Light and Momentary

Grand Pianos Revisited

Remember how I posted at the end of December about my difficulty getting motivated to tithe from my husband's bonus?  And then the next week I posted about how he had been offered a job and we'd received unexpected money in the mail?  I have been thinking for a while now about telling the rest of the story, or at least more of the story (since it may not be over yet), but two things have been holding me back.

One is the voice of my mother, saying Nice People Don't Talk About Money; the second is Jesus' admonition not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing when it comes to almsgiving.  (One would think that by age 34 I would be putting Jesus' voice ahead of my mother's; maybe I'll get there in another five years.)  Not only are both my hands in the know, they're collaborating to type it up and post it on the web.  But since my aim here is to say that God's providence has surpassed my wildest imaginings, and not to pat myself on the back for a decision made with embarrassing reluctance, I'm going to plow ahead anyway.

In the first two weeks after I mailed those checks, we found out that we would be getting back almost exactly what we had given away, all of it from unexpected sources.  (An example:  my husband's final paycheck from his city job credited him with way more vacation than either of us thought he had coming.)  I was still thinking about taxes, though.

The job my husband just left pushed us into a higher tax bracket for the first time.  I had no idea what our tax liability for the year would be, or how it would correspond to what had been withheld over the course of the year.  When I wrote in January that I would cheerfully pay higher taxes if it meant better health care for the poor, I thought to myself, "That is an invitation for Uncle Sam to send you a big bill."  I was determined to pay it cheerfully, if that's what it came down to, because render unto Caesar &c.  But I wondered how big a bite it would be.

When the W2 came I sat down quickly with a pencil and paper.  I was stunned to find that we had a substantial refund coming -- a refund, coincidentally, almost exactly equal to the total of those checks I wrote with such hesitation.

Now I am not preaching the prosperity gospel here, not saying that you should tithe because God will give you back twice as much as you gave away.  But this experience has taken me by surprise.

"You can't out-give God" is a truism among evangelicals.  I've heard it over and over, and I always nodded my head vaguely and thought about all the intangible blessings I had been given.  But I never imagined, when I dropped those envelopes in the mail at the end of December, what the next month would bring financially.

The idea of God blessing Christians materially is not a popular one.  Some of it is justifiable concern about unethical preachers who say, "Send me your money and God will pay you back"; some of it is an appropriate rejection of materialism.  But I think, too, that some of it comes from the misplaced feeling that praying about money is crass, that we should be praying for world peace instead.  In my freshman year of college I used to go to a Vineyard church occasionally and once I invited a friend, who had grown up in the same mainline Protestant denomination that I had, to come along.  When we left, there was an uneasy silence.  I asked him what he thought, and he blurted out, "I hope you're not going there very often, Jamie.  The pastor said you could pray for a car and God would find you one!  It seems like some kind of cult to me."

But I was thinking in the shower yesterday that Christians serve a God whose dying words were "I thirst."  I have seen spiritual explanations of those words -- that Jesus was thirsting for souls, thirsting for righteousness in the world -- but I think there is beauty too in the plain meaning of them.  To live in a physical world, with a physical body, is to have physical needs.  In the service of a Lord whose life began and ended amid privation, we need not be afraid to make those needs known.

The end of this post ought to be something like:  "And so I will never balk at giving again, because I have seen the providence of God."  Unfortunately, I am finding that it still takes discipline to get those checks written, and that it takes yet more discipline to let go of my worries about money.  It's an expensive series of undertakings, this business of buying a house and fixing a kitchen, moving a family and having a baby.  In December I wrote about the Israelites crossing the Jordan; I didn't realize that I would continue to think, "Yeah, we're walking on dry ground right now, but I bet it gets pretty muddy over in that patch I can't see." 

When my children are dawdling and grumbling instead of listening, I sometimes sing to them, to the tune of the Wisconsin fight song:  "Prompt and cheerful! Prompt and cheerful!  That's the way to be!"  (If they grow up to like Big Ten football, a predilection they will not have inherited from their mother, they will wonder why they are overcome by the urge to throw things at the screen whenever the Badger marching band begins to play "On Wisconsin.")  Maybe, in those moments when I am tempted to say, "I'll just write this check next month, when I can see the big picture a little more clearly," I should ask them to sing to me instead.

