Loosing my Fertility and Looking Beyond Babies

A few months back I wrote a post (here) about fertility and the possibility that I may be loosing mine. It was mostly a rambling post to process the possibility that I may be done with my childbearing years.  Today I am re-reading that post and ministering to myself as I come to terms with that possibility being a reality.  Turns out the specialist I saw has found the sources (three!) of my problems and they are all able to be remedied by a hysterectomy and some other surgical stuff at that same time.

The hysterectomy is the big think though - that is where they remove your uterus.  Your womb.  The home were my 5 babies grew and one baby's heart stopped beating. Ugh.

They are going to take the uterus and leave the ovaries so that I will hormonally still be mostly the same, I just obviously won't have a menstrual cycle or the possibility of having kids naturally.  I will still go through menopause (and get those lovely hot flashes) at the normal time, but I won't obviously loose any cycle then because I am loosing it with the surgery.

Cognitively... I am okay with all this.  I have four beautiful children to wake up to every morning. I have had 5 pregnancies and 4 C-sections. I have a medical solution to my pain and soon I will be pain free and able to really live again like a healthy person. It will mean 2-5 nights in the hospital and 4-6 weeks to heal so that isn't so bad.

Emotionally I am still not OK.  Not at all.  I keep asking myself why do I have such a heavy heart?

Emotionally I am filled with such sadness. The slow down in my blogging is a reflection of the darkness that is settling over me. I just don't want to do anything anymore. I want to escape. I don't want to think about it and I don't want to write about it. I really just want to sit in my room with a good book and forget about everything around me.  Cheerful right? This blog post itself has taken over a month to write.

Accepting the reality that I won't have any more kids is a shock to my system and I can't help but think of those women who DON'T have a full house already.  So first and foremost I am sad for others.  Just having a little glimmer of what it must be like, makes my heart feel like it is breaking - not for me but for them.  I can't possibly know what that feels like to have empty arms and to know that your body isn't working in accordance with your will.  I feel a bit betrayed by my body and really, in all honesty, that uterus has served me very well.  It was quite irritable during pregnancies but it didn't fail me.

There is a larger part for me however, that sees my sadness is tied up with a sort of confusion.  As a Catholic woman being open to life is part of who I am.  Even though my husband and I weren't planning on more kids, we certainly weren't closing any doors if you know what I mean.  We have had our own struggles with NFP (which I wrote about here), but have generally embraced it since my conversion. For us, "being open to life" has always been inextricably linked to having kids and practicing NFP. And now it isn't.

Why I am okay with my husband not bringing me flowers

Early into my courtship with the young man who would become my husband, I was told three things.

First, he would never get me anything from a "list".  He hated the idea of giving a predictable gift. 

Second, he would be a work-a-holic like his dad. He planned on working as many hours as possible and successful in his career.

Lastly, he wouldn't buy me flowers on Valentine's day.  They raised the prices so much on that day it was just a rip off.

None of my husband's predictions turned out to be true (Praise God!!), but they did set my expectations.  He was a romantic at heart (see number one), but practical at the same time (see number three).  As it turns out, the only two days I ever (and still only rarely) get flowers is on Valentine's Day and our Anniversary.  Maybe Mother's Day if he is also ordering them for his Mother and Grandmother.  And I am really okay with that.  

After a few years of marriage, I realized (among other things) that if I wanted flowers, I was going to have to make it really obvious.  Being passive aggressive, I devised a strategy of

What I Did on my Summer Vacation: Double-Dating in England

The kids are back in school (phew) and I have a moment to breathe in the serenity of a quiet (for now) home.  The last time I felt this relaxed was- oh, just a few weeks ago.  I had to look through my old posts to confirm the unbelievable - I hadn't yet blogged about the greatest, most fantastic part of my summer.  My instagram peeps got to see the best of the photos but now I realize that I never actually wrote a record of it.  So here goes...


What I did on my summer vacation…





A few years back, my friend and her husband hatched a great plan for a dual-family vacation.  We were going to do something EPIC for our husbands 40th birthday and go to Europe.  All 6 of us and 10 of them.  It was going to be crazy - rent a villa, invite some more friends, and just hang out in the south of France or somewhere equally cool for a few weeks.

We got passports for all the kids.

We looked at amazing places to rent.

We looked at plane tickets.

Then we booked a place in California.

It turned out to be a wonderful vacation, but it certainly wasn't the European Get-Away of our dreams.

Fast-forward to spring, and these same friends are at it again talking this time about a couples trip to England.  Now England is one of my favorite places. I love

The Real Story: My love-hate relationship with NFP

Like most Catholics who practice NFP I hate it and I love it both. 

