From the Draft Archives: NFP thoughts

**I wrote this in 2014 and never published it... but it made me chuckle to think about this season of life.**

Let me tell you something.

Chastity is hard.

It's not hard like: man, I just sprinted a mile in under 7 minutes for the first time and my muscles are burning and my lungs are wheezing.

It's hard like: Man, who blindfolded me one month after my stomach stapling surgery, threw me in an unmarked van, and then pushed me out at the threshold of an outdoor all-you-can-eat food festival.

Yes, I'm hungry and I need to eat, but I also know what is better for me and eating the entire table full of hot wings and sweet potato fries is...not.

The discipline and prayerful discernment required to successfully practice NFP has produced the fruit of a more unified marriage, a greater understanding of self-sacrifice, and a deeper devotion to God's will. Why binge on spam when you can have steak?

Friendly Fire

**I wrote this back in 2015 and never got around to posting it. We now have a beautiful one-year-old daughter and would love for God to bless us with more children. I know my voice is a little hurt and harsh; it might be off-putting to some, but it's like a time capsule of what I was going through 3 years ago.**

Nunya, but...

We have been faithfully practicing NFP throughout our two year marriage.  During that time we have been properly offended (of course we have, this is 2015, after all) by many sides of the aisle.  One acquaintance casually (drunkenly) said, "They're CATHOLIC, man! Of course they're going to be pregnant immediately." Others on that side of opinions have slyly pointed out that it's good we're not pregnant yet, "You want time to travel and to just be married before you decide to have kids." Others who join in that opinion openly chastise parents of more than two kids for having a lot or for having them close in ages; "Why?! Why would you decide to do that?!"

You see here, people: you can "decide" that you're "ready" for kids (cue the veteran parents' guffaws now) or that you've done enough traveling to warrant "getting around to" having kids, but you don't decide when they actually show up. That may seem laughable to those who are treating their "disease of fertility" with oral contraception or barrier contraception, but here's a wake up call: we're not actually in control here.  I know multiple human beings who exist though their parents weren't ready or hadn't traveled enough, as evidenced by the chemical control the woman thought she had over her body. Now many beautiful people exist, despite that assumed control.

It goes the other way, as well.  You don't automatically conceive and host a baby for nine months every time you play house, do the deed, tie your shoes, or whatever the kids call it these days, even if you're following all of the rules. You can know everything about your body's fertility signs and how it works, but that's still not a guarantee that you'll hold a tiny human in your arms in nine months.

How am I supposed to share the truth with people who don't agree with me if I can't even share the truth with people who do agree with me?

You have to think about how many factors have to going into having children.

Open to life means being open to as many children as God gives you and it also means being open to as few children as God gives you.

This is not a cry of, "Get off my back, I'm not a baby-making machine!" This is a call for you to realize you're talking about Love between a man and a woman, which deserves your respect. DATA about fertility and how would your tone change if you knew they were struggling with fertility.

It's none of your business. No matter which side of the aisle (fully secular vs fully NFP - which, unfortunately means have as many children as you can), you shouldn't be asking those questions or prodding.

On the Other Side of the Baby Shower

There were many pink and blue days in the last several years during which I prayed for strength, smiled through pain, and wept in the car on the way home. The Baby Shower: method of feminine torture, or one of God's roads to humility?

Existing in a state of life that looks differently to what I desire is the Looking-Glass problem: you feel you're called to a certain vocation, avocation, stage of life or whatever you please, though you're not living in that reality yet. You can see it through the looking-glass, but it's not within your grasp. The Looking-Glass problem has challenged me throughout my life and I'm comforted to know I'm not alone.

Single? Longed for a guy to love.
Dating? Wanted to be able to tell everyone I was going to marry the best man on Earth.
Engaged? Ready to be married. Yesterday.
Married, but waiting for God to bestow His blessings the way I wanted.... impatient.

Then we started facing the reality that few discuss: God needs to be involve in every aspect of our marriage, including the potential for long term infertility. Yes, we've always invited Him into our bedroom, naturally avoiding zah baybee-producing days when we discerned He wasn't calling us to parenthood yet. However, when we deemed ourselves ready and the POOF, YOU'RE PREGNANT IMMEDIATELY fantasy bubble popped, we knew patience was in order. It wasn't going to be so easy for us.

All this time, while looking ahead rather than living in the happy portions of my present, I attended what feels like dozens of baby showers. Each one was a battle between my two trains of thought: joy at another life for my friend to love and sorry that I might never see motherhood in that way.

Last weekend I celebrated my own little person at my baby shower, awash with gratitude. All the party long, I remained acutely aware of those present who were suffering from the Looking-Glass problem. I offered up the pain I felt in my past to ask God for their peace.

