Dear readers, I have a request of you.

I have decided – rather late in the game, I admit – to try to make the most of my time without kids. I have been focusing so much energy in the last year-and-a-half on trying to have a baby, and mourning the fact that I have no baby, that I have not been fully appreciating the time I currently have. I’m only lately realizing the tragedy of this fact.

I am realizing that every stage of life is sacred and shouldn’t be taken for granted. I know that there are certain freedoms that I have now, while I don’t have any little ones depending on me, that I may lose if I become a parent. So that’s why I’m asking for your help. Could you take a few moments to answer these questions, and help me to carpe me some diem while I have the chance? Yes, I am using my blog to be completely self-serving.

If you currently have kids:

What are you glad you did before you had children, or what do you wish you had done before the munchkins arrived?

If you’ve never had kids:

What are you currently doing to make the most of your childless years? Or what do you hope/plan to do before you become a parent?

What do you think I should do? My passions including writing, theology, history, language, natural living and nutrition, DIY, cooking, garden gnomes and the outdoors. What should I be doing?? Where should I be going? What should I be reading?

Thanks so much in advance. Any advice will be very much appreciated.

Photo courtesy of Stephen and Melanie.

This is a longer version of a post I wrote about seven months ago, so parts might sound familiar. At the time it was too emotionally sensitive to post in full, but I’ve developed some space from it since. Maybe someone out there can see themselves in this story.

Sometimes I wish to God I had never met Avery. Then I would still be indifferent to children.

* * *

I started babysitting Avery a month before I graduated with my M.A. I had worked two summers as a research assistant for a professor in my department, and she was hiring my dad and husband to build kitchen cabinets for her new house. I drove out to my dad’s shop to join their first meeting. I hadn’t talked to her for a while as she had been on maternity leave for the last couple of months. When she half-jokingly suggested I could work for her again as a childcare provider, I asked, “Really?” I loved the idea. I was thinking about going off the Pill soon and trying for kids. I thought this would be a great opportunity for some life experience.

At that point I still only wanted kids on a theoretical level. I had done the math and decided in my brain that now would be an appropriate time to start reproducing. There wasn’t any emotion behind the decision, only logic.

I had never been drawn much to children. They had never struck me as particularly interesting or desirable. They were needy and irritating. I had never been interested in cuddling or kissing or playing with children. I’d never had a flickering moment of desire for physical contact with a child.

That remained true, that is, until Avery.

The first couple of times babysitting were awkward. I hadn’t handled a five-month old in over a decade, when my littlest sister was a baby. I didn’t know how to coddle or play with him. I just talked to him like an adult – “Are you hungry? Are you in need of a diaper change?” – and watched him as he lay on the floor or sat in his baby chair. It was all right, though. I liked him all right.

One of the most shocking and confusing moments of my life was when I was babysitting Avery for the third or fourth time. I was carrying him in my arms, walking in circles around their apartment to get him to stop fussing, when he suddenly calmed down and decided to plop his weight forward and lay his head against my chest.

In an instant, something completely new and alarming ran through my body. I didn’t know what it was.

I was horrified. Stunned. And permanently altered. I suddenly recognized the feeling: it was pleasure. And I have never been the same since.

I got weak-kneed and had to sit down. I shifted his weight away from me slightly. What was happening to me? I was not the motherly type. I had no idea how to respond to this strange new feeling.

A few months later, something worse happened. When he flung himself against me, as I was now accustomed to him doing, he put his cheek against mine, causing my lips to inadvertently brush against his face. Instinctively, I half-kissed him. I was shocked by my own behaviour. I had never done anything like that before. I was immediately electrified with guilt and shame. My skin burned. I felt . . . almost dirty. I moved my face away quickly and shut my eyes against the tears. I had never felt such intense desire for someone before in my life. It almost choked me.

He wasn’t mine. I almost felt like an adulterer – enjoying someone who didn’t belong to me.

It was a very confusing moment. I made sure our faces never came into contact again after that.

Ever since then, my desire for a baby of my own has been almost physically painful. I have spent so many hours weeping because I don’t have a little one to kiss and hold. And the sensation was made worse by the fact that it was so new and came on so suddenly. When did I become this person? Who was I, really? How did one deal with such emotions? My newfound desire for children was confusing and disorienting. I’m not a woman, I’m an academic! Or . . . at least, I was. Now that I was out of school, planning to become a mother but decidedly un-pregnant, I didn’t know what I was.

Interestingly, Ben fell in love with Avery, too. We once babysat him together in the evening when his parents went to a concert. Avery liked the feel of Ben’s beard, looking him straight in the face as he patted Ben’s chin, and we let him play on our laps as we watched a movie in their darkened living room. Ben always reflects on that day with a melancholy smile. “I wish we could play with him again,” he’ll often say.

