I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me

“I wish someone would have told me this sooner!”

If fertility awareness had a universal slogan, I’m pretty sure that would be it. 

I learned about fertility awareness in the context of Natural Family Planning (NFP) when I was in college. It was a new idea to me, having grown up thinking that the Catholic Church’s prohibition against contraception only applied to premarital sex. But I had an odd group of friends who liked to talk about Theology of the Body and chastity and would randomly stop by dorm chapels to spontaneously pray the Rosary together on Friday nights.

I needed these friends, and though I had begun college with the intention of becoming a doctor, through them God awakened a deep call in my heart to study theology. 

Fast-forward to five years after graduation, I am married and have just given birth to my second daughter. I was desperate to find a method of NFP that would work for me postpartum and was blessed to find Boston Cross Check. My instructor was patient, thorough, and kind. It had been so hard to find her and get the support I needed, so I decided to become an instructor as well, merging my two loves of healthcare and theology.

The moment I knew things had to change was the day I made a client cry. 

We were going through the introductory materials about how the menstrual cycle works and all of a sudden, she burst into tears. I was afraid I had said or done something wrong, so I paused and she said, “I’m just so angry. I’m a nurse. I am a trained healthcare professional. And I was never taught any of this about myself!” 

As the years went by, I heard the same refrain, over and over again from both women and men. “I wish someone would have told me this sooner!” The knowledge gained through fertility awareness was empowering and liberating—but it also awakened a sort of retroactive anger or frustration in so many people, realizing that they could have known all of this much sooner. 

When my eldest daughter turned nine, I began to see where all of these experiences were leading me. I thought about the “puberty talk” I received in my fourth-grade classroom and how bitter I had been when my cycles finally started in eighth grade. I felt like I had been lied to: the cramps were awful, with heavy bleeding and more than a few episodes of passing out or throwing up at school. The best my doctor could offer were birth control pills because that’s all she had been taught to do. And they did nothing but contribute to a battery of other health issues which plagued me for the next three years. 

So I thought about what I could do better for my own girls, and quickly realized that this could be bigger than a family conversation. I sat down and started mapping out a program for girls that could be done before they start their periods, a program which gives them all of the knowledge about cycles that I teach my adult clients, with an added emphasis on care for our selves and other girls surrounding cycles and menstruation. 

Over the next few months, Cycle Prep began to take shape. I decided to exclude any explanations about sex, giving a nod to the “equation of life” which takes place when an egg meets a sperm, but focusing solely on what I thought young girls need to know in order to truly feel comfortable and empowered in their changing bodies. When it was finally ready, I decided to preview all of the materials with my two oldest daughters, wondering what sorts of questions they would have and whether any of it would make sense to them. 

To my delight and surprise, they were really engaged with our conversation! They understood the analogies I had used to illustrate hormone function and were very curious about all the different options they had for hygiene products. They immediately started brainstorming ways they could help other girls and for us, the natural conversation then led to “how does the sperm meet the egg?” This is exactly what I was hoping Cycle Prep could facilitate for families at home—a natural way to keep the conversation going whenever your kids are ready! So I called it a success and made plans to launch the workshop. 

A few weeks after our little Cycle Prep session, my eldest daughter and I were alone in the car. We were traveling into the city to attend a pro-life march—she had heard about “abortion” the year before. She’s always had a tender heart towards little children, so it was no surprise that she found this a very difficult and sad conversation, as did I. She had been joining me in supporting community pregnancy centers, so when we had the opportunity to attend a march, I naturally invited her along. As we were driving, she asked, “Mommy, if someone doesn’t want to get pregnant, why would she have sexual intercourse?” 

Cue the emergency lights flashing in my brain as I tried to stay calm on the outside. 

“Well, sexual intercourse feels good. And it’s a very powerful way for a couple to bond, because it’s so intimate. So sometimes people will want those aspects without feeling like they are actually ready for a baby.” 

“But they go together. That’s what happens when you have sexual intercourse. You get a baby.” 

“Sometimes, yes. But…” I hesitated and then decided to just go for it. “But there are certain drugs that women can take which basically stop their cycles from happening. If you don’t ovulate, you can’t get pregnant.” 

