Point Of View

I readily admit that I share things on this blog that I do not share with another living soul on earth.  It’s why I started this in the first place – I wanted a way to express what I was learning spiritually, what I was “musing” about.  These things  rarely hold  interest, or resonance, with anyone else in my narrow little world, but they are aching to be expressed SOMEHOW.  My efforts to have conversations on some of these topics “in person” have far too often failed miserably, and ended up in hurt feelings and misconceptions.  So, instead, I write.  Here, in this blog that, despite its officially public nature, gets read by virtually no one.  And that’s okay.  It’s not really the purpose anyway.  It’s for me.  And maybe, someday, when they’re old enough, for my children.  But mostly for me.  Because there’s something in me that yearns to deposit these little tidbits into a capsule, and send them out there as a probe into the vast universe, in the hope of making a connection SOMEWHERE.

What do people see of me through the lens of social media?  I often wonder.  Facebook is a crazy, crazy thing.  Truly.  Sure, it’s a way to reconnect with long-lost people, those once thought to be relegated to mere distant memory.  But even for people that we see regularly in “real life”, facebook shows glimpses into lives that we normally wouldn’t see.  Those verboten topics of politics and religion don’t seem to be quite so off-limits in the virtual realm. People feel freer to share things (sometimes too much!!!) through the internet.  Maybe for the same reasons as me – sharing that article, or that opinion piece, or that status, is a little space probe to find SOMEONE out there, who thinks as we do, believes as we do, sees the world as we do. 

The present kerfuffle over the Health and Human Services mandate has been strange for me.  As a Catholic who is growing in her faith, I am mortified by the implications of a government MANDATING that I do something that is against my religious conscious.  When I hear “98% of Catholic women use birth control”, I know that the statistic is skewed, but wholly beside the point. Government MANDATING a church do something against its own teaching is violating a principle bigger than any statistic.  It goes against the fiber of democracy.  I see that so clearly, and yet it seems the vast majority of this society – as represented by the comments and posts I see on facebook and on blogs – sees the situation completely differently.  They see a patriarchal and outdated church, led by celibate men, trying to control women and their bodies.   And sometimes, for a second, I can see that view.  What’s the big deal?  Everyone does it, everyone uses it – why can’t it be paid for by insurance?  Big WHOOP.  Why the big stink? It’s  just a pill.  I can put myself in that point of view momentarily, but then…. I know.  I am a Catholic.   However archaic and patriarchal that may seem, I have LEARNED why the Church is right on this.  I have been taught by the Best.

 My own fertility (or lack thereof) was such a source of heartache for much of my life – I rue that solitary year when we first got married when I took birth control.  I am part of that 98% statistic – the Catholic woman who at some point in her life was on birth control.    Such a farce.  Me trying to stop something from happening that WASN’T going to happen ANYWAY.  Trying to control something that was so far out of my control, it’s laughable.  I shudder now at my support of Planned Parenthood, in seeking contraception there (how naive was I??  I knew something wasn’t right when they laughed at me, told me I was lying about my sexual history.  Had they honestly NEVER met someone who waited for marriage????)  Looking back, I see what an affront that was to God – my trying to seize control of something truly only He could control.  After that first year, I was misdiagnosed with a very serious blood disorder, and had to go off the pill.  I remember receiving the call at work – my doctor urgently saying “STOP taking the pill TODAY.  It can cause clots and KILL YOU.”  That gets a gal’s attention.   A trip to the geneticist proved that the tests were in error and my blood was fine, but still… I see the hand of God in that misdiagnosis now.  God telling me to STOP.  Let my body BE.  I never went back on after that fateful phone call. 