I continued to watch my little borrowed angel on a weekly basis until he was a year old. I went from bottle-feeding him to feeding him solid foods; I cared for him as he learned to sit up and then handle toys and knock down the block towers that I built for him. I learned which books were his favourites and which blankets he liked to sleep with. Then he was old enough for full-time daycare, and I got a good-paying job as a research assistant for a different professor.

I was hopelessly and irrevocably in love with Avery. It was a strange experience, like falling in love with a married man. It was painful to be around him, knowing that our time together was not forever and that he would leave a cavern in my life when the job ended. But I also delighted in his presence. I looked forward to our afternoons together and couldn’t wait to sit with him on the grass at the nearby park. I understood now what it felt like to love someone you could never actually be with.

Through Avery I fell in love with all babies. I see children with changed eyes. I feel a pang in my gut every time I pass a school yard at recess or a chubby face glancing up from a passing stroller. I can imagine myself as their mother. But I’m no one’s mother.

Fifteen months have come and gone since I first met him and decided I was ready to be a mother. Seven months have passed since I last cared for him. I’ve learned enough about my body and fertility to recognize that motherhood will probably not be a part of my life anytime soon. Every month when the menstrual cramps begin to seize my uterus I curse the day I met that cherub-faced charmer with his clear blue eyes and hair that matched mine, making him feel like he could almost be mine.

Just the other day, Ben leaned over me to see a new picture of Avery that his dad had put up on Facebook and he repeated with his adoring chuckle, “I wish we could play with him again.”

I don’t understand why or how God allowed me to fall in love with a child – and through him, all children – at the exact moment when I discovered I couldn’t have any of my own.

It feels like a cruel joke was played on me. Someone was being tricksy and mean. And I do my best to forget that I ever wanted babies. I wish I had never learned to love something I couldn’t have.

Photo courtesy of Hapal.

The other day a reader of mine — who also happens to be someone near and dear to my heart — left an interesting comment on one of my recent posts. In the post, I describe how my husband and I long to have a child to share our love with, since we have more love than we know what to do with. She said she thought this was interesting, because it was sort of contrary to the way she understood love, marriage, and children. In response, she wrote this:

I’ve always thought that the intense happiness and love I feel in my marriage right now is hindering my desire for kids, where I’m afraid that having kids would harm the already awesome relationship I feel we have now.

And I can’t blame her for feeling this way. In fact, I found this comment intriguing because I think it represents a very common attitude in our culture: that children suck the life out of us. They harm marriages. They’re little vampires, consuming the lifeblood right out of us (and our bank accounts), crippling our ability to be good spouses. So you better get your fun in now while you can, because when children come along the Good Life is over.

Interestingly, the same is thought of marriage. Overall, according to conventional wisdom, life goes downhill after you find your true love. Marriage takes it down one notch, and then kids take it down to the very bottom rung. Which is odd, since the alleged apex of life is falling in love. That and sex.

Romance and sex, then, are the pinnacle of human experience; but marriage and children – the natural consequences of the above – trash everything. That seems to be the dominant (though paradoxical) perspective in North America. And it’s hard not to be influenced by this notion.

The reason I know this attitude is so widespread and influential is because I once believed it. I thought marriage was going to ruin everything that was good in my life, and the birth of children would mark the official end of excitement and fun.

Recently, I heard something interesting from a marriage expert that speaks to this attitude. He said, “I believe marriage is a life-giving institution, not a life-sucking institution.” Marriage doesn’t puncture a hole into your life, draining away its vitality: marriage pumps new energy into life.

I started up Project M for that exact reason: because I discovered, contrary to popular belief and contrary to my prior assumptions, that marriage expanded and nourished and deepened my life rather than stunted it.

And I’m starting to believe that children do the same thing.

I think we are one of the first and only cultures in history to believe that children are a burden rather than a blessing. Think about how God chooses to bless Abraham in the Old Testament to show him that he is pleased with him: he makes the promise, I will make your descendents as numerous as the stars. One of the best things God could promise Abraham was lots and lots of kids and grandkids.

* * *

I’ve been warned that it’s not a good idea to have children with the expectation that they will give you something, like love, purpose, or meaning. These wise and experienced parents have told me that children don’t really give anything. They aren’t very good at making you feel loved or important or competent. Children are takers. When you have children, it’s all about what you can give, and you shouldn’t have kids until you’re sure you have enough to give them. I assume that this is true.

But Jesus teaches us something interesting about giving. He tells us that there is gain in giving. It’s a paradox: the more you give, the more your receive, but not necessarily from the person you give it to. Something mysterious and profound happens when you give without expecting anything in return: you sense a fullness in your soul.

