sex – Page 2 – Mama Needs Coffee

Culture of Death, motherhood, Parenting, Pornography, Sex, technology

Pornography, technology, and being the parent who says “no”

April 25, 2018

We had some sweet little friends over recently during a rare spring-like burst of warm weather and had the snacks flowing and the sprinkler turning in the backyard, and I had a very “I have become my mother” sort of interaction with one of my son’s buddies.

He had his “phone” with him – an old iPod or a very original iPhone, I’m not qualified to confirm which (though it looked more like a phone to me) and was asking for our wifi password to connect to the internet to play music videos off of Youtube.

“Sorry buddy, we don’t do screens without parents in our house.”

“But it’s just music, Miss Jenny (I don’t ask them to call me this, but it’s fairly adorable/extremely aging that they do).”

“Yeah bud, I trust you, but I don’t trust the internet. Here, I’ll pull up a Pandora station on my computer.”

He continued to fiddle with his device for a few more minutes until I had to gently lay down the law: “bud, you’ve got to turn that off and put it in your pocket, or else you need to take it home.”

Thankfully my kids are not old enough to be mortified by me yet, but I imagine at some point they will feel exactly the way I did when my mom poked her head into the family room and caught my girlfriends and me watching a “Sex in the City” VHS (Lolol) tape that we’d rented from Blockbuster for a sleepover one Saturday night.

“Girls, you’re better than this. This is garbage. You can’t watch this in our house.”

I eye-rolled her haaaaard (and also rebelled like a hellion in college), but my mom was right. And she wasn’t afraid of me – or of my friends – thinking that she wasn’t cool. She didn’t have any ego in her parenting as far as morality was concerned. If it was wrong, she let us know, and while there is room for improvement in everyone’s parenting decisions, this was one area that mine got pretty right.

The funny thing is, even though my parents were known to be less permissive than some of my friends’ parents, if only because they were more likely to be home and therefore less likely to let us host raging parties during their weekends away – my friends flocked to my house after school and on weekends, many of them specifically seeking out the counsel and friendship of my mom. Even though (maybe specifically because?) she often told us “no.”

Fast forward 20 years and I know that we are in the minority in our parenting choices where media and technology are concerned. Our kids don’t have iPads, they don’t have internet access without us peering over their shoulders, we don’t have cable, and we (try to) vet anything they watch on Netflix before they see it. Are we being overprotective? Hell yes we are. Will they someday have unbridled access to everything the www has to offer and go hog wild, glutting themselves on the raunchiest content available? Yes… and hopefully, no.

We’re trying to train them to make good choices in that realm, just like we’re coaching and micromanaging the things they eat, the time they spend on their homework, and the physical activity they get each day. I’m not planning to follow my 18 year old around checking his cell phone any more than I’ll be trying to sneak bites of broccoli into his pasta sauce at that point: the hope is that the training and coaching will have paid off by that point and he will be captain of his own ship. But between now and then, it is our job to teach, guide, coach, protect, and, frankly, look like a jerk in front of his buddies who have their own tablets.

He may never thank me for it, or he may look back in his early 30’s and be glad we tried our best. Either way, it is not my job to be his best friend. It is my job to help him become the best version of himself. And in 2018? That means being super, super cautious where the internet is concerned.

It isn’t a matter of if my kids will eventually see porn, it’s a matter of when. And it isn’t a matter of whether they see the darkest and most degrading, chauvinistic violence committed onscreen, but at what age they first encounter it. I’d just as soon they be twelve than seven, since by that point we will have had several dozen conversations about dignity, sexuality, abuse, consent, and addiction.

It’s not enough to say “well, it’s out there, we have to assume our kids are going to find it,” throwing our hands up in surrender. It *is* out there, and yes, our kids are going to find it. And it is up to us as parents to arm them with the training in virtue and common sense to do with it what they ought: identify it correctly as dehumanizing garbage and reject it as such.

Will they falter and fail? Almost certainly. Will they pick themselves back up again after they stumble, and have the courage to start fresh? That part is up to the grace of God and the best efforts of the adults in their lives to form them, pray for them, and model lives of repentance and virtue.

Our culture eats purity. It feasts on vice and mocks virtue, and signals to parents that any wild oats our kids may sow are simply inevitable stages in modern life. We are told our kids will – and, in fact, should – question the gender we “assigned” to them at birth. That pornography is healthy and normal. That sexual activity among preteens and even younger is only natural, and is best managed with a box of condoms, a scrip for hormonal birth control, and a well-supervised setting where they can experiment “safely.”

This is asinine and more – it is diabolical. We throw our children to the wolves and then we cry out in horror when they themselves become the wolves. We have to be the grown ups, and not to get too Daniel Tiger up in here, but groo-oohn-ups pro-tect.

And say no. And generally do things that make them super unpopular with kids, like withholding matches and credit cards and car keys and, yes, even technology, until and unless the child proves himself capable.

I’m already sweating over the inevitable “how to recognize pornography” talk with my seven-year-old, and came darn close to it last month when his kindergarten brother came home wide-eyed from a trip to the modern art museum and regaled the back seat with tales of “naked people” paintings. We had a decent conversation about the beauty of the human body and how there is a difference between “art” and “bad pictures” like someone might take with their phone and…we stopped there. On the one hand, I’m grateful for the anecdotal point of reference to be able to return to as the conversation continues over the years. On the other hand, I’m going to have 3 teenage boys in my house in less than a decade and come Lord Jesus, come.

What are your best practices for modeling – and expecting – good behavior with technology in your home? Are you already getting the eye rolls from your kids? Do you have good, open communication with their friends and have clear expectations for what flies in your house?

Contraception, Culture of Death, current events, Marriage, Parenting, Pro Life, reality check, Sex

It’s not a fertility problem, it’s a marriage problem

December 1, 2017

I read – and shared – a piece from Medium with my Facebook readers yesterday morning. It’s about the precipitous decline of childbirths in the West – particularly in America – and especially in the year 2017.

