If you've hung around this blog for a while, you know what I do for NFP Awareness Week - share stories! I believe the best way to talk about a way of life is to show that life via storytelling (and that Anthropology degree might only have influenced that a lot).
There's been small years, busy years, and themed years.
This year is a theme year.
Supposed to be a theme year.
This has been a hard year.
This year is all about NFP in the postpartum time - but it's both on the blog and my real life. I've never had more "skin in the game" than I do this year. Merely trying to put together postpartum NFP stories has been an eye opening experience.
Most don't want to talk about postpartum
When I wanted to do a themed week on single women and NFP last year, I did not have high expectations. I was going to be excited if I got one story, over the moon for three, but we got FIVE!
When I was going through my third postpartum, and wanted to do a postpartum themed week, I thought this wouldn't be difficult in the slightest. If I could find five single women willing to share the story of their reproductive health, publicly on the internet, surely I could find couples willing to share their postpartum NFP story! There are lots of people having babies!
Nope. Nope. Nope.
Postpartum NFP is incredibly touchy - as I now know. No one feels comfortable. Or confident.
Many told me they did not have much of a story to tell.
The vast majority are winging it
It was the sheepish confession of the vast majority: "....we're not really doing NFP..."Sometimes it meant abstaining entirely until cycles returned. Sometimes it meant not following method rules. Sometimes it was more of a "what happens, happens" decision.
No one has it easy, but everyone believes they are the only ones struggling
Over and over I heard women tell me that postpartum was unexpectedly hard. Many learned or changed methods during postpartum. Many faced long stretches of abstinence. Many could not figure out what their bodies were doing.But everyone believes that they are alone in their struggle. That there must be someone out there with the perfect words of encouragement. That the right method must exist somewhere.
If anything, the difficulty in getting people to share their story is precisely why we need to share more stories! Because you're not alone, and your struggles are, more than likely, not as unique as you believe.
We have an abstinence problem
Cycle zero is awful. Waiting for cycles to start back up after baby is probably the most touch and go couples will experience in NFP. But no one tells you that it can take months and months after that for the abstinence not to stretch out into weeks (and months) due to wonky charts.Abstinence can be/is a real strain on many good marriages. Fact. But in general we are terrible at talking about it.
But there are some brave souls!
I found two couples willing to share their story!Aka. I asked my blog groups and my friends had my back. (Thanks y'all!)
Meet the brave few of this year's NFP Awareness Week postpartum edition!
Sara and Chad
Chad: I’m Chad and I like to party.
Sara: Oh my goodness, I’ll introduce him. Chad’s a Catholic convert and I totally love him for it. He just got his PhD in math because he’s a hardcore nerd. But it’s okay because I’m a nerd, too. We met in college studying math together. Now I’m living my dream of being a SAHM while Chad is living his dream of teaching college math. On the side, I have my blog: ToJesusSincerely.com and I’m the Tech Assistant for CatholicsOnline.net. I’m a cradle Catholic, but I have so much to learn from converts (some of my favorite peeps).
Sterling and Michael
Michael is a PhD chemist and is from a small town in Michigan. Sterling has a degree in finance and is from southern Washington. We have been married for eight years. We have four children and we are expecting our fifth in September! We have experienced three miscarriages.
We are both adult converts who are children of divorced parents. As such, we don't have any good examples of how marriage looks in a healthy setting. We have read a lot of books about Catholicism, marriage, and natural family planning to try and live out our vocation of marriage the best we can.
Come back next week to read their full stories!
Linking up with This Ain't the Lyceum for 7 Quick Takes.
What's your experience with postpartum NFP? What should we include in the discussion?
Excited to read their stories next week. Yup postpartum is hard; we follow the rules of LAM until 6m and then wait for cycling to return which for us meant 6 months of abstaining all 3 times.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to the stories! I wouldn't have much of story. I'm blessed that breastfeeding really does keep my cycles at bay for 9 - 10 months or so and after that we're usually open to having another child. This postpartum period has been the same.
ReplyDeleteOh yay!! Both awesome couples!! Can't wait to read their stories. I'm in the trenches of NFP 3 months postpartum right now myself!!
ReplyDeleteThis is especially for all those "in the trenches"! Sometimes you just need to hear about how you're not the only one.
DeleteOur story wouldn't be much of a story either. It's. Just. Tough. Looking forward to the rest of the series!
ReplyDeleteI'm excited to read these stories! I didn't have much of a difficulty with NFP postpartum because my cycles didn't come back until around 15 months postpartum (it actually drove me crazy that it took that long because I love charting haha!) and they were sort of simple to grasp when they did start coming back though a bit confusing; since we were TTW/TTC, I wasn't super paranoid about anything confusing that came up, though it would have been nice to have some clarity. I know so many people, though, who have struggled postpartum with months of abstinence and/or confusing charts, and it definitely needs to be something that we talk about!
ReplyDeleteA couple things I've noticed that I personally think are problematic in the realm of postpartum NFP are 1. Sometimes, you no longer are in contact with your NFP teacher (for example, I took my NFP class 6 years ago when I was engaged-I have not been in contact with my teacher at all because we didn't really have a particular need to keep in touch about charts over the years, and I have no idea how I'd contact her if I DID need help now) and 2. NFP postpartum can be hard/confusing, but I think it is made even worse with the "NFP wars." When people start claiming that one method is the "best" method out there hands-down and arguing that their favorite method is THE "science-based" one, and they start putting down other methods. I don't find this helpful at all, because honestly, every woman is different, every couple is different, and there a variety of methods that can work for different couples at different points in their lives! And unless we're discussing the "rhythm method" (which really isn't fertility awareness at all and doesn't really count as NFP), the NFP methods that couples learn are all based in sound scientific knowledge.
Yes to allllll of that! If you want to write a blog post on that I will link it for sure. Especially the NFP wars. That reaches fierce levels for postpartum NFP!
DeleteLooking forward to reading the stories, too! Are you aware of this recent series on Mama Needs Coffee? https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/mamaneedscoffee/2018/05/this-couple-went-a-year-without-sex-and-lived-to-tell-the-tale-living-humanae-vitae-part-1#comments
ReplyDeleteWe're postpartum and looking to learn Marquette method to avoid pregnancy for awhile. STM and Creighton won't work for us (we've been instructed with those by separate people) and neither would the Ovulation double check/progesterone test one (due to low progesterone). Right now, we're just abstaining. I have friends who are too. It's hard, but cosleeping with a baby is helping us right now plus just being so tired.
I applaud you for working so hard to figure it out!
DeleteMy fertility came back around six weeks postpartum with my first even though i was totally breastfeeding (no bottles or pumping) but I'm glad that works for some people. I'm Irish : )
ReplyDeleteThat seems to be a somewhat common experience! LAM also seems to vary from baby to baby, not just woman to woman, so that's a whole deal too.
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