Since I’ve never done anything particularly selfless, I wouldn’t really know; that’s just what Jesus says. But I trust him. So I believe that giving all my energy, love, time and resources away to a child would somehow nourish my life, even if the child never pays me back for what I have given him or her.

That’s why I am convinced that having children would be a life-giving experience, and I hope God will grant me the opportunity to participate in that kind of life some day. If not, I will have to find someone else to give my extra love to. And I encourage other couples who have some extra love to give away to offer it to a child. I think it will only enrich your marriage.

What do you think, especially you parents? Have I totally missed it? Do you find that children do, in fact, give? Do they suck out the life of a marriage?

Photo courtesy of Sean Dreilinger.

When you come across something mind-blowingly rad, you want to share it.

That’s part of the reason social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Delicious are so popular: they enable us to share rad stuff with other folks.

I don’t know about you, but as soon as I finish reading a truly brilliant article or watching a riotously funny video online, I want to share it. Immediately. I want to pass it along to someone else to enjoy. Sometimes I’ll call Ben into the room and have him watch it with me again, and other times I link it on Facebook or email it to my little brother or sisters to enjoy. It gives me pleasure to pass it on.

It’s like that in real life, too. If I’m taking a stroll around the block and all of a sudden the warm scent of a blossoming clover field blows over me, I can’t help wishing someone else was there to enjoy it with me. When I see some adorable animal doing something hilarious in the back yard I wish I could catch it on video to show my husband or friends.

There’s an impulse built into the human psyche to share something when it’s good, otherwise that good thing seems to get trapped inside your soul and it begin to eat at you.

It’s as though the enjoyment isn’t complete until you’ve shared it with someone else.

* * *

Without question, the best thing in my life is my marriage.

University was fun and meaningful; blogging is enjoyable and educational; and I have some pretty fantastic friendships that give my life fragrance and colour. But my marriage is where it’s really at.

My husband is my favourite person alive. He is just such a pleasure to be around. He lets me babble on and on about the things that interest me, even if they don’t interest him all that much, and then he babbles about the stuff that interests him. We chat and joke and smile and talk and cry and smooch and cuddle. I love it.

Around my husband I feel sexy, witty, intelligent and cute. He seems to be in constant awe of my talent and brilliance. Which astonishes me, because he is easily the cleverest and most highly-skilled person I know.

We have fun together: we tease each other and take bike rides and road trips together and quote our favourite comedians. We talk about books and God and food and philosophy. We complain about our bosses and friends, and feel understood by one another.

And after five years of having so much fun and intimacy together, the joy starts to feel a little . . . incomplete. Unfinished. It feels like it needs to be shared. The intense love that we share feels like it needs to be passed on, the way the genius of a brilliant YouTube video or a haunting melody feels like it’s incomplete until it’s shared with someone else.

And that’s where our desire for a baby comes in.

There seems to be so much excess love between us that it feels as though somewhere along the lines, some of it is getting lost. It is leaking out into some unfeeling void. The excesses of our love are just disappearing, unappreciated. There’s too much for just the two of us to contain and enjoy – to the point where it’s almost becoming uncomfortable. It hurts a little bit. Our hearts feel bloated, lethargic. We’ve been feasting on love for almost five years now and it’s getting to be a little much.

I don’t think it was as bad a year ago, when we first decided we wanted desperately to have kids, as it is even now. The love just keeps expanding and spilling and pooling at our feet. My husband just becomes more lovable, more saintly, and more intelligent, and the intense love for me that I sense from him feels almost unbearable to keep all to myself sometimes.

I want so badly to share it with someone. Someone who can enjoy it fully. No outsider could understand or appreciate our relationship to its full extent – it’s nothing remarkable to look at from the outside, I’m sure. It needs to be someone on the inside. Someone in our home, in our daily lives, to partake in the feasting. It feels like it needs to be a new family member.

And that’s just one of the reasons it hurts so much to find myself childless, month after month after month.

Image courtesy of fikirbaz.

That’s what one commenter suggested on a recent online debate about whether kids should be allowed in church. Here’s what she said:

I think our society hates kids. There, I’ve said it. We don’t want them at the grocery store, the shopping mall, or the sanctuary. We also hate the elderly.

Obviously, this commenter was being dramatic, as I am prone to be. But still, I’ve been thinking about this ever since. Is it true? Do we generally dislike children?

I ask this question as one of the guiltiest. I am terrible with kids. This may surprise you, given everything I’ve shared about how I want to get pregnant, but in all honestly I’m generally not very accepting of children.

I have called kids “stuff-wreckers” and “fun-ruiners.” I have given parents the stink-eye when their kids are “disruptive” in church and roll my eyes when I hear them screaming at the grocery store. I get annoyed when my friends who are parents take their kids along to adult social events. I resent all my rowdy little cousins for making gatherings suck. I have never tried to build relationships with anybody’s kids, and I refuse to help out with Sunday school or vacation Bible school in the summer because “kids are not my thing.”