In it the author, Lyman Stone, contemplates the impending collapse of the US fertility rate and tries to make some sense of it. He also rings a few alarm bells, launching wondering statements into the ether in an attempt to explain “why” this is happening. And also, to communicate to the reader that barring a full-stop culture-wide reversal of the trend, there is little we can actually do to recover to a baseline replacement rate of fertility.

I think he makes some compelling points, and that his data are both fascinating and confounding.

I also think we may be missing the forest for the trees.

The problem, from where I see it, hasn’t as much to do with our fertility rates as with what we have done – or what we have allowed to be done – to marriage.

Marriage has undergone a radical paradigm shift over the past decade. Sure, the roots of that shift date much further back, reaching into the origins of widely available artificial contraception and no-fault divorce, but marriage has been transformed from a commonly-agreed upon arrangement of mutual sexual fidelity between one male and female “till death do them part” has been dismantled piecemeal over the last decade at breakneck pace. And not only dismantled, but resurrected as something entirely different, styled and promulgated through the media and disseminated with breathtaking effectiveness across the digital continent.

So let me bring this back around to my thesis: people aren’t having children because people aren’t getting married. At least not “married” in the way we would have commonly recognized as marriage 100, 50, or even 25 years ago.

Let me try to explain.

Old view of marriage: (leaving religion entirely aside) Life partner/best friend + sexual attraction + desire to build a family + pledge of fidelity and financial/emotional support through thick and thin = lifetime commitment.

(Were there people who fell outside the bounds of this overgeneralization I’m making? Yes. But they were cultural outliers.)

New view of marriage: contractual arrangement ordered toward self-fulfillment/actualization, sexual desire and acquisition of maximum pleasure + material goods + financial fail-safes engaged to legally protect both parties in case of dissolution + mutually agreed upon terms of behavior/performance = finite legal arrangement hinging upon the satisfaction of both parties.

You notice in the old view of marriage, friendship – or at least partnership – and the creation of a family, built to last, were at least a part of the bundled expectations at the outset of marriage. My theory is that far fewer couples today go into marriage thinking primarily of the other, let alone the potential others, who might benefit from their committed union.

Marriage used to be ordered toward the future and toward the other. I would argue the marriage, in its present culturally understood form, is ordered primarily towards the present and the self.

And that’s not a great recipe for childbearing.

Because if marriage is primarily about me, and about my fulfillment in the present moment, then it makes almost zero sense to take the flying leap of courageous insanity necessary to procreate the next generation.

First, because the cost to me personally is so high: social, professional, financial, physical, and even sexual well-being can all take a real beating during childbearing and rearing.

Second, if I am partnered with a spouse who views our union primarily in terms of contractual benefits weighed against risks, and whose fidelity I cannot count on, I would have to be somewhat delusional to take the step to introduce a permanent fixture into our union: a child.

Until we can restore and adequately communicate an authentic vision of marriage as the fundamental building block and the primordial relationship of society, no government policy or tax break is going to make a dent in our fertility freefall.

Unless we recapture a sense of sacred duty toward the future, and an obligation to provide for someone beyond ourselves and our immediate needs, then from a purely hedonistic perspective, marriage looks completely insane, and having a child might be considered tantamount to self harm.

Are there other factors at play? Surely.

The current economic situation presumes a dual income household in most parts of the country (and given the typical consumerist expectation of standard of living), and bucking that trend by having more than 2 kids and almost by proxy, being priced out of daycare as a viable option, means being willing to suffer the cost of a radical downgrade in “experiences” and standard of living.

Like maybe being a single car family. Or not taking vacations. Or not owning a house for the first 5 or 10 or ever years of marriage. Or not bankrolling (gasp) a trip for every single offspring through a 4-year university of their choosing.

Of course, there are more dire circumstances than the absence of a college fund. And many families can and do choose to suffer those iniquities willingly out of love, or at least resignedly through gritted teeth and furrowed brows. And those couples, in my opinion, are the real heroes in this equation. Couples who don’t just forgo the annual vacation or the college fund or the organic milk, but who live a life markedly below what is considered “standard” middle class living, foregoing even basic pleasures and nearly all luxuries and likely being ridiculed while so doing.

But if the rest of us can’t get past the vision of marriage as a “me first” vehicle for self-fulfillment and happiness that may happen to include a kid or two at some nebulous point down the road, provided all the appropriate financial failsafes are in place and the milestones of adulthood in a materialistic consumer-driven society such as ours are checked off, then we’ll make little if any headway in rebalancing our precarious fertility rate.

And so, finally, why does it matter?

Why look to the future and worry about a time that doesn’t personally concern us?

Why not just leave the childbearing to the religious zealots and the immigrants and the poor, uneducated working class to pick up the slack?

In short, does it matter that people are no longer getting married and having babies?

Being 20 or 30 years old can indeed at times feel something like immortality, the inevitable physical and mental and financial slowdown of old age will one day claim us all, if we are fortunate enough to achieve it.

So even if we have no personal interest in weighing ourselves down with the baggage of a lifelong commitment and a handful of small people who share our DNA, have we stopped to consider the consequence of an aging population outnumbering the generation or two beneath it by 50 or 100 or even 200%?

The choices we make today will engineer the society we inhabit in the future. And as everyone who has ever had a mom who drilled mom-isms into their little brains can repeat in a singsong voice, “our choices have consequences.”

And a future of upside-down demographics where the culture is overwhelmingly grey and non-productive, fiscally speaking? That’s where forced – and likely plenty of voluntary, as is the duty of a good materialist – euthanasia will probably come into play.

Look to Japan to see the social and economic cost of an upside-down population where every worker is disproportionately responsible for 2 or 3 or even 4 pensioners a piece, and do the math.