So:  the three disciplines of Lent are fasting, prayer, and almsgiving.  Last week:  Bad At Fasting.  This week:  Almsgiving -- The Reluctant Approach.  Tune in next week for:  Prayer? Can't We Stop Talking About These Things I Am Bad At And Trade Fondue Recipes Instead?  But I guess the point of Lent is that we take these weeks and work on it, that we keep doing it stiffly until it becomes natural.

I wanted to write about this experience in part because I heard from several people who shared my fears about giving.  I don't know what the future holds for us; I only know that I am still surprised by what followed when I took the plunge.  You can't out-give God, they say.  But I tell you this:  a person has to wonder what might happen if she tried.

A Party

If I say this is a post about a weaning party, you figure it was for my youngest son, right?  Not so -- give us a year or two.  It is my middle son who is newly weaned.

I am a quiet tandem nurser -- not closeted, but not in anybody's face about it either.  Tandem nursing works well in our family.  It also makes some people uneasy, even some of my friends who have nursed two-year-olds contentedly.

Shortly after I started this blog I posted about my second son, the most intensely needy of my three children.  He is wired a little differently:  he feels things more keenly and resists change more vigorously.  He has never been a good sleeper.  I used to try to be lighthearted about it -- "Well, of all the things a kid could be bad at, sleeping isn't the worst option" -- but it was tough going, those weeks when he would wake up at 2am and be unable to get back to sleep for a couple of hours.

When I write about things that Marty says, I always seem to use words like "wistfully" or "ruefully" or "reluctantly."  ("I wish I wasn't your middle child," he said sadly one night.  "I wish I was one of your corner children.")  He is the child of mine who sees most clearly that life is hard.  I have such high hopes for him; I think that from great sensitivity can arise great compassion.  I hope he grows into a man determined to make his corner of the world a gentler place because he understands how overwhelming life can be. 

But it is not easy being his mother.  It's hard to know how much to offer straight acceptance when something knocks him flat, and how much to nudge him to get up and keep going.  It is a turbulent ride some days. 

I have also been put together as a person who feels things keenly.  I spent too much time as a kid and a young adult pretending that I was a different kind of person, pretending that if I said, "That doesn't bother me" loudly enough it would be true.  I had to learn to tell myself, "That bothers me, and this is what I can do to handle it."  That's what I want to teach Marty:  it's okay to be who you are.  Sometimes you push yourself to be a little bit more than that, too.

I don't understand Marty quite as easily as I do his brothers.  Sometimes I can listen to him with my whole self, giving him all my attention, and just not get what he's trying to tell me.  In some ways this makes for a less volatile relationship:  his older brother and I are so much alike that he pushes my buttons more adroitly than any other human being I have ever encountered.  (I keep searching the Yellow Pages for buttonectomists, but so far surgical removal of my buttons does not appear to be an option.)  Marty doesn't get under my skin very easily, but I worry that he doesn't feel heard sometimes.

These are some of the reasons why I was willing to keep nursing him for so long, because nursing was a wordless way to say, "It's going to be okay.  I'm here for you."  Katie Allison Granju's book on attachment parenting includes a story about a Ghanaian man in his eighties (I think; my memory is sketchy) who still remembered nursing as a young child.  When my sons are old men, I hope they remember childhood as that man did, as a time when they felt safe, and loved, and at peace.  If nursing helps, then hey -- let 'em nurse until they're done.

It has been three weeks since Marty said, after many, many discussions, "Hey, I could wean after all!"  It has taken me until today to be ready to write about it.  In the first few days I couldn't even think about it without tears pricking at my eyes (not a logical reaction, given how often I had wondered if he would ever wean; I will chalk it up to crazy pregnancy hormones).  I kept praying, "Oh, God, help me to be the mother he needs me to be."  I remembered times when I had been harsh and impatient with him, and I wished I had been more generous.  (And I considered blogging about it, but I knew that even one uneasy comment -- "He was how old?" -- would have been more than I could handle just then.)