So I’m not pointing fingers at all the “other” mean people who hate kids. I’m talking about myself here.

Some Observations

When I look around at the way society is structured, I sometimes get the feeling that we don’t like or value children very much.

For starters, we have so many things in place to prevent their coming into being. Between contraceptives and abortion there is an enormous industry for child prevention.

We resent the fact that pregnancy is a natural consequence of sex. We think that’s wrong and unfair. We feel we should be able to have sex as much as we want without it resulting in the creation of children, so we’ve developed technologies to separate the act of sex from reproduction.

We think of children as a financial burden and a gross impediment to our freedom. They destroy our careers. They ruin our figures. They require us to do unsavory things like trade in our sports cars for minivans and tote around unfashionable diaper bags. So we put this stuff off for as long as possible. We only want to have kids on our own terms, when we’re “ready,” when they will be the least inconvenience to us.

As for the children who do exist, we sure work hard to pretend that they don’t.

We don’t want them in church because they’re a nuisance, so we’ve developed a completely separate space for them to worship.

We don’t want to have to educate them ourselves, so we’ve developed a whole school system that corrals them together in an external building where a few highly-trained adults can deal with them. This incarceration also keep kids out of the parks, banks, theatres and grocery stores during the day so we don’t have to be bothered by them when we’re out doing our grown-up stuff.

The Fear of Babies

Of course, most of us don’t actually hate kids. Who actively dislikes babies and toddlers? Most of us who don’t have kids plan to have them eventually, and those who already have children almost universally love them (at least on some level). But, as Elizabeth from That Married Couple suggests, we seem to be quite afraid of them.

We’re afraid of having kids outside of our explicit plans. The thought of an unplanned pregnancy scares the bejesus out of almost everyone, and we demand the right to get rid of them if they’re conceived outside of our plans.

We’re afraid of babies ruining our dreams. We’re afraid they’ll bring poverty upon our heads. We’re afraid of them consuming so much that we won’t have enough for ourselves.

We’re also frightened by the enormous responsibility of molding little people into decent human beings — we’re afraid we’ll mangle their souls so badly that even after we die they’ll continue to haunt us. We’re afraid we’ll be too selfish to raise children. We’re afraid of inadvertently creating monsters.

As a society we’re scared of too many kids because we’re afraid there will eventually be too many people on the planet. We’re scared that there won’t be enough resources to go around. We don’t trust that future generations will be innovative or selfless enough to keep everyone fed.

At least I’m scared of most of these things. I’m scared that children will ruin my chances for success and renown. I’m scared that they will suck all the life out of me.  I’m scared that they’ll make me poor.

But I’m concerned that in the meantime we’ve created a hostile environment for those people who are most vulnerable, and for those who have just as much potential to save the world from its current state as destroy it:  our youngsters.

Note: of course I am oversimplifying the issue here. And I’m not saying, by any means, that parents who send their children to school are doing so out of a dislike for their children. I’m just saying that if you look at things from an outsider’s perspective, you might get the impression that we hate kids. Think about it. If an alien or a time-traveller from an earlier millennium were to visit 21st-century North America, would they get the impression that we hate and fear children? Does it seem like we’re trying to keep kids out of our daily lives? Are we really afraid of babies?

Please share your thoughts.

Image courtesy of akhater.

I wrote this several months ago. So no need to comfort me – I’m over it. But I thought the message was still relevant.

Also, with this story, I risk making my husband out to be a really big jerk, but I promise he’s usually a super-nice guy and really supportive almost all the time.

* * *

The other day I got my period again after another 38-day cycle (Just long enough to merit another one of those “God, if there’s a baby inside of me, please keep it healthy” prayers). I wasn’t pregnant. Again. Later that same day I heard that yet another one of my friends is pregnant for the second time.

I did pretty good during the day. I only cried a couple of tears in the bathroom once, and a teensy bit in public but nobody acted like they noticed.

But then in the middle of the night later I woke up crying my face off. I asked God why he hates my ovaries so much and why he loves everybody else’s. I asked him why I have to pay so much for prenatal vitamins that give me funny-tasting burps and aren’t going to any use anyways. I sobbed and sobbed so that Ben woke up and instinctively started caressing my hand a little bit. I started to slow down, but then I started to think about my other pregnant friend whose baby shower is coming up, and I started thinking about how I was going to have to walk into Babies ‘R Us and buy her the things I thought I would be buying for myself by now. That got the waterworks going even harder. It went on like this for a while until finally Ben rolled over and, in an angry tone, hissed, “Why are you crying?” as if to say, “What’s with all the racket? Can’t you see that I’m sleeping here?”

