What Football and NFP Have in Common, Religious Pandering, and Wimpy Marriage Prep. NFP Week Special Edition.

I'm coming in at the tail end of NFP awareness week and writing about a subject that's been done to death from nearly every conceivable angle, but, dangit...tradition is tradition. Hopefully I manage to find some new angles on this. 

1.) It's really hard to find resources on it that aren't obviously pandering, hit-you-over-the-head religious

"Canonization 2014-The Canonization of Saint John XXIII and Saint John Paul II" by Aleteia Image Partners is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

My very lovely Christian-but-not-Catholic midwife recently asked me to gather some resources for her on NFP. She really doesn't like the pill because it can work as an abortifacient, and she wanted to be able to offer her clients an alternative. She's also really interested in the whole getting to know your body aspect. She asked me to pull together some resources for her on several different methods and where she could find more information on them. 

Well. Several websites and a couple books later, I ended up having to hand her a resource list with a disclaimer at the top, "some of these use religious language because Catholics kind of have a corner on the market with this stuff" along with an instruction book that featured several pictures of Pope John Paul II. 

The only book I could find to recommend (I didn't have a copy in the house I could give her) that didn't have a religious angle was Taking Charge of your Fertility. Everything else seemed to assume, one way or another, that the primary audience was religious in nature. The only website on the Billings method I could find that offered instruction outright assumed everyone was there for Catholic marriage prep, and the pamphlets on the Marquette method I was able to give her, while they weren't overtly religious, seemed to assume everyone reading them was already familiar with other types of NFP. 

We gotta up our evangelization game here people, and have stuff to suggest (more than a single book!) that's a little less catered to Catholic in-culture. I've managed to find websites for a few individual instructors that manage to do this, but that's about it. 

2.) You don't have to print a chart-- you can use graph paper! 

I am somewhat bad with technology, kinda cheap, and just a smudge lazy, so figuring out that the little squares on graph paper are perfect for charting the pee-on-a-stick method I use has been a game changer. 

3.) The meme game on NFP can get pretty legit- comedic GOLDMINE

This is the image I have on the front of my chart binder. 

Need I say more? 

Turns out when you mix sex with frustration with your body, a culture that's just a tad hostile to how you live out your sexuality, and some of the uniquely awkward situations NFP lends itself to...you end up with some pretty freakin' funny stuff. 

Here's a collection of memes I made a couple years back if anyone wants to see more of my impeccable (ahem) sense of humor on this subject. 

4.) The most high-stakes, really-gotta-use-it time for NFP is also the time it's most difficult to actually do.

 Post-partum NFP. You're taking care of a baby, trying to cope with a lack of sleep and regular routine, you're probably breastfeeding and getting up multiple times a night, and it's pretty impossible to pee at the same time every morning and/or be asleep long enough to get a good temperature reading. Add to this the fact that your hormones are on the fritz, going up, down, and sideways unpredictably so that you can't even tell what your body is doing half the time and yeah...it's awful. 

And, of course, while you're already taking care of one baby is not the time most people want to get pregnant with another one and add morning sickness to all that. 

It genuinely bothers me that the NFP that they always seem to present in marriage classes is "normal" NFP where you're in a time of life with a normal routine and steady hormones. Those classes are supposed to be for marriage discernment: I imagine that being told the truth about NFP during that time of life would be pretty darn clarifying.

 "Look at the person next to you and realize that you're going to have to live together during a period where you're both tired, taking care of an extremely high needs individual for an extended period of time, and you're not going to be sure whether or not you'll be able to have sex for several weeks. Think you can do that?" 

If the answer is no-- ta da! Bad decision averted. Or at least an area needing some work has been revealed. 

Instead, couples are just told NFP is "good for true intimacy" and that it's "good for their marriage". That's true, but...

5.) NFP is "good" for your marriage in the same way twice-a-day football practice in 97 degree heat is "good" for a football team (hopefully this analogy is still relatable outside of Texas).

It's painful. It's difficult. It's not enjoyable. (And this can also be true for people trying to use it to have a baby if they've got fertility issues). 

Yes, going through it together will make your relationship stronger, but it does so by dragging all the residual selfishness and problems out front and center and making you work on them. It does so by strengthening your self-denial and relational muscles-- so long as you let it.

 It's not even automatic; you've got to choose love the whole time and not be a jerk or it'll just end up being a nasty mess. 

Kind of a tall order sometimes. It's what we call "sanctifying." 

6.) There is a very high likelihood you will have a cup of urine just lying around your bathroom at some point. 

Just go ahead and make your peace with that now. Even the sympto-thermal method has caught on to the fact that LH strips are easy to use and really helpful-- pee sticks are the present as well as the future, and they're here to stay. 

7.) LH strips look like positive pregnancy tests, and it's a bad idea to leave them out when you're sharing a vacation house with your in-laws.

Let's just say I found this one out through experience. 

That was a fun conversation. Slightly scarring.

Check out the rest of this week's takes here.