A friend and mother of six beauties summed it up well when she said "I know that if I want to, you know, then I should only, you know, if we are ready for another baby".  

Engaging in the marital embrace is something that is not done on a whim unless you are open to another baby.  When you are postponing conception, the marital act is a highly anticipated and carefully charted-for-event. And that is what I hate about it.  

I hate having to say no.  

I feel like my body deceives my husband. It sends out pheromones and I maybe I flirt, but once the kids are tucked we really are slaves to the chart.  And that stinks. 

I love it because each month my husband has to wait for me.  I love it because he knows what is going on with me and cycle.  I love it because it has freed my body of the toxins. I love it because I am able to give myself to my husband freely and receive his love in return.  

I love it because it gave us Anna.  

We decided to risk it and break the rules and here she is 

Most recently, practicing NFP has helped me to more deeply understand the union of husband & wife.  In the model of the trinity, husband and wife are like God the Father and God the Son - and from the love of the father and the son comes forth the Holy Spirit.  The love between God the Father and God the Son brings forth the Holy Spirit.  

Similarly, the love that my husband and I share is multiplied - sometimes (5 times in our case) in the form of a child.  

But in reality it is multiplied many more times that just when we conceive.  The love between a husband and wife is a love that can't be visibly seen.  

The marital embrace is the love that cools hurt feelings. It is the love that washes away annoyance.  It is the love that brings forth charitable acts and thoughtful comments.

When you routinely go without the opportunity to share in that life-giving act of love, you are able to notice the difference in your marriage, and your appreciation for that gift grows. 

So here's to lots of marital embraces… and learning patience and self-control too.

Thanks for stopping by to think with me!

14 things in 14 years: What my marriage has taught me thus far

After the cake is cut and the guest have gone, the wedding becomes a marriage.  

Better Than Eden is doing a great link up this week and gave me the idea of writing one thing I have learned for every year of marriage.  This year we will celebrate 15 years of marriage and in the last 14+ there are a few things I have noticed that are worth sharing.  I have included the obvious, but also the subtle.

How to be Your Husband's Mistress

Picture this - someone giving your husband unabashed attention, clearly being happy to see him, listening to him he speaks, sneaking around a little, and cherishing the limited time they have together.

That someone can and SHOULD be you.

In a recent survey, 48% of men rated emotional dissatisfaction as the primary reason they cheated (Neuman, 2015).   It is not all about sex.  So here are 8 easy tips for how to be your husband's mistress (and a rockstar wife).

1.  Get pretty for him.  Not because he will leave you if you don't - do it because it shows that you care what he thinks of you.  It shows that you want to be attractive to him.  Only 12% of cheating men said their mistress was more physically attractive than their wife.  Putting on a shirt that is not decorated with baby spit up is a nice gesture if you want a hug when you see him.

10 tips to survive the sleeplessness of parenthood

A few years ago Samuel L. Jackson did a fabulous narration of a very vulgar story book entailed Go The Fok to Sleep.  You can catch the youtube here.   Do not listen to it with your children around.  Or your parents.  Or any CPS workers.  But if you are sleep deprived and have headphones handy, it may make you laugh until you cry.

I clearly remember the time when I first realized that I wouldn't ever sleep like before.  I had a 6 week old baby and I was sitting at the kitchen table talking on the phone. That was before texting, when friends actually talked on the phone.  I asked my friend, who had a 1-year old and a 4-year old, how soon I could expect to get some sleep.  She laughed and told me she had been up the night before too.  What??  Wet beds, sick kids, nightmares, dry throats, shadows on the walls, whatever.  Parents don't sleep.  I was shocked.   Really I was.  She only had two kids!  I was so unprepared for that.  I cried.  I really did. I sat at my kitchen table and sobbed.   I just wanted 8 hours of sleep.  Was that so hard?

Um.

Yes.

It is actually impossible most nights.

Babies get up in the middle of the night, little kids get up, big kids get up.  Then your kids enter the teen years and they sleep and sleep and sleep, but they don't go to sleep until later, robbing you of any 'alone time' to decompress with your spouse.  Or you are up late waiting for them to come home.  I am told that this is precisely the age when we parents are up worrying about them rather than being physically out of bed.  Supposedly that continues through life, until you switch to worrying about your own parents.  There are also all sorts of other things that ail adults and keep us from having a good night sleep.  Some are self induced like too much caffeine, or alcohol rebound; others just part of aging -changing prostates and achy joins.  My newest nemesis's are the barking dog next door and my 8 year-old's night terrors.

So how do parents cope?  

