Originally written as a guest spot on Lynnie’s Lane on September 30, 2018
View original post here: https://dsw3516.wixsite.com/website/post/being-brutally-honest-about-natural-family-planning
Edited and updated on 8/4/2020 after the birth of my beautiful daughter in May 2020
Part 1: My Experience with NFP prior to pregnancy: Written in 2018 when I first began Natural Family Planning
The exits are to your right, left, and straight ahead. I tell you this because this article is about to get entirely too real, even for me as I type it and live it. We are going to have a very open and honest conversation about sex, natural family planning, and all the interesting things that our bodies do as women when we stop taking hormonal birth control. If you have a sensitive stomach and an even more sensitive brain, this post is not for you my friend, please see yourself out.
However, if you are interested to know more about hormonal birth control versus natural family planning, and hear about my hilarious journey to embracing my womanhood, grab some popcorn and stick around because this is about to get really interesting.
Viewer discretion is advised.
Step 1: The scary MONSTER of a decision
My sweet, dear husband called me one day after work and said to me, “How do you feel about not taking birth control anymore?”
Do you know my response?
Laughter.
After I realized I was laughing alone, I said, “Wait, you’re serious?”
We had already had the conversation about wanting children in the future, but we also both knew that realistically we wanted to have a plan.
We wanted to wait until after graduate school was over for the both of us, and we thought that the only way to plan our family was me being on hormonal birth control. Thus – the laughter coming from my body when he posed this question.
Why would he want me to stop taking my birth control now? Was he trying to say he was ready to have children now? Had something happened at work that made him change his mind? Had our plan not been clearly communicated to one another? Or – the more probable one in my head -- HAD HE GONE MAD?!?
He then explained to me that he had seen a patient that day, a woman in her late 20's, that had experienced several strokes as a side effect of her hormonal birth control, as well as breast cancer that had also been tied to her hormonal birth control.
For a little background for those of you that don’t know me very well (or for some of you that do – I am pretty private about this stuff) I have had several breast cancer scares since being in my 20's, and I have a history of breast cancer on both sides of my family. I quickly began understanding, this wasn’t my husband losing his mind; this was my husband gaining clarity sparked by fear. I was skeptical, but agreed to do more research and consider other methods of birth control that were non-hormonal.
Step 2: Convincing myself this is a good idea
After weeks of research being done by both myself and my husband, we decided at the end of my hormonal birth control pack for that month I would not renew my prescription and we would try natural family planning. For all you ladies out there who take hormonal birth control, your inner voice (or your outer voice) is screaming IS THIS LADY CRAZY!?!? Trust me, been there, heard that voice, and I had to tell that tiny little lady in my head to calm down!
(Before I continue to explain what convinced me personally, I want to say that I am a HUGE advocate for women having access to all forms of birth control. I know how important it was for me to have access to birth control throughout my earlier years of life, and I will always advocate for women to be able to make the choices that are best for their health and their lives, this was just the best choice for my season of life and my family.)
During my research, I found that strokes are much more likely in women who are taking hormonal birth control. I also found that heart attack risks increase, blood clots are more common, and the risk of breast cancer is slightly increased as well. With my familial history already greatly impacting my life, going through one breast tumor removal myself, and with another possibly on the horizon now, I thought about how I was taking a pill every day that further increased my risk of these health issues instead of protecting myself and taking care of myself in the way that my body needed (and had been desperately screaming at me to do for years). Personally, these health risks were a huge deciding factor in convincing me to give natural family planning a chance.
Religion was also a big part of our decision. My husband was raised Catholic and I was raised Pentecostal. My husband was taught about NFP growing up, and we took an NFP class together before we got married. We both prayed on this decision for several weeks and felt in both of our hearts that moving forward, it made the most sense for our family to at least give it a chance.
The next step in my journey was calming the raging war between my logical brain and that annoying little lady in my head again, who I finally formally met, and her name is control.
Step 3: Fear of letting go of the 5-year plan
Basically, what NFP looks like is I take my temperature every morning as soon as I wake up, record it on an online charting system, and then go about my day as normal. Throughout the day, when I use the bathroom, I have to record the traits of the cervical mucus that comes out of my vagina.