One night he was lying in bed and he asked me why I was a little sad about his weaning.  I said, "Oh, hon, I want so much for you to have all the consolation and love and closeness that you need, and nursing made that a little easier."  And he answered, "But it's okay, Mom.  I've had enough milk."

So today we had a party to celebrate.  A couple of people said, "A party? That's all you need right now."  But I told them, "You know, a guy only weans once in his life."  I baked two cakes in honor of the occasion, and invited fifteen kids to come.  Fortuitously, his godparents were in town this weekend.  A couple of his friends brought presents; everyone wished him well.  I am writing this post happily, if sleepily, glad for the way my boys are growing up.

This post has been all about the difficult side of mothering Marty, so let me tell you quickly about some of the things I have loved:  from the day when he took off crawling with a wicked grin and one leg cocked sideways, to his current fascination with being Wonga-Taw, a mysterious superhero whose superpowers seem to derive from his willingness to strip down to his underwear and run around in raggedy circles.  He loves strong flavors:  as a toddler he would eat whole jars of anchovy-stuffed olives and he begged for tastes of Angostura bitters.  He is the blondest of my children, and the skinniest, and no matter how many children's hands I hold in my lifetime I think I will always remember the feel of his, warm and slender and strong.

During my pregnancy I was so certain Marty was a girl that we didn't even have a boy's name picked out.  It was a tough birth, but I only remember the painful parts dimly.  What I remember vividly is the joy, and the blessed relief, when he was finally there.  And I remember what I thought when the midwife flipped him over and I saw that Maria Caroline would not be a good name for our baby after all:  "Oh, I love you!  You are not what I was expecting, but oh, do I love you."  We had gone around and around about a boy's name without getting anywhere, but as soon as I saw his face I knew immediately what his name had to be.  I've been thinking about that moment over the past couple of weeks, because it's a good metaphor for our relationship.  I keep saying, "You are not what I was expecting, but oh, do I love you."  And all those questions I have about the future -- I hope the answers come to me when I need them, just as it happened that first time I saw his face.

The Making of a Three-Eyed Werebear

This is a post I began ages ago, when I wrote about my oldest son's nearly catastrophic birth.  Near the end of that post I said I'd write more about learning to be a mama bear instead of a mama sheep, and I started this right afterward.  But it had been languishing in my drafts folder ever since. 

Then Jane L., whose recent comment about the doctor who delivered her first baby has made me laugh over and over, left another comment that inspired me to dust this post off.  I hope that many of you find it unnecessary, that many of you already have such comfortable relationships with doctors that you say, "Duh, Jamie," and go skipping elsewhere in the blogosphere.  But I suspect that some of you, like me, have occasional trouble feeling like you're on equal footing with your children's HCPs.

The truth is I am not usually very bear-like.  Most of the time I am soft-spoken and conflict-averse.  Nobody messes with my kids, though, and perceived attempts at same can induce a surprising metamorphosis.

The three-eyed-ness came about because I have looked at the issue of parents talking with HCPs through three different lenses.  First I was a health care worker myself, and then I became a mother, and then I became a breastfeeding counselor helping frustrated mothers.  In reverse order, here are some of the things I have seen through those lenses.

When I talk with mothers who are saying, "My doctor says I have to..." or "My doctor is making me..." I encourage them to consider a different perspective.  (I would like to tell them to reject such thinking out of hand, but it would be a mite inconsistent for me to counter inappropriate bossiness by being inappropriately bossy.)  I pay my HCPs for their opinions.  I do not give them money so they can strip me of my autonomy, or leave me feeling incompetent as a mother.  If a mother is feeling backed into a corner or pressured to do something that makes her uncomfortable, I suggest that she reframe the discussion with a phrase like this:  "So your recommendation for my baby is that I consider..."

I do not say it with an adversarial or unpleasant tone.  It is simply intended as a reminder -- to both of us -- that there's more than one way to skin a cat.  May I deconstruct? 

So your [not God's, not even the entire medical community's]
recommendation [not ukase]
for my [let's remember who has to consent here before we proceed]
baby [small vulnerable person for whom I will walk through fire]
is that I consider [because I am a competent person and you can be certain that I will weigh my options in this situation]...