On a fundamental economic level, our failure to adequately replace the dying, aging population otherwise known as all of humanity leads to a gruesome end-of-life scenario for those of us who will not or cannot invest in the next generation.

But who cares? Shrugs the pro choice, pro radical individualism, pro what-suits-me-needn’t-concern-you camp.

I suppose that remains to be seen, whether those who are so flippant about other people’s lives today maintain that perspective on their own lives one day in the not too distant future.

In the meantime, the rest of us should be getting about the business of having and raising families, despite the temptation to count the cost – and the cost is often and increasingly dear.

But when you look a little further down the road, through the mists of time, the long-term cost looks to be far, far greater.

Culture of Death, mental health, Pornography, Sex, sin, spiritual warfare, technology, Theology of the Body

Sex, violence, and the internet: every parent’s battle

August 9, 2017

My boss brought to my attention a startling and, frankly, disturbing piece of research that surfaced last week correlating the age of a boy’s first exposure to pornography and his resultant attitude towards women. In results that ought to startle nobody who is familiar with the concept of the “latency period” in human development, according to this small study of 300 college-aged men, the younger a child is introduced to pornography, the higher the likelihood of violence in his interactions with the opposite sex.

The study authors were surprised, as they’d been expecting to see a correlation between promiscuity and earlier age of exposure. What they weren’t expecting to find was that the younger the child was when he was exposed, the more likely that he would hold a violent attitude towards women:

“That was a shock because scientists had expected that men would be more promiscuous the earlier they came to pornographic material.”

For male children who are exposed to pornography later in life, their attitude towards the opposite sex tended toward a “playboy” mentality leading to higher rates of promiscuity and an increased number of sexual partners.

I feel like any parent in possession of a grain of common sense could have predicted the outcome of the study, provided they were familiar with what the Church has traditionally identified as “the latency period” of childhood development. The notion being that pre-pubescent children are, by design, not in possession of the necessary mental faculties to process sexual images or events when they are prematurely exposed, and thus sex can actually become conflated with violence.

This is part of why sexual abuse of children is particularly horrifying, and why the normalization of pornography in our culture has such profoundly troubling consequences.

You see, introducing children “gently” to pornographic content and premature sexual information, ala Planned Parenthood’s method of classroom instruction of school children, is not the way to craft sexually healthy humans.

Putting porn into tiny, still developing brains that are neither emotionally nor biologically equipped to receive or process such information leads not to sexually-savvy adolescents down the line, but to children whose neural pathways have conflated sex and violence in a devastating intersection of dopamine and digital content.

In a society plagued concerns about rape culture and violence against women, this is something that should grip our attention. The more we learn about pornography and it’s effects on the brain, the greater our efforts to prevent – and honestly, at this point, mitigate – a massive public health crisis.

Porn is not harmless.

It’s not harmless at age 5, (the youngest age at which the men in the above study were exposed. Sob.) and it’s not harmless at 26 (the upper age range of the study). It’s not harmless at 13, which, according to this study, is the average age of first exposure. The wider-studied average appears to be age 11.

And this is really important:

Most said that they had first encountered it by accident, rather than searching it out or being forced to watch it. And how exactly that happened didn’t appear to determine how men would relate to women.

Whether they’d been exposed by accident or by design, it was the age at which they were exposed, not the method (or intention) of exposure, that determined whether they’d tend more towards violence or more towards promiscuity.

Parents, teachers, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, caretakers: this is on us. We cannot turn our children loose with internet devices, however carefully we’ve filtered and password-protected them. We cannot hand over the remote and expect kids to safely navigate Direct TV or Netflix. We cannot check out of the essential and critically important task of raising healthy adults who have a shot at a healthy interior life and decent sex some day.

Porn is not harmless. And it is not inevitable, either.

At least it doesn’t have to be, for our children.

I spend hours each day on the internet, and it has been years since I’ve come across hardcore pornography. Softer porn is harder to avoid, but as an adult with a fully formed brain and conscience, plus the necessary technological and common sense, I can easily click away plus take steps to avoid questionable content in the first place, based on the sites I click and the search terms I craft.

But I am 34 years old and female. And if I can still not help the accidental exposure to soft core porn in my daily use of the internet, imagine with the digital landscape holds for your 10 year old son or your 15 year old daughter.

Do not give your kids smartphones. Do not allow them to peruse the internet without the screen in your plain site and safeguards in place to enable safest searching. This isn’t prudishness; it’s sanity. It’s not a matter of cultural or religious preference, it’s the difference between living in a civilized society and a barbaric wasteland. Does it sound weird and inconvenient? Yep. But the devastating public health crisis we find ourselves in the midst of demands some weirdness and inconvenience of us, the grown ups.

Why do you think co-eds get raped while lying unconscious behind dumpsters on college campuses? That kind of behavior doesn’t develop in a vacuum. A normally-developing and sexually healthy 19 year old male doesn’t violently assault an unconscious female simply because he’s had a drink or 10. That is not normal human behavior. It is the result of a broader cultural dysfunction that has whispered temptingly that we can have our cake and eat it, too. That porn is healthy and acceptable and normal under the right circumstances, and that the consequences of what is done alone behind the privacy of a screen doesn’t reach out tentacles into the wider community.

Wrong.

We were wrong, and it is beyond time to correct course.

Fight for the future generations of men and women who will become the mothers and fathers and leaders of tomorrow. Don’t resign yourself to the inevitability of a sexually depraved future of men unable to care for or bond to women, of women unable to imagine or demand anything more of the partners they’ll settle for.

We can do better. We can do better than an unsupervised 5 year old whose 14 year old neighbor shows him porn on an iPhone. We can do better than a 14 year old girl sexting topless pictures to her first boyfriend, but actually to the entire lacrosse team, whose goalie will upload the images to an amateur porn site specializing in underaged content.