You know, normal daily stuff, right?
I told y’all this was not for the faint stomached.
In a nutshell, certain types of mucus means you’re fertile and other types of mucus mean you’re infertile, and matching those with high and low temperatures helps you to learn your cycle. When using NFP to achieve pregnancy, charting all of this shows you when to have sex to have the highest chance to conceive. When using NFP to avoid pregnancy, like we are right now (2018), this chart shows you what days you should avoid sex because you are the most fertile.
Easy, right? Wrong.
I could never fully explain the horror of what that first week of natural family planning looked like in our house, but I can tell you it was a lot of crying, feeling lost, questioning our choice, and fear.
Fear of not having control.
Fear of the slightest chance that my 5-year plan would not work out the way I wanted.
Fear of pregnancy coming before we were “ready”.
I thought that taking a birth control pill every morning gave me complete control over my own fertility and family planning, and I felt like this whole shady temperature taking game was the opposite of having control.
I felt like my life was in complete and utter chaos.
After talking with my husband about these fears (multiple times), he reminded me that I was more in control of my body and my health now than ever, it was just going to take time, and if I didn’t like it I could try something else.
And it did take time.
It took several weeks to be exact.
But after several weeks of being very cautious about when to have sex, taking my temperature every morning, learning my different types of mucus, and dealing with the detox from hormonal birth control (See Step 4 for the nasty details of what that looks like), I felt I was gaining more control back and I felt more EMPOWERED than ever.
I COULD ACTUALLY MAKE THIS WORK.
Step 4: The nitty-gritty, nasty, truth of our bodies
I couldn’t talk about NFP without giving you the nitty-gritty details about what happens to a woman’s body when she stops taking hormonal birth control, so I made a list as the weeks went on about all the weird things that happened to my body throughout this journey. Let’s take a look see, shall we?
I’d like to call this one, “weird things that happen to your body when you stop taking the birth control pill” a musical.
Just kidding, unless you want to sing it, then be my guest, be my guest.
1. My nipples hurt to be touched, even by my bra sometimes, and ESPECIALLY when washing my body in the shower. (Happy to report, after a few weeks this returned to normal! Yay!)
2. I was constipated, had diarrhea, and was constipated again. I have always had issues having a regular bathroom routine to be honest, but I am happy to report that now that I am off birth control everything in the bowel area is more regular than ever before. Little did I know, when my bowels started working naturally as intended, I would no longer feel constantly bloated. This was a huge relief and probably one of the biggest physical changes that I could feel in my day to day life.
3. My face broke out, like a lot, and all in the same place. I would get one break-out cleared up and then the next one came with a vengeance. I learned this was because all my natural hormones were learning how to get balanced out into their natural form. After a few weeks, my face returned to being clear and I wasn’t obsessively doing kale-dead-sea-water-from-the-top-of -mount-fuji-face-masks.
4. Stuff came out of my vagina that I have never seen before. Vaginal mucus is quite a scary sight when you’ve been on hormonal birth control for ten years and your body has never had a normal cycle. Holy cow. To be quite honest, at one point I thought I had Jello coming out of my vagina and I was worried that I would have to explain THAT to the emergency room doctor until I read more in the
NFP book we were using and learned this is totally normal.
5. I LOST 7 POUNDS. Y’all I didn’t exercise or eat green kale infused chips or anything. I just dropped 7 pounds like magic.
6. My sex drive became way more intense. The intimacy in our marriage has increased greatly because of this lifestyle change. And on the weeks we can’t be physically intimate because of fertility? We are pushed to think outside the box and find other creative ways to make each other feel beautiful, wanted, and loved.
Step 5: Embracing and stepping into my womanhood
All of this brutal honesty and vulnerability has been for me to tell you that YOUR WOMANLY BODY IS AMAZING.
It is powerful.
Strong.
Fierce.
And you are in charge of keeping it healthy and happy.
I feel more empowered now than I ever have before, and I am so incredibly proud of my female body and what it does for me every day.
Whatever you’re afraid of? Do it.