That shut me up. I sucked in my breath, pressed my lips together, and woke up the next morning with swollen eyelids.

Nothing was spoken of the incident between us that morning as he got ready for work. He left, and I worked on my research project. It was one of those mornings where you decide that if you make it through the day without killing yourself you will have succeeded.

A few hours later the phone rang. It was him. Good, I thought. He’s ready to apologize for his insensitivity.

He didn’t apologize. It didn’t come up. We talked about our plans for the afternoon, and I kept my answers curt and stiff, and then he had to go. He didn’t even seem aware that he had been downright evil.

In the evening after supper he was at the computer, looking at some pictures that one of our friends had posted on Facebook. They were of a party we’d hosted at our house. I came and stood beside him as he flipped through the photos.

“You look like a famous person,” he said of a picture of us, scrolling the arrow over my face. “I’m so lucky to have such a beautiful wife.”

“Yeah, you are lucky,” I said. “You should treat me better.” I always joke around like that, so he didn’t realize that this time I was serious.

“I haven’t been treating you good?” he asked absently.

“Not last night,” I answered shortly. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. “When I was crying,” I added. He looked at me, concerned but confused. “When you yelled at me for crying,” I clarified.

“I didn’t yell at you.” He turned back to the pictures, with an expression that said You’ve obviously lost it.

“Yes you did. You sounded annoyed at me for crying.” I thought for sure I was getting an apology out of this conversation yet. He was visibly trying to remember. But his answer surprised me.

“I remember I wanted to yell at you, but I didn’t actually do it,” he finally said. He was actually starting to sound annoyed again as he spoke.

“You were annoyed at me for crying?” I asked incredulously.

“I was frustrated.” He sounded like it.

I couldn’t believe it. My husband was mad at me for inconveniencing him with my sorrow?

“Well, you yelled at me. In a whisper.”

“I don’t remember doing that,” he said, returning to the pictures. The conversation was over as far as he was concerned. Click, click, click, went the mouse. But I wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

“You did. You yelled at me for crying.”

He shrugged with exasperation. “I don’t remember doing that. Do you want me to apologize for something I don’t remember doing?”

I paused for effect. This is ludicrous, my silence said. “Of course!” I exclaimed aloud. And with that I stalked out of the room.

“Well, I’m sorry!” he yelled at my back.  That one does not count, I noted to myself.

That was the last we spoke of it. I knew I wasn’t getting an apology for it. He didn’t think he had done anything wrong.

I decided to forgive him. Staying mad wasn’t doing me any good.

Later that night I climbed into bed with him, fully clothed, and snuggled up close to him. I kissed him on the cheek eight times consecutively, really fast, and then sat up to change.

“How come you’re happy now?” he asked.

“I’m not happy,” I replied. It was true. I still wanted to die a little bit. But I like kissing his cheek, so I did it.

“But you’re not mad anymore?” he asked. I sighed.

“Yes, I’m still mad at you. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be around you,” I said.

That wasn’t completely true, though: I actually wasn’t made at him anymore. I had forgotten to be mad.

I changed into my PJs, wrote in my journal, and snuggled into bed. He never apologized. Oh well.

Sometimes I think you just have to let your loved ones get away with being insensitive jerks. It’s the only way you’ll be able to live together for the rest of your life. I know that I’m an insensitive jerk a lot of the time, too, so it’s only fair. So sometimes I just let the unforgivable stuff go, and hope that he’ll do the same for me sometimes, too.

Have you ever had to forgive your spouse – or someone else you love – even though they completely didn’t deserve it and didn’t even ask for forgiveness? How did you deal with it? Was it worth it?

Image courtesy of alicepopkorn.

This may shock you, but I don’t only read and write about marriage.

In fact, lately I’m feeling so inundated by marriage talk that I swear if I get one more #marriagetip in my Twitter feed I am going to flip my proverbial lid.

Consequently, I am delighted to direct you to a guest post that I wrote for a non-marriage blog I love, Naturally Knocked Up.

Yes, this is a blog about pregnancy and birth so it’s kinda related. But it’s also a blog about nutrition and health. And I am wildly interested in both topics right now.

In fact, I am in love with this blog. I’m in love with the author, Donielle [in a totally healthy, blog-admiration kind of way]. I have been devouring her posts every chance I get [And "devouring" is a good metaphor because after I read them I usually go and cook something and then eat it].

So you can imagine how delighted I was when Donielle said she’d publish my guest post on her site. *Doing awkward hopping-back-and-forth dance that I do every time I get good news via email*

I have learned so much in the past couple of months about nutrition, food, and fertility  from this site that I am thrilled to introduce it to you. You don’t have to be trying to get pregnant to appreciate it — Donielle offers terrific, healthy recipes and mind-blowing information about children’s and women’s health that is conducive to all kinds of healthy bodies.