Part of my job as a breastfeeding counselor is providing mothers with references they can take to HCPs.  Many doctors are pleased to learn about Tom Hale and his work on medication use in lactation; they welcome an informed alternative to the PDR (guiding principle:  "If we tell you not to take it when you're nursing, you can't sue us after the fact").  Any doctor worth his salt knows that things change in medicine and few (if any) of them have time to keep up with all the journals they might like to.  A mother can say, "Hey, I found this article from the British Medical Journal that suggests an alternative."  It doesn't have to be a big hairy "you-are-out-of-date" confrontation because a low-key exchange will do the trick in many cases.

When stressed mothers call me about difficult doctors, I encourage them to remember this:  you are the expert on your child.  Other people can be experts on teeth or ears or lungs or whatever, but they can't see the whole child as clearly as you can .  Once I was told by a dentist that my 2yo son needed to wean before we came back.  I wish I had said what I was thinking:  "He is more than teeth.  I'll have to see if he's ready for that.  What else can we do about the decay in the interim?"  Instead I nodded and seethed and never returned.  (The end of that story, since there are many many similar stories out there, is that I subsequently found the world's kindest dentist and at age 4 my son had two fillings, painless for all concerned.  He weaned not long before his fifth birthday and has perfectly normal teeth today.)

As a new mother dealing with HCPs, my biggest problem was fear of conflict.  It was hard for me to see a middle ground between meek compliance and teeth-baring hostility.  Of course there is an enormous middle ground, and I have grown more comfortable inhabiting it.  I was surprised to learn that I could say, very pleasantly, "What's the rationale for that?" or "What are our other options?" or "You know, I don't feel comfortable with that recommendation," and send a conversation in a much less stressful direction.  (Maybe you all grew up in homes where healthy conflict was the norm, but I emphatically did not.)

I also had to learn not to be afraid of other people's opinions.  While I was working in the hospital where my oldest son was born, I went to NICU rounds and heard the irritated gossip about quirky and demanding parents.  As the mother of a NICU baby I did not want to seem quirky or demanding because I did not want to provide amusing stories at NICU rounds.  Afterward I was so angry with myself when I thought about the times I had quietly given in.  Never again, I vowed, would I let anxiety about what someone else might think or say keep me from doing what was right for my child.  I can't say I have always stuck to my resolution (and I hate those muttered "that kid needs a good spanking" comments as much as anyone does), but I do my best. 

One other thing I wish I had known earlier:  if you can't get what you need from your HCP, go elsewhere.  When my first son was born, my husband was a graduate student and money was very tight.  I took Alex to public health for well-baby exams and immunizations, but the public health nurse practitioner and I had a -- what's the opposite of a harmonious relationship?  Can people have cacophonous relationships?  Because the bad vibes between us were abundant, and amplitudinous too.  (Dictionary.com says amplitudinous is not a word but I say puh.  It ought to be a word.  If you are part of the OED staff and you are looking for a citation for amplitudinous because how else can one describe the intensity of some kinds of dissonance, go right ahead and cite me.  You heard it here from yours humbly.)  I never left there without feeling like I was a bad mother overlooking serious health problems in my child. 

Once in particular, my son had had been fussy and had a cold.  When we went in for his well-baby check, he was much less drippy and much more happy but he had some fluid behind his eardrum.  The NP said he needed a ten-day course of amoxicillin; I asked what would happen if we waited a day or two to see if he continued to improve since he had no fever and seemed to be so much better.  "Oh, you don't want to do that," she said imperiously.  "He could get meningitis."  Yeah, and we could get hit by a bus on the way home, too.  From that encounter comes one of my firmest convictions about health-related decision-making:  I don't do scare tactics.  If you have incidence data, if you have solid information on risks and benefits, then let's talk.  If you can only offer me arm-twisting and improbable bogeymen, I'll take my children elsewhere.

After too many public health well-baby visits that left me feeling like my child was an agglomeration of inadequacies waiting to be identified, I opted to shell out the money to see our pediatrician instead.  This was a big deal, given our financial straits at the time and my own frugal tendencies, but I quickly decided it was money well spent.  That pediatrician told me something I will always remember:  he said, "In medicine there's almost always more than one way to do things.  Anyone who tells you otherwise probably just doesn't want to take the trouble to learn something new."

