A Different Challenge and a Different Witness

A few snow days have absented me from the cyberworld as the Captain and I do things such as unpack boxes that have been sitting in the house for months and clear our guest room so that it *almost* looks like a guest room. And I have been mulling over this next response to Sarah. Because last time I accused myself of trading in the abstract and then continued to do just that.

I have to do this post carefully because I have threatened the Captain on more than one occasion when he joked that posting our charts on Facebook would be a good form of witness. Um, no.



Before we got married, we’d heard NFP “witness stories" mostly from older couples who were “converts” to the idea and loved to tell about how it had made their marriage so much better. And they were beautiful couples with a lot of wisdom, but those stories don’t actually offer insight into what it is like to practice NFP as a newly married couple and as a woman learning a whole lot of things about her body ALL AT ONCE. (There are so many pieces of our bodies we don’t think about until things aren’t working quite as we expected.)

I have a good friend who got married about a couple years before me, and, until Sarah’s blog post, hers are the only newly-wed NFP stories I have heard. In a world where most of my Catholic friends who have gotten married have had children fairly quickly, it is encouraging to hear from someone who wants children but knows that the prudent choice right now is to wait. Not that there is anything wrong with having children soon -- it is beautiful! -- but sometimes, it is prudent to wait, and that is a different challenge and a different witness.

As is the struggle of learning to know a body that acts up. Sarah wrote:

In our first months as newlyweds we dealt with much confusion, frustration, and loneliness… Irregular charts made my body feel like an enemy and drove me into neurotic data tracking. I worried that God must be punishing us for some secret transgression and that I had failed as a wife. … In reality, our problems were simply practical. Three methods, several hundred dollars of classes, and one minor surgery later, it's finally getting better.

Learning NFP made me hate my body for the first time ever. That’s right -- I have been a 13 year old girl, but the only time I have hated my body is when I got married to a man who makes sure I know all the time that I am beautiful. Because we started charting after learning that NFP will work for all women* and then realized that we did not have a regular chart. And then we looked at the “Your chart might look like X, which means Y” section, and realized that none of those fit. I wanted so badly to make it fit a recognizable pattern and a known solution. When it didn’t, I got mad, I got pouty, I got sullen. I hated my body.

“Confusion, frustration, and loneliness” as Sarah lists sound familiar. On one hand, only one person has the lived experience to this body that won’t cooperate. On the other hand, I am used to withdrawing into myself -- and I had to learn that this strategy doesn’t work and isn’t fair when you’ve got a ring on your finger.

All these emotions colored our life as we went through a season of marathon doctor visits, before entering a season of waiting. It takes time and sometimes trial and error to get a diagnosis and solutions aren’t always a quick-fix magic pill.

This all meant coming to terms with the fact that I can’t actually control my body the way I would like to pretend that I can, which I think it one of the points of NFP. Catholic teaching on the body reminds us that our bodies are not tools to be used or objects to be manipulated, but rather part of our very humanity. Which is hard to remember when your body isn’t working as it’s meant to work. I was prepared for the “Listen to your body and respect its patterns.” I was not prepared for “Your body is part of this broken world and will at times be broken too. Love it and respect it anyway.”



*I do want to add that if we had not been practicing NFP, but instead using hormonal contraception, I would have had an undiagnosed and asymptomatic problem that would have cropped up later and possibly worse. This is one thing about the Pill that freaks me out a little bit -- when I learn all the conditions it masks without solving.