So check out my guest post about Sterilizing Life and then take a look around the site. If nothing else, print out and try this absolutely delectable (and ridiculously healthy) recipe for black bean brownies. I have made them several times myself and let me tell you, they is gewd.

But first, read my article about how we are sanitizing the life right out of our lives.

Photo courtesy of margolove.

So I think you guys know that I started charting my cycles last month as I finally embraced Fertility Awareness.  I learned a ton during my experience of going from completely unaware of my body’s fertility patterns to somewhat aware. If you are interested in fertility awareness, but haven’t taken that first step yet, here are a couple of things I personally learned. I don’t know if you gentlemen readers are too interested, as it’s all about periods and girlie stuff like that, but you can read if you want to. It’s not a secret or anything.

Stuff I learned:

1. Ignorance sucks.

During our first eight months of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant, my sadness and frustration were complicated by my complete ignorance about what was going on.

I had a vague understanding that the Pill may have messed up my hormones, and that I might have to wait a while for them to get back on track (and by “a while” I figured something like 1-3 months). I also had a vague understanding that you could identify fertile periods by taking your temperature every morning and by paying attention to cervical fluids, and I tried keeping track of both for a while, but my knowledge was spotty and I just ended up more confused than ever. I didn’t know how to read the mixed signs I was getting, and I had no idea what to make of my 50-day cycle. I read every change in my body – from swelling fingers to back pain – as a possible sign of pregnancy, and was thus devastated time and time again as I discovered they were not.

And I wasted a bunch of friggin’ money on stupid unnecessary pregnancy tests.

Now that I’ve read a whole book on the subject of cycles and fertility, and have thoroughly charted a full cycle, I feel a lot more confident and in control. I was still deeply upset to find that I still wasn’t pregnant by the end of the cycle, but at least I understood what was going on. I could put a name to it, and that felt good. After I was done grieving, I was glad to at least have an idea of what the problems were and how to address them. And I began to understand that my whacky cycles for the past 8 months were pretty normal for having just gone off the Pill. Some women take years to start ovulating after stopping the Pill.

I now wish desperately that I had learned all of this stuff a long time ago. It seems so unfair that I had to endure eight months of bewilderment and frustration before finally getting a clue.

I can’t believe I’m only figuring this stuff out now, after four years of marriage and nine months of trying to get pregnant. I can’t believe I had to thrash my way through all those months of ignorance and moments of “What the #@^&?” to get to where I am now.

I don’t want anyone to go through what I did. I want women to have knowledge. I want them to have awareness. I want women to learn about this stuff ahead of time, before they reach the point where they feel like they’ll die if they don’t get pregnant. I regret waiting so long to learn about it, and I don’t want others to experience this kind of regret. So please: learn more now!

2. At the same time, it does kinda suck having to pay such close attention to your body’s signs and stuff all the time.

I am an absent-minded person by nature – kind of flighty and inattentive about anything that’s not inside my own head. It’s hard for me to practice any kind of awareness. Fertility awareness is real challenge for me, I’m not going to lie: sometimes I just want to be able to forget about it. But when I think about it reasonably, I conclude that it’s worth it. I am gaining important knowledge.  Acquiring knowledge always takes a lot of self-discipline. If I was willing to study hard for six years to become a master of literature, I should be willing to put in some hard work to become the master of my own fertility. The consequences are life-long.

[Note: my use of the word “work” is kind of misleading. Fertility awareness doesn’t take more “work” than brushing your teeth every day does; it just takes attention. Which is hard for me.]

3. Bonus: the NFP people were right: fertility awareness does help you to predict your period. Huh. That’s nice to know.

In fact, I found it easier to predict my period using FAM than using the Pill. On the Pill I generally had a vague three-day window in which to expect it. Now, I know that when my basal body temperature drops I can expect it within a couple of hours.  That’s how it worked this last time, anyways. Let me tell you, that is handy information.

Ladies, if you are not entirely convinced by the usefulness of FAM, at least you can have this little bonus benefit of being able to predict your periods. Well, that is, it’s useful if you’re an irregular woman who normally has trouble with that. You regular 28-day women who don’t know what I’m talking about because your periods happen like clockwork? You suck and you can’t be a part of our cool club that uses magic (a.k.a. basal body temperature) to predict our periods.

4. A lot of women still worry that basal body temperature is taken somewhere other than in the mouth, and this is a major barrier to acceptance.

Let me assure you, you take your basal body temperature the same way you would take your temperature for a fever: with a thermometer in your mouth, kinda under the tongue. Only you do it in the morning when you’re still in bed. The words “body basal” do not indicate that it needs to be taken anywhere that could conceivably be considered your body’s “base.”