Do not think that I am in a hurry to bash HCPs here, because I have also been the one in the white coat.  I have sat across the table from angry, frustrated patients; I have had that sinking feeling when the receptionist whispers, about the family I am scheduled to see in ten minutes, "She's not a very nice mom."  One of the reasons it is important to me to keep my interactions with HCPs pleasant is that I know just how it can feel from the other side.

When I started my last job I walked right into a nasty situation:  nursing staff complained that a patient's daughters were adamantly rejecting my predecessor's recommendations.  "They just don't care if he dies," said one angry nurse.  "They're very unhappy," said the social worker.  "They're not the only ones," I thought to myself.  But I took a deep breath as the social worker called them to introduce me, and I asked them to tell me more about what was going on.

It turns out that a two-part regimen had been recommended, and they thought part B was adversely affecting their father's quality of life.  They didn't object to part A in the slightest.  "Oooohh," I said (that's me, ever articulate).  "I don't see a need for B at all.  I was very concerned about A, but I certainly see why you wouldn't want B."  I kid you not:  three minutes, problem solved.  Keep A, scrap B; everyone's happy.  Their father died quietly in his sleep a few weeks later of an unrelated condition.  I hope his last days were peaceful.

What I want to remember from his situation (aside from Don't Borrow Trouble -- I was pretty stressed about that phone call beforehand) is the fruitlessness of hostility.  The nursing staff saw it unequivocally:  the daughters were heartlessly disregarding recommendations that could save their father's life.  The daughters saw it unequivocally:  the nurses were heartlessly covering their butts without noticing how unhappy their father had become.  I am a little saddened to think about how often similar scenarios play out.  No matter which foot the shoe is on, I want to be willing to listen. 

I had thought these three points of view would be more separate, but they seem to have interwoven quite a bit.  Maybe that's as it should be, since the outcome should be trinocular vision and not triple vision.  The principles that guide me in the roles of Christian woman and mother and occasional allied health professional mesh nicely, I think:  Do unto others.  As you do it unto the least of these.  First do no harm.

I am reading back over this with a critical eye and thinking, Honestly, Jamie, didn't you know this stuff before?  But I didn't, and the learning was painful, and so I am going to go ahead and post it in hopes that it may prove useful to another mother somewhere.  Reluctant werebears, unite!

Apples and Fugu

I bet the Pill prevents pregnancy-induced insomnia.  I never have trouble sleeping, except during the last weeks of pregnancy.  I have been tossing and turning and thinking about an exasperating exchange with another blogger, and I have given up trying to sleep.

I read a variety of blogs, written by women with a variety of different views.  Usually I am content to listen to their opinions even if I disagree with them, but occasionally I'll jump in and comment.  Last night I ran across a paean to the Pill.  Did you know it prevents ectopic pregnancy?  Of course it does so in the same way that any form of birth control does:  if you don't conceive, you can't have an ectopic pregnancy.  By that logic, the Pill also protects against placenta percreta, pre-eclampsia, and postpartum hemorrhage, as well as the pregnancy-induced insomnia that has me awake and writing this grumpy post.

It didn't start out as a grumpy post, though.  I left what I thought was a courteous comment last night saying that it was incomplete to list benefits of the Pill without also listing its risks.  I provided links to mainstream documentation of what I acknowledged were low-incidence complications.  And the blogger wrote back to say, "Hi, Jamie! Thank you for your thoughtful comment. For some women, the risks of the Pill do outweigh the benefits, although I personally think the Pill is great." 

Okay, actually, she didn't say anything remotely like that.  But I have this silly hope that people who disagree can have civil conversations and acknowledge their common ground, and I am frustrated by the elusiveness of what seems like a modest goal.