Getting pregnant, praise God, is not the event that introduced peace back into my life. God worked hard on my heart through my sadness, during every negative pregnancy test, and every doctor's appointment. He healed me before he healed my body, and then gave me the precious gift that keeps bouncing and punching from within.

I yell my prayers from the top of my lungs for those struggling with the Looking-Glass problem. These words of my experience may only frustrate or sound like platitudes, but they are as True as I've known:

There is a reason He's making you stronger through this trial. Run to Him and ask Him to do the work to heal you. Your burden is heavy, His is light, and He can carry it along side you as you strengthen.

Meantime

Several weeks ago I wrote a letter to our Lord.

Allowing myself to be a little mad at God for not making answers as obvious to me as I want, when I want them, is both totally immature (childlike? Can I get credit for that?) and spiritually healthy. I must know how unconditionally he loves me because I'm willing to yell at him.

The outside world will not be privy to my entire letter to God, but I want to start educating those who might not know much about the business of family growing. It's not the fault of those who are ignorant of it. It's the responsibility of people facing infertility, or at least unintended delay in growing their family, to teach.

1 - Gratitude

One part of my letter thanked Him for blessing me beyond my deserving -- obviously so. He offered, gave, is giving, and will give me salvation, if I am open to His mercy. I had a joyful childhood, have talents and gifts, an incredible husband, a beautiful job, and the opportunities and courage God gave me to serve Him and His people. That huge list of things that makes my heart so full should be enough. My ingratitude is something on which I am working.

2 - Reflections

My letter moved on to trying to explain the perceptions I've developed in the last three years with regards to hope. I feel like I've put too many shiny silver hope coins in the machine. I'm fresh out. This leads me to divide hope into two categories: active hope and subsurface hope.

Active hope: "This might be the day we conceive!"
Subsurface hope: "I can do all things through Him who strengthens me even though I feel like the exact opposite IRL."

Shiny, appealing active hope is not the right kind of faith. There is childlike faith, but then there is dealing with the consequences of assuming everything is going to happen the way you predict it.

3 - Servility

Faith (and the accompanying subsurface hope) is continuing to ask and pray to Him for His will, even when you're mad that your personal timeline is inconvenienced. Faith is knowing that God can do anything, but that he expects you to continue engaging in your life in the meantime.

"Faith is to believe what you do not see;

the reward of this faith is to see what you believe."  

--St. Augustine

I don't see what I'm supposed to do in the meantime as I wait for the fulfillment of my vocation, I wrote in my letter to God. "I know I'm not doing this right; I know the Devil has my ear. I'm having a hard time distinguishing between Your voice and his, which is crazy," I wrote.

I recognized in the letter that my job here on Earth is NOT to avoid pain at all costs. This is one of the lesser reasons why IVF will never be an option (more on that in the future). I end my letter asking God to tell me what I'm supposed to do to distract my thoughts or deal with things in the meantime.

Since writing it, I've had 3 or 4 holy hours in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and received a few whisperings of answers. I'm still sorting them out, but if anyone has an answer to my question, "What do I do in the meantime while the process of God's will is underway?" I'd love to hear it in a comment below!

All Aboard or Hit the Trails

ATSF Route Map (from Wikipedia Commons)

In speaking with my younger, wise sister last night, I realized how much my advice is colored by my changed perspective as a woman who found and snatched up (oh, I got him!) the man of my dreams, the man God made for me.

At earlier points in my life, I saw my journey to my vocation as a 19th century train ride on the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe (Harvey Girls, anyone?).  I was on a train, coping with tunnel vision, knowing the train had certain stops along the way, with a marked the course and planned stops. If the train stalled, I quickly overanalyzed and shouted, "Oh my gosh, we're here, we're here!" and fell madly in crush with the train station in Dodge City or Winnemucon.

The ultimate destination in this scenario was a train station called Marriage and I was busy trying to make every train station the Marriage station so that I could finally say I had arrived. I didn't want to miss that stop!

"This could be it! I might have found him! Won't it be a beautiful story to tell!"

In those ATSF days, I would walk into a room and make an immediate evaluation of the men in the room: wedding rings, ages, height, face, perceived personality, style, and whether or not they were looking for their bride who just walked in the door...

My eyes and heart tired of the effort.

At a point about six months before I started officially dating my husband (we were friends at this point), I abandoned my train metaphor and realized that this journey to a married vocation is actually a hike.  Thank you, Holy Spirit!

I realized God would not let me walk by that outcrop of stone overlooking His beautiful creation. In time, I walked on the paths, through the woods, over the creeks, admiring the creation within the hike along the way, but His mightiness revealed itself to me without question.