1- Redefine your normal.  A normal night

Natural Family Planning: Safe and effective in a happy, healthy, marriage

This week is Natural Family Planning (NFP) awareness week so I figured I would open a potential can of worms (since my audience is NOT exclusively or even mostly Catholic), and write a little post about NFP.  When I became Catholic, I was a married mother of 2 and a contraceptive pill user.  It worked for us.  Really well.  We had spaced our two children roughly how we wanted them spaced.  My husband and I both feared that when I became Catholic the 'birth control thing' was going to be a hard hurdle to get over and we would end up with a dozen kids - back then we were still under the dilution that lots of kids was something other than an awesome thing.   So I came to NFP a bit reluctantly.  My engineer husband, who did not want to still have kids in diapers when he had kids in college, came to the first class even more reluctantly.

You get what you pay for…and 8 other truisms from our remodeling project

I feel like I could do a whole series on the experience of remodeling our bathroom,  but in an attempt to keep this post from diverging too far off topic, I will keep it to one long post.  

About a year & a half ago we started the mental part of remodeling our bathrooms.  I looked at photos and my husband and I sketched stuff out.  Our experience with remodeling prior to this was fairly hands on.  My dad and brother are super handy so growing up there was always something under construction. Before I was married, I lived with my brother in an 1912 (that is old for AZ) house that my dad was renovating in his spare time.  We pulled up the hardwood floors ourselves and stripped them down to re-lay.  I helped knock out the walls, stepped on a rusty nail, got Gig Gulps & burgers for everyone.  I am super handy.  By which I mean I know just enough to get by, and I know when I need to ask my husband or father to step in.  I have no problem encouraging THEM to help me out.  I am a really handy 'support' person.

When it came time to remodel our first bathroom, the idea of hiring someone never even came up.  All we were doing was painting and re-tiling the shower.  My husband learn to lay tile - he is an engineer and they can do everything.  I painted the bathroom a beautiful blue (oops!)  and then promptly re-painted it a dark brown. It turned out beautifully - 9 months later.   

This time, with 4 kids running around, we opted to hire a professional to take care of the job.  


We didn't change the footprint of the space, but we did shorten and widen the shower, add a shower head, and build in a linen cabinet.  It wasn't a complicated project, but it turned out to be a lot more complicated than we expected.  I know everything always takes longer than you think it will.  I knew that before we started.  But I wasn't expecting a 2 week project to drag on for 2 months. 


There are a couple of lessons I learned that I thought others may benefit, and after the little adventure I need to vent just a bit.  So here is what I have to share...

This summer did you go on a Family Trip or a Vacation?

A few months back I posted the first little essay in what was to be a series on our summer vacation… It was all about getting a passport for a glorious although undetermined trip to somewhere exotic.  Well the reservations are made and the exotic place is…

OXNARD, CA

Just 6 hours away.  No passport required.  No air travel required.  No customs required.  About 1/10th the price of the plane tickets elsewhere. 

So it isn't very exotic, but right about now I am ready to go anywhere to escape the triple digits.  For those reading from some place outside of Arizona - yes it is a dry heat - but 113 is just not pleasant.  

As I get ready for this grand vacation I have to remind myself that it is really a Family Trip not a Vacation.

According to Merriam-Webster 

A vacation is

"a respite or time of respite from something". 

A trip is 

"to journey to somewhere".

A time of respite (vacation)  versus a journey to somewhere (trip)

My kids travel well.  I am sure it has to do with the fact that we let them play with all sorts of fun electronic devises while we drive.  I am not ashamed to plug them in for a few hours.  The devices only last 2 of the 6 hours - we don't let them play the whole time,  but they feel like this is the only time we say "yes" whenever they ask so they have a good attitude generally.  And then the batteries die.  Please don't tell them about car chargers.  We also bring way too much other stuff- snacks, music, treasure box, books, Madlibs… they are all fun and wonderful things that we work into the mix to make the time fly by.  

It is a lot of work and leaves me with very little leg room. The car it packed to the windows.  Most of the drive I am sitting

On the deEvolution of Parenting: Part Two - Kids as commodities

Continuing from where I left off on the deEvolution of Parenting...

In addition to the introduction of birth control (which allowed women to postpone family life, have fewer children, and peruse careers first), author Jennifer Senior highlights two other areas which have sucked the joy out of parenting - The role of the child has changed and the fact that women work outside the home in greater numbers now.  

She says the role of the child has changed.  We have become a society where we are working FOR our children instead of having them work for us.  Our kids today don't provide an economic benefit but rather are very costly to raise, so we 'require' two incomes.  Put another way, we have become we are a society where Moms work outside the home because they need to, and we have fewer kids because we can't economically handle more. 


In a sense, as parents we are trapped because we want to give our children more and more materially, because we see this as the answer to happiness. 