I have long been frustrated by the way the risks of the Pill are presented.  Articles that say, "Although the Pill may have undesirable side effects, it is safer than pregnancy" -- they drive me up the wall.  I have read that such comparisons are statistically invalid, because the studies available at the time I was reading about it compared morbidity and mortality for populations of pregnant women and populations of Pill users -- without correcting for the fact that Pill users tend to be young, healthy women with access to health care.  No doctor who valued his license would prescribe the Pill to a 42-year-old brittle diabetic smoker with uncontrolled high blood pressure, but she is free to become pregnant.  Obviously, her risk of health problems is far higher than that of a 19-year-old healthy nonsmoker.  (I have to think that there are better studies available now, but I don't keep up on the literature at all -- Alicia? anybody know?)

But the larger issue is the false dichotomy:  either you take the Pill or you get pregnant, so make your decisions based on those two options.  I used to say it was like comparing apples and oranges, but that doesn't quite get it.  Oranges are cheap, nutritious, and tasty -- much like apples.  Here in my insomniac grumpy state I'm going to say it's like comparing apples and fugu, the expensive and occasionally deadly Japanese fish whose popularity leaves me scratching my head.

Fifteen years ago I would have found that a preposterous analogy.  I grew up in a mainline Protestant denomination, in a family that viewed contraception as normal and responsible.  When I heard that there were some people who didn't use contraception, I thought, "What's the matter with them?"

In the year after I finished college, I found myself unexpectedly drawn to the Catholic Church.  I didn't understand the teaching against contraception, but I was willing to follow it.  My mother has seldom been so angry.  In her view I was waving my hand in the air, calling, "Oh, boot heel of the patriarchy?  Come on over and grind me into the mud, please!"

What I have never been able to explain satisfactorily to my mother is that NFP is empowering.  For my college friends and me, our fertility was something capricious if not downright malicious -- something lurking in the corner until it could smack us upside the uterus with a pregnancy.  It wasn't until I took an NFP class that I realized my fertility is a gift, whether or not I am in a position to get pregnant in a given cycle or a given year.  NFP showed me that I could live in harmony with my fertility instead of bludgeoning it into not-quite-submission. 

One criticism of NFP is that it takes some learning, and that's true enough.  You can learn how to use the Pill in one visit to your doctor, but it can take months to get comfortable identifying changes in your cervix.  Once you have the knowledge, though, it's yours forever.  You don't have to wonder if you're pregnant or just late.  You don't have to wonder what's going on when you're nursing a baby.  You don't have to be afraid that you only have two unappealing choices:  either synthetic hormones or perpetual pregnancy.

When we were engaged, I was really stressed about NFP.  I envisioned long years of abstinence and anxiety.  The reality has been something else entirely.  If I follow my previous pattern after the birth of this baby, I will have had a total of five periods in the eight years between January of 1999 and January of 2007.  (I do love breastfeeding.)  In only one cycle since January 1999, the one immediately following my miscarriage last year, have we sought to avoid pregnancy.  A couple of times when my youngest was a toddler and I was unsure how working would affect my fertility, I said, "Talk to me in a day or two; I'm not quite sure what's going on today."  And that's it:  we've had no worries about surprise pregnancies, no doctor visits to discuss birth control, no side effects from synthetic hormones, no pharmacy bills, no "oops I forgot to stop at the drugstore" moments.  Somebody should market that!  Except -- wait -- it's free.  And it's way too uncomplicated for a technophilic culture like ours.

All right, I'm back after a shower and a cup of coffee, and I'm feeling more measured.  A couple of disclaimers are in order:  I know the Pill is safer than fugu; I know that our practice of NFP has been made easier by my longer-than-average stretch of postpartum amenorrhea; I know that my situation as a married Catholic woman with a faithful husband is different from the reality many women face.  I know there are lots of happy fugu eaters out there.  Although some NFP advocates call for a return to the Comstock laws, I'm not looking for a fugu ban.  I'm just saying we should have more apples in the grocery store.

I still think it's a little odd that the Pill is so widely accepted.  Is any other normal body function routinely suppressed in healthy women?  Is there any other case in which we blithely use synthetic hormones to interrupt the conversation of hypothalamus and pituitary, to squelch normal organ function?  Absolutely, the risk of complications like liver tumors, stroke, heart attack, gallbladder disease, retinal thrombosis, and death in Pill users is tiny.  But every single case -- as well as every case of nausea, headaches, mood swings, and the other less alarming but far more common side effects -- every single one is iatrogenic, caused by medical intervention that interrupted a normal physiological process.  If I were a doctor who had pledged "first do no harm," that would give me pause.