BOOM! Look at that view! So much better than an over-analyzed train station that was never meant to fit.

Whelmed?

"I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?" -Chastity from "10 Things I Hate About You"

I don't know, Chastity, but I know I'm not whelmed right now. I'm one of the others.  And I know this because I've been basically silent for the last two weeks.

Until yesterday. I had this misconception that I was a talented stress-curtailer. I thought I was Mrs. Pluck and that I was getting better at relying on God.

Long story short: I threw a temper tantrum yesterday when I realized I might have messed up my new teacher orientation schedule. As if I was watching from above I saw a crazy woman completely fall of her rocker in frustration with herself over something that I know is probably minor.

How do we fool ourselves like this? We think we are handling things efficiently and effectively. Look at me go! I am fully relying on God.

CRASH!

There are NO SOLUTIONS TO MY PROBLEMS!

Courtesy of Master isolated images/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It turns out that it wasn't the biggest deal in the world that I missed it.  In the middle of my tantrum I realized that my frustration was based on my feelings of what other people thought.  You'd imagine that fact would help calm me: nope.  I kept choosing anger and frustration at myself.

I offer no profound solutions for dealing with stress, what to do to rid yourself of stress, or how to recognize you're suffering from the overwhelming feeling in the background, except to say that the only thing that kept me from completely breaking down (though, whether or not I did is debatable) was the steadiness of my husband.  He listened, he was patient, he did everything he could help calm me down until last night he just said, "That's enough. You are not allowed to talk badly about yourself anymore. No more beating up on yourself. None. You're not allowed."

I know it was frustrating for him to see this woman he didn't know occupying his wife's body.  He stayed calm. He stayed supportive. He didn't blow it off or somehow tell me my concerns were invalid. He didn't call me silly and he didn't yell back at me.

Please be that person for someone the next time you are around a two-year-old adult. I really needed him (all the time) last night.

In the Quiet

I am addicted to background noise.

If there is silence in the house, my first objective it to give it some rhythm. Thank you, Spotify.

When I got my first computer before leaving for college, I developed the habit of falling asleep to a movie or TV show whispering from my laptop from my bedside table.  Since then until May 25, 2013, I estimate at least 60% of the nights included the white noise of some TV show, book on tape, or movie buzzing in my room during the sleeping hours.

Image courtesy of jannoon028. And FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Here's the thing with bad habits (run away screaming whenever anyone tells you they know "THE thing" with a bad connoted reality): we all know well when something is a bad habit versus a good or neutral one.  We know, but what does that matter if we choose to ignore that?

It's less that we know this action is a bad one as it is that we acknowledge there are some untoward consequences. Yeah, those. We'd like those to halt, please.

I knew I wasn't getting enough sleep. I knew I was addicted to the extent that forcing (yes, forcing) myself to leave my computer on the desk in the corner of my room was eventually accepted as futile after an hour or two of laying in silence that hit the volume of a five-piece brass band.  Of course, after such a loud nothing I would pop up, grab the powerful computer and huff back into my familiar viewing spot.

I knew I was watching people who would otherwise not be role models every night, letting them talk their way into my subconsciousness. It was a retreat and I was eager to give in to it.

The other thing with bad habits (run!) is: the first few days of giving up the rotten routine are the hardest and after that, it can be a brave new world.  Watching videos on my computer to fall asleep deprived me of time to be in silence.  It's no coincidence that I felt a foggy wall grow between God and me at this time.

So what happened May 25, 2013?  I married a man who treasures the virtues of silence (read: no screens in the bedroom).  Cold turkey, my friends.

Then I relapsed when I got my first smart phone about six months into our marriage.  I brought my phone in the room "just in case" I needed to remember something in preparation for student teaching the next morning or "just in case" Jack the Ripper charged into our room.  That silence got louder and louder and I grabbed the screen next to my head every. Single. Night.

It is still a temptation to bring up my phone at bedtime, you know, just in case.  But the bad mood and fogginess I felt with my husband on the mornings after staying up two hours too late, flicking through my phone, are too rich for my blood.  I choose good consequences over bad ones, one day at a time.  I find God does arrive in the silence and the consequences are more sleep and more joy.

Elation Hibernation

The sun is coming out, the air is beginning to warm, birds talk to each other between the budding trees.

Hello, again.

Lately I have joked with a few friends and family members about what I call the Elation Hibernation.  Since getting married last spring, I have been fully aware of (and basking in) the Elation Hibernation I have been enjoying with my new husband.  It has been a necessary step in our relationship and in our vocation.