So these are some of the things I’ve learned. How about you? Those of you who have used NFP/FAM:  what additional insights have you gained? If you are choosing not to use FAM, or aren’t at the stage of life in which you need to think about your fertility, what do you worry/wonder about?

Want to learn more? Consider purchasing Tony Weschler’s Taking Charge of Your Fertility, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Definitive Guide to Natural Birth Control, Pregnancy Achievement, and Reproductive Health.
I love this book and totally recommend it. If you buy from the link I get a teensy little commission.

If you’re in Canada you can get it here.

(I had a different post written for today, but after this morning it didn’t seem fitting).

I have never had so many people tell me they’re praying for me. Friends, family members, and complete strangers from across the blogosphere have left me comments and sent me emails telling me their prayers were with me and my husband as we journey towards starting a family. One dear friend even prayed with me over the phone, praying blessings over the child either in my womb or soon to be there. I have been unspeakably uplifted by all these kind and generous words.

This morning I found that my temperature dropped, after only nine days of highs. Meaning not only that I’m not pregnant, but that I couldn’t have even gotten pregnant this month. As far as my understanding goes, the embryo needs at least 10-11 days in a luteal phase to implant. [If none of this fertility lingo makes any sense to you – don’t sweat it. The point is that I now know that pregnancy was once again impossible for me].

Not that I’m really surprised by the short luteal phase. Nothing else in this cycle was really pointing to fertility anyways. But I still felt crushed to see it spelled out in numbers on my expensive thermometer like that: still no baby for you. Your body’s broken.

That marks month nine.

I was still crying by breakfast time, my teardrops falling into my oatmeal, my husband sitting across from me speechless at the table. He understands that I want a child but he doesn’t understand the emotional toll that all of this takes on me. He doesn’t understand why I take the long way around the store to avoid the baby aisle. He does his best, though.

As for the prayers, I can only come up with three possibilities:

• The people who said they were praying for my fertility were lying
• Prayer doesn’t work
• Prayer does work, and God was listening, but for some reason he hasn’t granted it. Because maybe he wants something different for my life. I don’t know. Maybe he wants me to write.

Even though I believe in theory that God wants to give us good things and that possibility #3 is the most heartening, I can’t help being a little upset with him.

I thought you wanted me to have babies! I thought you were telling me nine months ago to quit school and quit the Pill and start a family! Or are you even paying attention? I’ve been taking all those %$@-&#*@*! vitamins and reading those stupid parenting books . . . for what? So you can taunt me every month with the hope of a child, just to dash it over and over again?

I don’t actually mean any of it. I know God doesn’t behave like that. In theory.

My friends are having a girls’ night tonight. I don’t think I’ll go. Everyone there is either a mom, expecting, or planning to get pregnant soon. Almost all of them are now practicing FAM thanks to me and my stupid blog, which means they’ll all be able to have kids the instant they decide to, which will probably be next week.

Maybe I’ll stay home and write.

I feel like all I ever do any more is whine and complain on here and then you guys say incredibly nice things to make me feel better. I feel like I’m abusing my rights as a blogger. I’m incredibly self-indulgent. Forgive me for that. But it’s hard to write about anything else when I’m feeling like this.

There is no real point to this post except to say that I feel a little hopeless today. So if you’re feeling hopeless today, know that you’re not alone. Maybe tomorrow will be better for both of us.

Maybe by tomorrow I will have gained some insight into all of this, too.

P.S. Don’t forget to take my very quick survey and enter to win a gift card. I know there are plenty of you who took the survey but didn’t enter. You still have a chance!

Sorry to keep rollin’ along on this same theme of child-conception, but I thought I’d like to end the week on some positive notes before moving on to other topics within marriage next week. Here are some things that I’ve learned in the last seven months about trying (unsuccessfully) to have a baby.

1. What people don’t tell you is that the Pill totally whacks out your hormones and it takes some time for your body to recover after you come off of it.

Don’t talk to the three women I know who got pregnant the moment they stopped taking the Pill, exactly the way they wanted – they’re freaks.[i] For most women, apparently, it takes about three months to return to normal after coming off the Pill. It takes this long, or sometimes even longer, to begin showing normal signs of fertility. (OK, I have to admit that I have lost the website from which I got this information, but I swear I just read it like three days ago from a totally legitimate site).

I wish I had known that seven months ago.  I made the mistake of trying to track my fertility (using the basal-body temperature method) as soon as I stopped taking the Pill. [ii] I began with the explicit attempt to find out what my fertility pattern was like, so I could use it to my advantage later when I actually wanted to conceive.