On the deEvolution of Parenting: Part One - Freedom

I recently posted something on finding the joy in parenting and in life, so my ears perked up when I came across the teaser for a new book entitled All Joy and No Fun: The paradox of modern parenthood.  I have not read this book so I am obviously not reviewing it.  But the Parenting Now segment of the PBS news hour was interviewing the author so I settled in to watch and learn and I was driven to comment on the points made in the interview.  

I was thrilled with them covering this subject. 

Until they started.

Then I was just depressed. 

Dr Mom Answers Again… Go To Marriage Tips

Last week while I was on my adventure vacation, I had to privilege of being featured again on A Mama Collective.    Fitting that the topic was GoTo Marriage Tips given that this week we celebrated our Wedding Anniversary.

For our anniversary this year we had dinner and then did spontaneously something new.  We each offered to work on something that we know bothers the other one.  After 14 years of marriage you KNOW when you are bothering your spouse. You don't have to ask or be told.   So my area was 'not putting stuff away'.  Now here is the thing, if I had said "what bothers you - okay I will work on that" it wouldn't have worked.  Instead I said "honey, I know it bugs you when I leave my stuff laying around.  Starting today I am going to really be conscious of putting my stuff away.  When I don't want to do it I am going to do it anyway as a gift to you".  See it came from ME - not from HIM.  I am choosing to do this for our marriage.  He then offered something up as well and neither of us got defensive or felt put out.  It was really cool.

So anyway, if you missed the Q/A it please check it out.  It is never too late to leave a comment or start a conversation!  If you have a question you want addressed let them know over at the collective and they will pass it on to me OR you can always leave it in the comment section.

Thanks for stopping by!

Character building adventure vacations

This year our character building adventure vacation was mild. And it was actually a good 6 years or so since we have been on one so I was anticipating all sorts of trouble.  Each year my parents and sister and her family head to Lake Powell.  Lake Powell is beautiful, fabulous, fantastic, and the source of most of my childhood vacation memories. 

Five Tips for a Great Mother's Day

My first few Mother's Day were a little rough.  This year I found myself surrounded with as much chaos as normal but somehow had peace.  So it got me thinking about those early years, ripe with expectation about the glorious gifts, the showering of affection and the tranquility that would no doubt befall our home.  Those were days of disappointment.  It wasn't because people weren't trying… rather it was because I wanted to be celebrated, honored, and adored ALL DAY LONG.  Not just for the amount of time it takes to read the greeting card.  "Well yeah" you say.   If you continue to expect that you will most likely end up crying in the bathroom and telling everyone you are "fine".

So here is how you keep yourself out of the  bathroom and keep a real smile on your face:

1- Lower your expectations for your spouse.  He really CAN'T be him AND you and do it as well as you would.  He is probably awesome at what he does do, but be realistic.  If he is lucky, then

Happy Birthday You Old Old Man...

My Husband turns 40 this week.  With the help of his mother and some other fabulous folks, I threw him a nice party.  It was my first grow-up party.  Usually we do the 'BBQ at our house" with family or friends.  I cook and he grills and we just hang out.  Well since it was his 40th I opted for a nice but small shin-dig.

His brother and his best friend from childhood are both just two years older and both called him an Old Man this weekend.  Which got me thinking about age.  In reality I think my husband is "younger" now than he was 14 years ago when we got married.  Honestly he seems to be reverse aging.

I know I am totally biased but the man is more handsome 

and fit than he was when we first began dating.  He is svelte.   

But when I say he has undergone reverse aging, I mainly mean it more than just in his physical appearance.  He is more relaxed, more playful, more spontaneous, more comfortable in who he is. 

When talking about age developmental psychologists refer not only to a person's chronological age, but also to their biological, social, and psychological age.  

The Illusion of Control

Last week I had a really bad day.  Well it wasn't a bad day so much as a bad afternoon/evening.  It was followed with a fabulous afternoon/evening the next day.  The contrast between the two days and how I planned for those days was startling!  But I get ahead of myself…

Here is the set up.  Kids have soccer practice (again) but since we are now doing this 4 nights a week (sigh) I am really trying to implement strategies that get us to all eat healthy and get some time with my hubby as well.  So before the kids are even out of school I have some homemade chicken and rice soup in the crockpot.  I get the munchkins home, and spend an hour or so goading them to get their homework done, clothes changed, water bottles filled and bags repacked for practice.  I load up my crockpot, drinks and all that, and we set out for the park.  I unload the kids and the crockpot and the drinks and the bags and get everything all set up.  The boys take off, Hubby is milling around talking to the other coaches, so the girls and I dish out the soup.