You can find a million places and people around the world who will give you their version of what the first year of marriage looks like.  My husband and I have gotten a continuum of responses, from "If you can make it through the first year, you'll be together forever," to "The first year is the honeymoon stage; just wait."  Boo, I say, to ye negative ninnies!

Hey bear, time to get up!

Image courtesy of Toa55 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Married life has gotten better and better everyday of this, our first year.  I love him more now than I did when I first realized I was falling for him, than I did when he surprised me by kneeling with my ring in hand, and than I did when I looked at him as if he was the only one in the room while I vowed to be his wife forever.  I have also spent more time with him than any human being on the planet since I was a baby attached at the hip to my mother for those first few months.

We have become expert chefs (in a few dishes), fit runners (well, he was already a ridiculous runner), committed workers (on both our marital choices and employment), movie-cuddlers, and explorers into each other's minds and habits.

I'm blessed with parents and parents-in-law who understand that my husband and I needed to learn about who we are as a family.  They generally wait for us to contact them, which, unlike has been my lifelong habit, means I don't talk to my family for days sometimes.  We are learning about our autonomy. It's a whole new step in the direction of adulthood (am I there yet?) that I didn't see coming.

Warning: ignoring the fact that you're hibernating can alienate you from the outside world.  I became aware of it (though I still delighted in our PJ and movie-watching evenings) and came up for air in the form of reconnecting with good friends.  I'm so grateful to have these friend and family who show us, every time we see them, that they understand with their outstretched arms and interest in our lives.

The next step, as any good sitcom will teach you, is to find great couple friends. We're blessed to have several already and we're working to spread the joy.  God has blessed our marriage with so much Grace that we've both grown in our relationship with Him through our covenant with each other.

Honestly, part of me feels like summarizing with "Sorry I'm not sorry," though I know I could be much more successful at reaching out to others, like we are called to do.  As soon as spring shows up, so will I :) In the meantime, pass the Netflix.

I'd love to hear from the married folks, dating folks, engaged folks, and single folks on this phenomenon.

My Saint Claimed Me

January Prompt: Saints: Picking Them, Picking Us

Check out The Bright Maidens over at the Facebook Page! 

"I picked her and I literally have zero in common with her, except our names. And mine has an E," I told my husband less than a month ago, condescendingly patting my 17-year-old self on the head for my shallow reasons in picking my confirmation saint.

Image borrowed from this video. 

I went on to describe her life:

• Lived her childhood through the Revolutionary War
• Husband's formerly healthy business went underwater
• Husband died of tuberculosis after suffering through the disease for most of their marriage
• Family disowned her when she converted
• Raised five children alone
• She looks ridiculously depressed in virtually every rendering
• Eventually started the Sisters of Charity and helped found the current Catholic education system

My saint always depressed me, but what choice did I have? We had the same name, it was easy.

The first image that pops into my head is from a documentary I watched on her at some point in my life. She's in a dark room, kneeling at her husband's bedside, weeping as he passes away. Phew.

My shelf holds at least five books about her, though I knew I'd rather not share her trials. I held her at an arm's length, hoping to avoid more commonalities in my lifetime.

It took a wicked norovirus striking my married household and a PBS video to V8 smack me: She picked me!

Yes, people say that all of the time and I must admit that I've never had a strong dedication to one saint over another. I hardly tap that resource, aside from my constant pleadings for Mary's prayers. I'll blame myself for not seeking ways to answer non-Catholics' digging questions about our relationships with the saints -- instead of having to figure out how to appease the hatahz, I avoided exploring it at all.

Well, I was sitting on the edge of my marriage bed, trying to comfort my ailing husband as he suffered from a ridiculous bug and BOOM. That image of the first American-born saint with her tuberculosis-stricken husband rushed to mind.

I mean, she looks like a ball of fun. Source.

A few days later, I was in class, watching a video about the history of education in America when the era of conception of the Catholic school system played out in front of my eyes. A product of a Catholic high school, it never occurred to me why there would be a Catholic school system, except the obvious: parents wanted their kids to learn Catholic-ness in school.

No, it was because the only free schools for immigrant, Irish (and Italian, Polish, German, etc) children were unabashedly racist against those from the Emerald Isle and extremely anti-Catholic. This is why it's such a big deal that my saint is the patron of Catholic schools: immigrants who wanted their children to learn the faith despite poverty and sincere anti-Catholicism.

She sought me out. I have basically ignored her my entire life as books of her life sat on my shelf, so you can hold onto your arguments of the power of suggestion. She has been far out of my mind for years.

As a recently married grad student currently earning my masters in teaching elementary education and English Language Learners, I'm grateful to finally acknowledge one of the great ladies who has been praying for me throughout my life.