Feeling super uncomfortable about it? Good, embrace that feeling, you’re growing.
Want to know more about NFP? Call me, I will be so honest with you that you will wish you’d called me way sooner.
And the biggest fear for me – afraid of not having control over your life?
Let go of the need to control the outcome of everything.
Trust the process.
Trust your womanly intuition.
If you’re religious, trust God and his plan for your path in life.
And most importantly, trust yourself and your body.
You can take control of your health – you just have to take the first scary leap!
“You don’t always need a plan. Sometimes you just need to breathe, trust, let go, and see what happens.” -Mandy Hale
Part II: My experience using NFP to achieve pregnancy
After re-reading my experience above – and laughing at how naïve I was when I wrote the original post about natural family planning – I thought it was only right to share that I am still using NFP in 2020, 2 years later. I most recently utilized NFP to conceive our daughter, Eliza Josephine, who was born on May 29, 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. She is wonderful and again, I felt so empowered that I knew my body enough to know when I was healthy enough to try to get pregnant, and to be able to track everything right down to the day she was conceived. (and especially during this uncertain time with the pandemic occurring, I have felt very thankful to not have to leave my house and go to a pharmacy to pick up birth control!)
Here are a few updates to my original post with some new helpful tidbits I have learned along the way the past two years:
1. The fear I originally felt subsided pretty quickly after using NFP for a few weeks/months. I know that I was mainly afraid of losing control of my own reproduction, but I honestly feel more in control now than ever because I am so in tune with my body. If something is off – like I am getting a cold or am really stressed – my cycles and temperatures reflect that and I am able to reflect on how I am actually feeling, rest my body and mind, and do what is best for my physical and mental health.
2. Something really weird happened when I stopped taking birth control (Okay a lot of really weird things happened as you can see above but this one was a longer lasting mental effect). I felt I had mental clarity again. I didn’t know I was lacking this clarity until I regained it. Looking back, when I was taking hormonal birth control I felt like I was living in a mental fog. It was harder to remember things and it was harder to decipher how I was feeling a lot of the time, but now I feel very clear headed.
3. My emotions leveled out in a way that again – I didn’t know I needed until I got it. I am way more self-aware and in tune with my emotions now than I used to be and I don’t blow up or get angry as easily anymore. I am level headed and can talk out how I am feeling….even in the week leading up to my period.
4. I hate to report that the cervical mucus does not get any better! It still freaks me out to see what comes out of a woman’s body every month and I am still surprised when my body does exactly what it is supposed to do in making the right kind of mucus for fertility when I ovulate each month. It is very interesting, but also still very weird to see!
5. When we were ready to get pregnant, I knew exactly what days of the month I was most fertile and that felt so empowering to me. We honestly stopped tracking everything when we wanted to conceive that way it wasn’t stressful, but what was empowering was I knew if we didn’t conceive I could immediately pick up where I left off tracking to see if we could be more efficient in our “trying” phase. (This is not to say NFP works for everyone to conceive. I know people who have unfortunately experienced miscarriage and loss and infertility when trying NFP out. I am just saying it worked really well for our situation specifically).
6. Breastfeeding throws a whole new loop of scary into NFP! Our daughter is 2 months old and we are starting to track everything again to try to get a baseline for me and get an idea of what my postpartum cycle is like, but because I have no period/irregular periods while breastfeeding, everything is up in the air and my cycle chart is a mess. It looks like a first grader drew it…seriously. Maybe when I am more confident with breastfeeding and NFP – I will update this again with what I have learned. For now – I am fearful and feel out of control again, but I have decided that is just a phase I go through with new things! Breastfeeding and using NFP is definitely a new thing all in itself and deserves an entire book just about what to expect with that!
Overall, I am still extremely happy with using NFP as our chosen form of “birth control” and I can’t see myself ever wanting to go back on hormonal birth control. It works really well for our family and it is helping me and challenging me every day to have faith and to keep lines of communication open with my husband about our plans for our family.
The pros to my physical and mental health from using NFP outweigh the fears and uncertainty that comes with learning something new and taking that leap of faith!