“They stop their cycles?”

“Yep.” 

“But… isn’t that unhealthy? Your body is designed to have cycles and hormones are really important for you to be healthy. So wouldn’t stopping your cycle be really bad for you?”

“Yes, these drugs do come with a lot of unhealthy side-effects, that’s true.” I was beginning to feel really proud of all that Cycle Prep info, but then she took it to a whole new level.

“Well that doesn’t make any sense. You only ovulate once per cycle and the egg doesn’t live that long. If you want to have sexual intercourse but you don’t want to get pregnant, why don’t they just time it so they have sexual intercourse when she’s not able to get pregnant?”

There you have it, folks. My nine-year-old invented fertility-awareness-based family planning.

The rest of our conversation circled around the fact that there were, in fact, methods out there which would teach you about your body and how to plan your family with that knowledge. I explained that this is what I do for my clients and I felt the most supreme sense of satisfaction and validation when my daughter looked at me, with a totally new-found appreciation. 

“Wow,” she said. “You do really important work.” 

I’ll take that one to the bank. 

Now, lest I fall into the trap of shameless self-promotion, the point I want to make is that through this conversation, I have seen the huge impact which comes from teaching girls to truly understand and respect their menstrual cycles. In particular, I think it’s important that we offer opportunities for girls to learn all about their cycles prior to the onset of puberty, so their first experience of a menstrual bleed can be viewed in the bigger context of the intricate design and function of their bodies. 

It wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I realized I had stumbled upon a core teaching of Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body: Original Solitude. 

Towards the beginning of this compendium work, the pope discusses the two different creation stories in Genesis. While the first creation story focuses on humanity being created simultaneously male and female in the image of God, the second creation story focuses on adam, mankind in his primordial state. At the beginning of this tale, adam is neither explicitly male nor female. He is placed in the garden with all of the other animals, which JPII explains would have been an opportunity for adam to focus on the similarities between himself and the animals. Yet this is the opposite of what happens. 

Instead of finding the animals to be like himself, adam realizes that he alone has a unique relationship with God. He alone serves as the steward of this garden, and he alone receives the commandment against eating the fruit of the Tree. This is what JPII refers to as adam’s experience of Original Solitude—the realization that humanity stands apart from the rest of creation, despite sharing many similarities with it. And it is precisely this self-knowledge, this awareness of how different adam is, that allows the male Adam to recognize a truly suitable partner in the female Eve. “The meaning of original solitude enters and becomes part of the meaning of original unity,” JPII says. Without this first experience of self-knowledge, Adam and Eve would not recognize the value of one another. Original solitude is what enables them to experience true communion. 

Perhaps we can offer this same gift to the girls in our lives. Perhaps we can teach them about the dignity of marriage and sexuality by first teaching them to appreciate the uniqueness of their bodies. In Cycle Prep I tell them that even though cycles are designed to help us eventually carry a pregnancy, this will not be the result of the vast majority of our cycles. Our lived experience of cycles is not primarily about pregnancy: it is about embracing the unique rhythms and complex harmony of our bodies. It is about emotions and bleeds and hormonal headaches and acne. If we teach them to embrace the work and design of their bodies as something which has value outside the context of sexual relationships, then perhaps we are setting them up for a powerful experience of Original Solitude, which will lead them to true communion in their relationships. 

I believe that a truly feminist approach to educating girls about cycles and puberty should have the dual goals of empowering them through knowledge and equipping them to embrace their cycle as a healthy and natural part of how their body is designed to function. I wonder how my life might have been different if I had been equipped back in fourth grade with knowledge about the variety of things which are normal for young girls to experience, and the warning signs which could have led me to seek help sooner. I wonder how my experience of cycles might have been different if my doctor was given the tools to help me with my painful cycles, rather than putting the medical equivalent of a “pause button” over my issues. 

We all deserve better, and I’m encouraged to find that fertility awareness—or perhaps simply “body literacy” for our younger girls—is a growing movement. I cannot wait until the day we can replace “I wish someone would have told me this sooner!” with “I am so glad I learned this from the beginning!”