What I learned frustrated the dickens out of me. My temperature was not rising through the first half of my cycle, plateauing, and then falling during the last half like it was supposed to. It was jumping up and down erratically. It did this for a couple of months. Then, one month, around the time my temperature was supposed to peak (during the middle of my cycle), my thermometer indicated that I had in fact become sub-human. That’s right – my temperature was actually lower at this time than the average human’s is supposed to be at any time. I flung that thing across the room in frustration, cried into my pillow for a few minutes, and then stopped taking my temperature for the rest of the month. It wasn’t telling me anything.  That cycle ended up being twice as long as it was supposed to be, too.  I have retried that method a few times in the months that have followed but I’ve seen nothing normal or predictable yet so I’ve officially buried my thermometer somewhere in the back of my bathroom closet. It has been nothing but an aggravation to me.

I now believe that if I had just waited a few months for my body to return to normal, perhaps it would have started showing normal human results and I wouldn’t have gotten so frustrated. Maybe I’m even normal by now, and could actually learn something if I started back up again; but at this point I’m so sick of schizophrenic temperature readings that I don’t want to look at another thermometer ever again. Or at least for another year.

So if it’s worth anything, here’s my advice: I recommend going of the Pill before you’re ready to start having a family.[iii] Ease into a less psychotic birth control method. Wait a few months. Then, when you’re ready to start paying attention to your body, it will already be doing what a woman’s body is supposed to be doing (unlike mine). I also recommend not tracking your fertility right after coming off the pill, because the results you get will probably not make any sense and will just drive you crazy.

So wait a few months.

2. When trying to conceive you may, for the first time in your life, have the opportunity to stress out about being too stressed out.

There is no shortage of well-meaning friends and family members who *know*that stress can inhibit conception, and who want to help you out by advising you to be less anxious. Of course, the only real consequence of this advice is that you begin to worry that you are worrying too much. You start to feel anxious about having too much anxiety. See what I’m getting at here? Not very useful.

So my alternative advice is this: remember that worrying is normal. It’s natural. And to a certain extent, it’s even healthy. Own your anxiety.  Tell yourself things like, “My anxiety gives me a richer inner life than all these serene and wispy-headed Buddhas.” Remind yourself of all the stuff you’re good at due to your high-strung nature, like memorizing Latin noun declensions and writing academic papers. And then watch a movie, or do something else you enjoy, citing relaxation as the objective: “I need to watch New Moon in order to relax so that I can get pregnant!”

I don’t know if this technique has helped me get any closer to getting pregnant but it has decreased the amount of crying I do.

3. Talking about it helps.

For some reason that I don’t fully understand, there is this idea circulating that you shouldn’t talk about your fertility problems. Apparently the subject is considered taboo. But fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your outlook), I wasn’t born with one of those filters in my brain which notifies me of what things are and aren’t talkaboutable.  I told lots of my friends about my inability to conceive, before writing about it on here for the whole world to see.

Call me uncouth, but I’m glad I did, because it has helped. Whenever I finish whining and pouring out all the reasons I’m sad, I find that I’m not actually that sad anymore. I get really melodramatic about it for a while, but then I look back and am able to laugh at myself. “Sheesh, Kath; it isn’t that bad,” I say to myself. “What a drama queen. I’m really lucky, actually. I get all this time to practice my writing, and I get plenty of sleep every night, and have lots of fun times with Ben and my friends . . . What was I complaining about, again?” Then I carry on with my life. It never fails. The sad feeling and sense of emptiness eventually creep back, but then I talk about it again. It always helps me to get through. So I’m glad I don’t have one of those filters on my brain.

Also, talking about my fertility has connected me to my female friends in a powerful way. It has made me feel closer to them. We all share this beautiful thing – this capacity to bear children (in theory, anyways) – and sharing our experiences makes us all feel a little more united.

Lastly, my friends have provided me with great comfort when I have talked about it. They tell me they can relate, and that they can see me being a great mom someday. They are all really sweet and sympathetic. I have met with nothing but generosity and love. And the responses I’ve gotten from my blog readers have been equally heartwarming. How would I get all this comfort if I didn’t share my problems with you guys? Where would I be if I followed social norms and kept these things to myself?

So those are some of the things I’ve learned. Yay! Life experiences have made me a slightly wiser person. I guess that’s something.

I would ask you what your own experiences have been in this department but I have a feeling it wouldn’t be relevant to most of you. But do you have any additional thoughts or words of advice on the subject?

[ii] For male, young, or otherwise uninformed readers: a woman’s fertility can be tracked by taking her temperature every morning – just the normal way, with a thermometer in her mouth – because a woman’s basal body temperature rises when she is fertile and drops when she is not. A woman is generally only fertile (i.e. able to conceive a baby) for a couple of days every cycle. There are other ways to track fertility but you might not care to know them.  I’ll let someone else explain. Probably next week, actually.

[iii] Actually, I’m starting to think maybe we all should stop using the Pill altogether and turn to healthier, more natural forms of birth control, but that’s another topic.