carefully studying your bodily functions carefully 6 months before you get married (as I did), you might not have a clue sometimes. And since you can't just carry your cervical mucus around, showing it to people, you end up feeling scared and alone a lot. Plus, who do I have to get advice from? Not too many people: I know a couple of people who have been NFPing for a year or so; many more who are recently married and pregnant; some others who NFPed until they stopped needing to decades ago.

F) The people who teach you NFP emphasize that while the pill puts family planning all on the woman, NFP is a method used by the husband and wife together, communally, as one happy family. In one sense that's true: I don't get sex, my husband doesn't get sex. In another sense it's not true at all: the woman who taught us the Creighton Model admitted that the man's primary contribution to charting is putting the appropriately colored baby sticker on the chart each day. (By the way, we don't use that model, and I find baby stickers as part of charting to be really infantalizing and odd.) The fact is, the woman does all the work and makes all the guesses about whether or not she's fertile or not. I can imagine ways to include the husband more fully in this process, but let's just say, it's not all that natural.

G) After you've ovulated and waited enough days to be certain you won't get pregnant, when there's finally a green light, well, it's just about the time that one starts PMSing. And the truth is, when one is PMSing, you can end up accidentally picking fights that, let's just say, aren't the biggest aphrodisiac.

H) One of the really nice times for NFP to work is right around the wedding. It tends also to be the case that the wedding is the time of most stress of your whole life. During times of extreme stress your reproductive system tends to not work in any way that approximates normal. While my body is generally to be relied upon like atomic clock, the months around the wedding smashed that clock and made my body do things that are barely even mentioned as possibilities in the NFP instruction guide.

I) Now that it's winter, we're trying to save money on heat. That means that our room gets quite cold as we sleep. Now I'm not getting even remotely accurately temperature readings from my cold thermometer. 

That's my review of The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning: more whining, please. Can't we both accept NFP and be honest about its difficulties?


P.S. I want to whine and fuss about NFP. But the truth is, not only do we use it because that's what the Catholic Church teaches and we're open to learning from the Church, but I'm also not even sure what kind of birth control I'd use if I were open to using it--I have moral and health concerns about most of those, anyway.

P.P.S. I'm pretty sure that most of the things that I've complained about are just the plain old things that everyone who uses NFP experiences. Francisco and I have a great situation, actually--neither of us has to travel extensively for work, and when we do, we can often travel together. Neither of us has serious health conditions that make having children life-threatening, etc. Which is to say, my complaints are much less significant than some of the complaints that other people have.