Five years after I stopped birth control, there was still no baby, and we had still not learned our lesson.  I still was seeking CONTROL – to reach out and take from God that which was His by right.  Fertility drugs, fertility treatments, IVF.  Birth control and fertility treatments were two sides of the same coin for me.  I’M in charge of my own body.   I KNEW that God wanted me to be a mother.  He would not have put the aching longing so intensely in my heart if He didn’t want that for me.  And yet, I could not see how it would happen unless I did something about it myself.  I did not trust Him and the promise He had made to me.  I would take over His job, or pay someone that could.  And again, looking back, I can see now how God was telling me to STOP.  Let my body BE.  He created it, and HE was in control of it. 

I’m forever thankful that we have a forgiving Father.  All that heartache, all the fear… it was all a lesson.  It was my Father teaching me to trust Him.  He wants good things for us, and will bless us abundantly,  in HIS time, in HIS way – not mine.  And so it was that, after five years of me stubbornly trying to control my own fertility, God manifested HIS power and glory, and blessed us with identical twins.  Naturally.  Or, probably more accurately, supernaturally.  Without an iota of “medical” assistance, but with plenty of “out of this world” assistance.  And to drive home the point even more… the boys were born on my birthday.  A gift from my Father, in no uncertain terms. 

The doctor wanted to put me on birth control after the boys were born, and this time… I refused, much to my husband’s dismay.  It became an area of tension in our marriage, but I could not deny the miracle of my boys, deny the lesson that was so dramatically taught to me.  “You know you’ll be pregnant again within the year” the doctor had told me.  If it was God’s will, so be it, I thought.  But there were pressures.  My husband didn’t want more children, and I couldn’t make him understand that my not wanting to be on birth control had very little to do with having more children or not.  It had EVERYTHING to do with learning my lesson.  With my not saying “Thank you very much, God, but I’ll go ahead and take control back now.”  So I refused, and he resented me for it, and things weren’t good on that front. 

I’ve written before about how the birth of my daughter was prophesied by 10 year old autistic boy while I was at work one day.  That I would have a little girl, who looked like me, and would be born in November.  To me, it was God bringing home the lesson once more.  “Let it be and let ME”.  I could not deny the hand of God in our lives – it was glaring and obvious, and not subtle in the LEAST.  After our daughter was born, Rob wanted me to get my tubes tied.  “We’re getting older, we don’t want any more kids”.   But see, even though the infertility, the miscarriages, and the subsequent miracles were happening to us as a couple, the lesson was being taught to ME specifically.  And my husband lived in the same world as the “98%”, who saw me as somewhat INSANE, who logically thought that if you wanted to avoid something, and medical technology was there, you did something about it.  It only makes sense.  I hear it, and it makes logical sense to me, too.   So my saying “but we need to let GOD be in control!” just sounded like a lame excuse for having a truck-load of kids, which he didn’t WANT.    I’m mortified at the arguments we had about this!   I BEGGED him to not make me violate my conscious in this way.  To not make me figuratively slap my Father in the face by saying “Thank you very much, but I’m going to take control back now”.   And eventually, I just plain refused.    How crazy I know it must’ve seemed to EVERYONE else.  It’s just a PILL.  It’s just a little SURGERY.  Everyone DOES it.  Why was I making it so hard on our marriage????  So, my husband did what he thought best, and had himself sterilized.  Despite my pleadings.  “Fine, we won’t have more children.    I GET that.  But please trust God in that, and don’t do this to yourself!”  I do not own his body, though, and I could not change his mind.  It is what it is, and my marriage remains as part of the “98%” statistic.

I can’t say that my husband regrets his decision, although at times he doubts it.  Sometimes, I know he wonders, just what IF we had another child… would it be so bad?  I never have been able to adequately explain that it really has very little to do with physically having another child or not.  It has everything to do with who is in CHARGE.  Letting our bodies work as they will, within their own natural rhythms as God created them, lets HIM decide – and after all, the Author has a vantage point and a wisdom that we will never have .    He knows us better than we know ourselves, and I have learned well that my job is to trust that. 

But I’m probably just being deluded by patriarchal, celibate men who want to control me through my uterus.