Talk to your kids about porn. Talk to your kids about technology. About social media. About boundaries. About saying no to immediate perceived goods for a greater good down the line.

We do not have to settle for the status quo when it comes to kids and healthy sexual development.

And neither do we have to wring our hands and lament the passing away of the civilized world. Stand up and fight! Your kid will not die without an iPhone. Your kid will not die if you pull them out of public school for their own safety and sanctity, if that’s the reality of your particular situation. Your kid will not die if you forbid the viewing of “Game of Thrones” or “Girls” in your home. Your kid will maybe even thank you some day, on the precipice of 40, surveying a wasteland of divorce and domestic destruction all around him and observing the apparent miracle of his own reasonably happy family.

We cannot settle for this. We must not settle for this.

Some excellent resources for educating about porn, combating the effects of habitual usage, and best practices for parents:

Digital resourcs:

The Digital Kids Initiative

Fight the New Drug

Porn Kills Love

Print resources:

Good pictures, bad pictures

The porn myth

Freedom: Battle strategies for overcoming temptation

Your brain on porn

Good pictures, bad pictures jr.

Theology of the body for tots

Catholics Do What?, Contraception, infertility, Marriage, motherhood, NFP, Parenting, PPD, Sex

NFP in real life: hard, but worth it {an interview with the Denver Catholic}

July 24, 2017

Jenny Uebbing, who writes at Mama Needs Coffee, recently asked her readership, “What do you want/need from the Church in order to live NFP?” and the resulting comments were numerous … and eye-opening.

Many people are seriously struggling with living it out.

The difficulties are as varied as the people themselves: Crosses in all shapes and sizes, including infertility on one end of the spectrum and super-abundant fertility on the other, making it hard to space children apart. Long periods of abstinence, medical problems, feeling isolated from instructors, finding trained doctors or other like-minded people are just some of the other common hardships.

“People are so hungry for support from the Church, who they’re trying to be faithful to,” Uebbing said. “And a lot of people are feeling that the Church doesn’t see them in this particular struggle, or have anything to offer past marriage prep short of an emergency intervention when they’re on the brink of divorce. There’s no middle ground.”

….

(Read the rest over at the Denver Catholic)

Catholics Do What?, Marriage, NFP, Sex

What I learned from the NFP survey

June 9, 2017

A lot of people are hurting, and a lot of people feel alone. That was easily – overwhelmingly – the takeaway from all the discussion we’ve been having around here about NFP. About the failure to learn NFP adequately. About the failure to talk about NFP realistically. About the lack of community, of resources, of support, of success…

And it doesn’t surprise me. We live in this world, all of us, and we are all to some degree impacted and informed and undone by the ravages of the sexual revolution. Even if you’ve never used contraception, even if you live in the most amazing and supportive and life-affirming Christian community on the planet, since you’re still a citizen of planet earth in 2017, chances are you’re still deeply impacted by what the world believes about sex, and to a certain degree, how that has shaped your own beliefs.

I expect NFP to work a lot like (wink, wink) Church sanctioned contraception sometimes. And so it’s shocking sometimes, more shocking than I care to admit to you here, when a pregnancy test turns positive. “But I did the math. We used the right days. I knew exactly where I was in my cycle.”

And yet. Sometimes God overrides the system. So that’s hard. But it’s hardest when I’m fixated on the (false) notion that I am in complete control of my fertility. When I forget that in our marriage vows I gave that over, too, along with my freedom to walk out the door when things get tough, my options to look elsewhere when the road gets rocky.

NFP is not natural contraception. It’s dangerous for us to equate it as such, touting that “97 percent effective when used perfectly” stat, and I think that’s what can get us so frantic over the “failures.” Because while we’ve been trying to make it attractive enough to convince people to use it, maybe we’ve lost sight a little bit of the reality that it’s hard. That it will always be hard. That it will always be less convenient than popping a pill or putting in a diaphragm. That it will always require a degree of sacrifice. That it, in fact, means something entirely different from contraception. Instead of self indulgence, self denial. Instead of self gratification, self mastery. Instead of wild spontaneity, meticulous discernment. (This while a couple is hoping to avoid a pregnancy. If a baby is what you’re hoping for, then by all means, get spontaneous).

What I’m trying to say is that I think by selling NFP as an easy! natural! beautiful! alternative to the sexual stupidity of the culture at large, we’ve done a disservice to the couples who are actually brave enough to use it. I know I’m not alone in having my “divine vending machine” concept shattered by being blindsided by surprise pregnancies, the utter failure of the notion of “child spacing by breastfeeding,” and the particularly cutting blow of post partum depression.

But, God, I’ve wanted to say. Have said. I’m playing by your rules. I’m trying to follow your will. Why is it so hard? So painful? So lonely?

And He points me to Calvary.

He points to the Cross, that gentle yoke if I shoulder it alongside Him, and whispers I know you better than you know yourself. I know what will make you whole. I know what will make you holy.

And it doesn’t feel good.

It doesn’t look so good to the outside world, either. It looks like a mess. It looks life failure. Like struggle. Like all hope is lost and all was foolishness.

But then. The Resurrection. That impossible reclamation of all that was lost. The undoing of reality. The rejection of what was sensible and practical and possible.

God’s ways are not our ways. And if this is a difficult thing we wrestle with in our marriages, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re doing it wrong.

I am happy to have sent along all our frustrations, suggestions, pleadings and prayers to the USCCB convocation, and I do hope the working group finds a lot of gold in what I mined from your comments. But l am also praying for all of our hearts to be transformed – clergy and laity alike – by Jesus. By His plans for our marriages, and perhaps in ways that diverge radically from our own.

Unrelated photo of my center console: the champagne of mom beverages.

Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, Evangelization, guest post, infertility, Marriage, motherhood, NFP, reality check, Sex

Waving my white flag {guest post}

May 19, 2017

A dear friend wrote something so important, so beautiful, and so honest for me, and it is my privilege to share it with you here today. A wife of 10 years, a mother to 4 on earth and 1 little saint, and a Catholic convert, I’m so grateful for her transparency and her humility.

Because NFP? It ain’t no bed of roses. But the thorns can be wonderfully refining.

I’m 4 kids deep into this motherhood thing, 5 if you count our sweet guy in Heaven. We count him, and wish it was PC for the world to count him too.

I am open to life. Not because I always want to be. Not because I can handle it. Not because it’s the cool thing to do.

But because God calls me to be.

Now that doesn’t mean that I don’t come into it most days kicking and screaming. I mean yes, in theory I can list all the incredible, awesome, fantastic ways that being open to life is God’s plan and even the theology behind it, but putting it into practice is a totally different matter.

So here I am, ready to waive my white flag and say that sometimes I wish I didn’t have to be open to life.

Ouch.

It’s hard to say and even harder to admit the hardness of my heart that wishes sometimes that I could say that I am “done”.

But just like I know better then my six year old (even though he doesn’t think so), praise the Lord, God knows better for me, too.

But y’all, that does not mean that this is easy.

And it does not mean that just because God wants this for us that the world, our communities, our churches, our friends or even our own families will support us.

And that is tough. How are we to live this “call” out alone, with no one cheering us on?

Maybe I’m wishing for too much. But doesn’t it seem like this journey would be a heck of a lot easier if more of us shared the “hard”, the “it’s not easy”, the “I feel like I can’t do this” with each other? We need each other, y’all. We need others there to say “I understand”, “I’ve been there” instead of saying or thinking “well then why are you having more kids???”

Because to be honest, I could use some cheering on right now.

If I get asked one more time “are you done?” and I have to politely smile and say “probably not!” all the while secretly wishing sometimes that I could be, I’m not sure how I’ll handle it. It might come out more of a grimace.

Sometimes I don’t want to put on a fake smile and convince people that I’m not done and I am JUST TOTALLY HAPPY ABOUT IT. Because sometimes? I’m really not.

Because being open to life sometimes does. not. make. sense. I mean why in the world would I not be “done” if it is so hard? That’s what the rest of the world is doing, after all. And sometimes I want to have a temper tantrum and say “I want that too!”

And it feels like if I don’t put on a happy smile and say “probably not, we’ll see!” I’m some kind of a fraud. Or am at least setting myself up for more comment along the lines of “don’t you know what causes that?/why don’t you stop?/he should get “fixed.”

And deep down…I do know that God knows better. I really do trust Him. I really do know that his plans are perfect. I believe that. Well, I try.

And I also know that fertility is a gift. I know some of you reading this may have a pit in your stomachs and wishing you were on my end of the fertility spectrum, and would maybe give anything to be in my shoes. And for any pain reading these words causes you, I am truly sorry. It’s not far off from my memory when we lost our first little one and tried to get pregnant for what felt like a life time. It’s also not far from my memory having surgery for endometriosis and enduring HCG shots to regulate my hormones to help us get pregnant. Or having countless progesterone shots to help me keep my baby. So I understand, even as I sound I know I sound like an ungrateful you know what. This isn’t exactly my proudest moment.

But if I’m honest, I’m just here trying to live out the call to being open to life and it is hard.

Hard because I want to determine the number of kids I have. I want to have sex with my husband and not worry about getting pregnant. I want to not gain and then (have to try so hard!) to lose 50lbs (again!). And I know all of those are selfish reasons. (And listen, I know a thing or two about good reasons to avoid too…I have had my hands full of health problems, children with behavioral issues and really rocky times in our marriage).

But maybe we could all use a bigger dose of honesty with this open to life thing??

Maybe my words will make one of you not feel so crazy or alone. Sometimes I have the feeling like everyone else is doing this open to life/NFP thing with JOY and LOVE and a SMILE and I’m over here wondering if I missed something. Can we all take a deep breath and let it out? I mean, c’mon I’m not the only selfish, prideful sinner, right??

So here I am 33 years old and I’m staring down who knows how many *more* years (I know it’s a blessing!) of fertility and the possibility (again a blessing!) of a few more babies, but I’m lonely in a world where being “done” is the norm.

Don’t get me wrong… I ADORE my kids! And I look forward to a Thanksgiving table in 20 years that is bursting at the seams. But some days I need to let my guard down and admit that if I had it *my* way I would like to just throw myself on the floor like my 3 year old before God and scream “ I don’t want to”.

But here’s the thing. When I sift through all my sin and my pride in this area, I come upon a startling truth: I truly am grateful for the boundaries of the call of being open to life, because I have a God that knows me and desires what is best for me: To be with him for eternity.

And He knows in order to get there my soul needs (daily!) refining, and that my path that is most particularly refining is motherhood (and marriage, but that is another blog entirely 😉 ).

Thank God – He knows me better.

Thank God – He wants more for me.

Thank God – He gave me the boundaries of NFP and the call to openness to life that gives me the opportunity to practice examining my conscience and my heart daily – hourly – to root out selfishness and pride.

Because if I said I was “done,” I wouldn’t be giving Him room to stretch me.

And stretch me He will – and you too for that matter, if you let Him.