Very few doctors seem to agree with me, though.  I am not the poster woman for successful NFP use, because I had severely irregular cycles in my teens and twenties.  Every doctor I asked about it offered me the Pill.  I don't want to take the Pill, I told them.  As soon as I said that, the conversation was over.  The bag of tricks was empty.

And yet the solution (discovered when my NFP teacher sent me for help) was so simple:  I gained five pounds and implemented some stress reduction strategies.  Hey presto -- the improvement was remarkable.  I will never have ovaries you could set your watch by (especially not now, while they're on the biennial plan), but I have no complaints.

No complaints, that is, except about the difficulty of getting to this point.  In the pre-Web days when I was trying to get started with NFP, good information was absurdly hard to find -- even from a doctor.  Not enough has changed on that front.

Some of my girlfriends who took the Pill in their twenties have said things like, "I'm never taking the Pill again," and, "I told my doctor I was unhappy with the Pill, but he said it was better than getting pregnant."  Sometimes I hear it from women at breastfeeding support groups, too:  they don't like the spotting, or the mood swings, or the sudden drop in milk supply.  One woman's doctor told her that it was better to supplement with formula than to get pregnant at three months postpartum.  (Excuse me.  The memory causes me to stop and -- pound pound pound -- beat my head on my desk for a minute.  I'll stop now, though.)  Why doesn't he know that LAM is more effective than the mini-pill?

Women are going to their doctors and saying, "I'm looking for something sweet and crisp and vegetarian that starts with A.  Can you help me?"  And in response too many of them are hearing, "Well, today we have fugu sashimi and fugu soup..."

I am thinking about all the delicious apples in the world -- Braeburns and Fujis and Galas and Honeycrisps, versatile and inexpensive and good for you.  Calendar rhythm is the Red Delicious in this analogy:  nearly worthless but still mysteriously ubiquitous, held up as an object of ridicule whenever apples are on the table.  And did anybody else ever see that book on astrological birth control?  If you're a Scorpio and he's a Leo, you can groove on the 3rd, the 5th, the 7th through the 13th, and from the 18th to the end of the month.  I wish I had bought it when I saw it in a used bookstore; the memory makes me laugh.  Maybe that one is like a crabapple:  unfit for use unless modified beyond recognition.

The birth control issue can be a litmus test for both Catholics and non-Catholics.  For some Catholics, the degree of a person's opposition to birth control is a measure of her allegiance to Rome; for some advocates of reproductive freedom it is a handy gauge when evaluating for wingnut-fruitcakeness.  I disagree with both points of view.

We are closing in on twelve years of marriage, in which we have never used contraception.  I cannot offer it as evidence of personal piety, though.  If all I had to do to get to heaven was stay away from contraception, you could plan my canonization Mass now.  Unfortunately, that "love thy neighbor" business still kicks my butt.

I would also dispute the opposing conclusion, that a woman who says "I will not use contraception" is a rabid militant hyperzealous far-right-winger ill-equipped for life in this millennium.  I am none of those things, but I'll still say no thanks to fugu.

For a while now I've been kicking around ideas for an NFP post.  At first I was going to say that I had decided to give up teaching NFP because my heart wasn't in it anymore.  Then I was going to say that one of the things I like about PCT is that it's in a diocese with an excellent (and less politically charged) NFP program, and maybe I wouldn't give it up after all.  As I have been thinking about these issues, remembering how glad I was as an engaged woman to hear a friendly voice on the phone saying, "Yes, I used to have trouble finding my cervix, too," I am feeling an obligation to keep teaching.

Not everybody wants an apple.  It may be that I hear so many women complaining about the fish of the day because my own sympathies lie that way.  But my hope is that reliable information about reliable natural methods of family planning will become as mainstream as apples in the produce aisle.  Maybe I can help to make that happen.

If I put a pot on my head, will you call me Jamie Appleseed?