So here I am sitting here before you, waving my white flag. Wishing I was “done” but knowing that I’m not and grateful for a God who gives me the opportunity to wearily lay down my white flag and pick up my cross and follow Him.

breastfeeding, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Marriage, mental health, NFP, Parenting, pregnancy, Sex, Theology of the Body

NFP: The methods and the madness

January 12, 2017

Never one to resist a pun.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, but I wanted to have a few months (a year maybe, now?) under my belt before going and saying something crazy like “we found an NFP method that works great for us and it’s been a game changer.” Before we go any further, however, the necessary disclaimer that I am not a medical expert, that my opinions are not those of a trained healthcare practitioner, and that what works great for one couple may not be so hot for the next. Which is why we have a proliferation of methods at our disposal. Some friends who learned the Sympto-Thermal method alongside us while we were going through marriage prep are still happily using it. Other friends have gone through one method after another, landing in their doctor’s office doing bloodwork and figuring out all kinds of hormone imbalances and health issues.

So the big fat disclaimer to this all is: NFP is women’s healthcare. And we women and the men who love us should take it seriously, and treat it as such. Which means seeking out doctors and nurses and instructors who are trained in the various methods, when we’re struggling with finding something that works and with figuring out our unique fertility. Facebook groups are super helpful, books are great, and online resources can be a godsend, but sometimes you need a trained professional to help figure out the language your body is speaking.

This is where I tell you that we found such a professional to teach us a wonderful new method of NFP well suited to my body, and we lived happily ever after. But no, I self-taught using the sage counsel of a combination of Facebook groups and my patient little sister. So do as I say, not as I do! End disclaimer.

Where were we? Oh yes, 3 methods in 3 years. Or just about. We learned Sympto Thermal through the Couple to Couple League when we were engaged, but perhaps because we were excited to start our family right away, I wasn’t paying the greatest of attention to that daily temperature taking protocol. Once baby #1 came along and I was supposed to start waking up at a reasonably early hour and testing again, along with making mucus and cervical observations, I was done. Between the night wakings, the nurse-a-thons and the unusual mucus patterns, we never found our rhythm (ba dum ching) with CCL again, and so we moved on to Creighton.

Creighton was great in terms of helping me to understand where I was chronologically in my cycle. Numbers are really difficult for me, and Creighton was more hands on (I’m sorry I literally cannot help myself) and helped make our fertility a more concrete concept. However. While I am nursing, it was basically an endless yellow sticker party for months and months and months. (For the uninitiated, yellow stickers are when your instructor gives you the green light to go ahead and consider some days infertile, based on observations over a period of months, and agrees that the hormones related to breastfeeding are also totally obscuring the cyclical mucus patterns your body is supposed to show once you cycle returns postpartum, and that you probably haven’t actually been in Phase 2 for the past 13 weeks. In my case, that return to regular fertility typically begins about 10 months after baby, as long as I’m breastfeeding.

The psychological toll of the yellow stickers was tough on me though, because it always felt very “fertility roulette” and very much all on my subjective shoulders to make the right observations and then to give the correct classification. Call it a lack of self confidence or just a body really intent on getting pregnant again, but I pretty much felt like every month we practiced Creighton we were going to conceive, so long as I was nursing. Enter the weekly Dollar Tree pregnancy test taking ritual.

After Luke was born in 2015, our 4th sweet bundle of joy in 5 years, I was very anxious for a break, both mentally and physically. Creighton did not seem to be a good fit for our particular situation, at least during the nursing months (and they were all nursing months, back then) so we sought out yet another method, one that several of my girlfriends had tried and found success with.

One thing I want to note is that because the postpartum season is so exhausting and so overwhelming, it is the one time I have really found myself tempted by contraception. I totally get it. I get that it seems like a godsend, like an obvious solution, and like the only non-insane thing to do when you’re bleeding and sleep deprived and financially bereft and just barely hanging on.

And I think a lot more of us have been there than are willing to let on in polite company.

But in my heart of hearts, and in the heart of our marriage, I know that God would not hold something good just out of arm’s reach from us. And that if contraption were a true answer to our hardships, the Church who is a good and faithful Mother would extend it as the healing balm to our fertility woes.

But she hasn’t. Because it isn’t. It isn’t the answer when you’re 7 weeks postpartum and haven’t slept in 44 nights, or when you’re struggling to make the mortgage payment, or when you’re teetering on the precipice of menopause and really, really afraid of having a baby in your mid forties.

Contraception is either good for human love, or it isn’t. It either builds up and supports marriages, or it tears them down. And it’s either something God has asked us to yield to His will over our own on, or else it’s something that everybody can freely partake of, no matter the circumstances.

Human circumstances are rarely black and white, but God is. And His guidelines for our happiness and holiness are unwavering, however wobbly and wrecked I might be in any particular month.

So, back to the new method. We ordered up a Clear Blue monitor (this one from amazon, use my pal Bonnie’s affiliate link to shop there), which comes in a really fun box with “helps you get pregnant faster!” scrawled on all four sides of it, as do the monitor sticks, which inspired a ton of confidence in me when I opened the package, and which I really love seeing under my bathroom sink every morning.

Basically, the Marquette Method did an end-run around this ovulation predicting and pinpointing urine-testing monitor and figured out a way use the monitor and to co-opt it’s data to reveal to a woman the specific parameters of her fertile window (Phase 2). The monitor uses urine test sticks which measure detectable levels of lutenizing hormone (LH) and estrogen levels and can give a pretty accurate picture of when ovulation is occurring, and then gives you a count down back to “low” fertility after peak day. I like the objectivity of the method tremendously, because I can put all my faith into a tiny machine instead of my exhausted midnight brain, and that seems eminently more reasonable to me. I’m only joking the very littlest bit about that. Which maybe I need to talk to someone about. But seriously, having an objective standard by which I am measuring my fertility signs has been a huge weight off my shoulders.

The postpartum period was a little tricky with Marquette (and a little more expensive with the test sticks) but it was hugely freeing for me to feel like I had a good understanding of what my body was doing, and that even with the continuous mucus patterns during breastfeeding, the hormone levels my body was producing were low enough to reassure me that my cycle was not yet returning. I think it probably bought us literally months of useable days during the postpartum period with Luke. And now that I am in regular cycles again, it has been extremely helpful in corroborating other psychological and physiological changes that each cycle brings.

Learning Marquette with a Creighton background helped me to not trust the monitor overly much, too, I would say. Because I know have what I think is the most possible data at my disposal, short of blood testing, I can make truly educated decisions about my fertility using what I learned with each method, checking the hard data against the more subjective. (Not saying Creighton is not scientifically rigorous, just that it’s easier to be objective with a little computer than with a square of toilet paper.)

Also, it should be noted that for couples who are struggling to conceive, Creighton is something of a gold standard for many people.

I hope this was helpful? Informative? Not mind-numbing or totally repulsive? And I may write a more detailed Marquette “how to” post one of these days, if I can work up the enthusiasm.

Bioethics, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, infertility, IVF, Marriage, motherhood, NFP, pregnancy, Pro Life, Sex, sin, Women's Health

Why not just use birth control? {some possible “right” answers}

June 8, 2016

I field a good number of questions along the lines of “how do I explain to my boss/neighbor/mother-in-law/college bff why we don’t use contraception?”

This tends to be an especially sticky conversation when the questioner in the scenario happens to also be Catholic. That being said, with fewer and fewer Catholics (and Christians of most denominational stripes) actively practicing their faith, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to toss out the simple “Because we’re Catholic” line out there, period, no matter who’s doing the asking.

You’re Catholic? So what? So’s my brother/hairdresser/uncle/pastor, and they all have no problem with the Pill.

And then there’s that persistently-pesky misappropriation of Pope Francis’ own take on the matter. (And no amount of pointing people to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or even Francis’ own latest encyclical, will do the trick. Because they read something on CNN he reportedly said on an airplane, so boom, 2,000+ years of Magisterial teaching, torched.)

In my own experience, my best conversations about how and why we have so many kids have been more personal than “because we’re Catholic.” But of course, that is one reason: We have more than a couple kids because we believe, with the Church, that marriage and babies are tied together in a sanctifying, delightful, and often overwhelming way. And for our marriage, that belief and the resultant openness to life has yielded a larger than average family size in a modest amount of time.

Remember though, this openness to life and docility to God’s will can look vastly different for different marriages. I have friends whose heroism far exceeds what I can hope to offer with my life, even if afforded several more decades of time on earth. Their “yeses” have yielded tiny caskets, months of painful longing, and years of frustrated hopes and dreams. We should never assume that a family with fewer than 5 children “must be using contraception,” or isn’t “open” to what God has for them. He gives and takes away.

We don’t actually get to call those shots, which is utterly confounding to the modern concept of omnipotence-by-science, where fertility is concerned.

Another possible good answer for inquiring minds can be a quick crash course in Theology of the Body, no advanced degree required: God’s plan for sex is better than ours.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what we hope for in our marriage, and about what marriage is. We want to be consistent with our actions and our words, and for our love to be holistic. It seems unhealthy to separate the potential for creating new life from the potential for deep communion through sex. So we don’t try to. And enough conversations with friends and acquaintances who do have convinced us that using contraception isn’t going to bring more pleasure or more unity into our marriage.

If anything, the anecdotal accounts we hear from couples who are using birth control seem to point to more strain, more sexual frustration, and more opportunities for miscommunication and conflict.

Another big reason for us, personally, is simply the casual observation that our culture sucks at sex.

Divorce, estrangement, frigidity, sexual assault, disease, abortion, adultery…all this stuff was supposed to be solvable via contraception. Or at least tamped way down. It’s gone the opposite direction, though. And what’s toxic for the culture at large isn’t something we want in our master bedroom.

Finally, there’s something to be said about wanting what you can’t have. Abstinence is not, it turns out, the end of the world.

And I will admit, after almost 7 years of practicing NFP, there is an inherent element of healthy self denial (not to be confused with the mind numbing insanity of the postpartum period) that I’m throwing in the “W” column. It can be good to have to wait. It’s good to sometimes want what you can’t have, or at least, what you can’t have without rolling the dice on another butt in diapers 10 months down the road. It’s good for our marriage, and for our development as adult Christians who are capable of suffering out of love for God and for one another.

So, in summary, there are reasons beyond “the Church told me no,” “I don’t know where babies come from,” or “I don’t want to put more hormones/chemicals in my body.”

(Though those are all perfectly sufficient answers, too. Particularly in line at the grocery store.)

Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, Homosexuality, motherhood, Parenting, Sex, Theology of the Body, Women's Health, Women's Rights

About those bathrooms…

April 28, 2016

I read a great piece this morning on the Target situation du jour from local writer and friend who explained with great compassion and insight why she and her family would still be patronizing the Bullseye, restroom politics notwithstanding. And she took care to explain her position in such a way that I found myself nodding along and agreeing and, well, see for yourself how well thought out and nuanced it is.

I wholeheartedly concur with her assessment that the real threat implicit here is, first and foremost, the opening up of the (relative) safety of the women’s room to a host of unnecessary risks to women, who are naturally more vulnerable and more prone to violence.

And that’s why I’m angry.

Not because I hate transgendered people.

Not because I’m a backwards bigot who has never seen a cross-dresser.

And not because I want my children to live in a bubble of Stepford proportions, clad head to toe in Vineyard Vines and playing with their intentionally-curated pink Barbie houses and blue Matchbox cars. I happen to think that popular distinctions between the sexes are mostly BS, and mostly stereotypical. Playing with tools and cars does not a penis endow, nor does care for the garden or interest in the goings-on of a kitchen qualify you for membership in club uterus. But that’s a whole other post entirely.

No, I’m angry that the conversation has so completely shut out (for the most part) women’s, and particularly mother’s, concerns, and it seems to be more of the same, tired “business as usual, pretty little ladies need not bother themselves” from the mainstream media and on social media.

It strikes me as terribly dismissive – and ironic – that the legitimate concerns for the safety and privacy of roughly half the population (and Target’s bread and butter demographic) are being shoved aside to further a political agenda, on Target’s part, aimed to build their social capital as the unofficial Best Corporate Advocates for What is Currently Cool and Trending.

I think women, along with people in the trans community, are both being used in this equation.

Trans and gender-fluid individuals don’t want attention drawn to their plight the way it has been the past week, I have no doubt. The hatred and vitriol I’ve seen spewed across the internet on both sides of the issue has been breathtaking. And as someone who has written publicly about dog moms, I’ve seen it all, people.)

And on the other hand, concerned mothers are being marginalized and dismissed as hateful bigots because they don’t want creepy pretenders claiming sudden and terribly convenient gender-fluidity-for-the-sake-of-restroom-access using the toilet alongside themselves and their little, and not-so-little, girls.

How, precisely, a Target team member is to be expected to accurately vet the validity of a baseball-clad bro in gym shorts’ claim to a female mind and soul has yet to be convincingly explained to me. Because they didn’t think it through. They didn’t arrive at the logical conclusion that bad people will exploit a bad policy in order to do bad things.

The whole thing smacks of relativism and dismissive “progress” at the expense of, who else, women. Who are and will always be the perennial losers in the sexual revolution.

This move by Target? It was never about better care for people who lay claim to transgenderism. It was about making a political statement and garnering valuable corporate activism capital in the eyes of an increasingly secular marketplace and, even more so, in the echo chamber of social media and the mainstream news cycle.

And the outrage from the other side of the aisle? It was never about marking out or marginalizing or demonizing the “others.” At least not from where I’m sitting, clutching my own proverbial pearls and wondering whether or not my little girl will be safe when she’s in the restroom one day, without me there standing guard outside the stall door.

But now it’s become both of these, because we’ve lost our damn collective minds. And it’s hardly possible to order a coffee without offending someone, bumping up against a competing worldview or accidentally uttering a trigger word.

Listen, even if we disagree 110% on matters of human sexuality, it is still possibly to have courtesy and mutual respect for one another.

And maybe, for Target and for every other retailer-cum-social engineer out there in the fray, a simpler and more authentically respectful solution to all parties involved would have been the addition of single-occupancy family/individual restroom and dressing room to their stores. (Because you know dressing rooms are coming next.)

But that wouldn’t have been nearly as splashy or, therefore, nearly as sexy.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, Evangelization, motherhood, Parenting, Pornography, Sex, sin, Theology of the Body, toddlers

Porn proof kids and patron saints {part 3 in a series}

April 27, 2016

{Part 1}

{Part 2}

Lately I’ve been writing about — and hearing heart-wrenching accounts of — people struggling with pornography addiction. It’s rampant in our culture in the West, and the deeper I dig into the statistics and the anecdotes, the more I’m realizing that it is very much a cross-cultural issue, and that even as the internet has transcended geographical boundaries in the best ways, it has been the vehicle for what I suspect history will look back upon as one of the most pernicious evils of our time.

And none of us are immune to it.

But it’s not hopeless.

And the very last thing we’re called to do, as parents, is throw our hands up in the air and resign ourselves to the sad inevitability of our kids and their friends becoming statistics.

So we take the practical steps. We talk to our kids early and often about what pornography is, the real cost of it, emotionally and spiritually and physically, and we put physical and behavioral barriers in place to protect them and to safeguard the sanctity of our homes.

At the same time, we are called to be salt and light in a world grown dim and flavorless – and increasingly so, where sex is concerned. So we fill our little people’s hearts and minds with truth, goodness, and beauty, and we demonstrate for them what real love looks and feels and sounds like. And we send them out.

Christianity does not belong in a bubble. And neither do little Christian foot soldiers in training. So while do our best to make our home base a sanctuary of love and learning and growing in discipleship and virtue, we must also equip our kids to engage the outside world, bit by bit, bringing the Gospel to their friends and classmates by means of those organic, innocent child-to-child encounters that the very young are so ideally suited for.

Our kids are going to be exposed to evil in this life, but we needn’t resign ourselves to the inevitability their becoming enslaved to it.

By teaching them, using the language of Theology of the Body and the currency of virtue and the grace of the Sacraments, our kids can become little living icons of Christ in a dark and hurting world, and grow up to be the kind of men and women who change history.

St. John Paul II left a great gift to the world in his masterpiece, Theology of the Body. As his wisdom and holiness continues to be distilled into materials that kids and young adults and laypersons of every stripe can readily access, simply entrusting our kids to his heavenly protection is a powerful first step.

A famous story has been circulating on the internet for a couple years now, and it never fails to bring me to tears. Fr. Gabriele Amorth, chief exorcist for the diocese of Rome, was speaking about the effectiveness of invoking different saints during exorcisms. During one encounter, he asked the demon point blank “why do you fear the name of John Paul II so much?” and it replied “Because he pulled so many young people from my hands.”

Mic drop.

Another heavy hitter in the battle for purity, I’ve no doubt: Mother Angelica.

Though she’s only been in heaven (hey, even the Pope thinks so!) a month or so, stories are already circulating about wealthy businessmen (as in, this exact scenario played out more than once!) trolling for porn in their hotel rooms and instead happening upon the oddly captivating image of an elderly nun, sometimes sporting an eye patch, telling them who they really were, and why they deserved to be fed more than garbage.

(Those encounters, by the way, ended up culminating with conversions to Catholicism and massive financial gifts to the ministry and operations of EWTN. Because God can use any of us.)

So we entrust ourselves, and our children, to the mercy of God and the powerful intercession of His saints, and we face the problem of pornography head on, because, in the immortal words of St. Joan of Arc: “I am not afraid. I was born to do this.”

Take heart, moms and dads; So were you.

(This post originally appeared at Catholic Exchange)

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