By Anna Frei
I would never have known about NFP, if it were not for my beloved, cradle-Catholic husband. When we were engaged and I was still struggling in my own faith life, worrying about how we would make our mixed Protestant-Catholic marriage work, we discussed our future and children. He told me that we should learn and practice NFP, explaining how all his married friends from college practiced it and how it was the teaching of the Church for all couples.
I had never heard of it, and after a brief Google search and some browsing of internet forums (lesson learned: don’t do this, talk to people in-person!), I was convinced that I should be terrified, that it would never work, and that there was something distinctly anti-science and oppressive about it. But we were getting married in the Catholic Church and an introductory session was required for our marriage prep. It was in this session that I heard how it really worked, and this changed things.
Before this intro session, I had never heard the phrase “cervical mucus” (my biology education was severely lacking). It was very shocking to learn that something I had witnessed in my own body was not only serving a purpose, but had its own intricate language. I was excited to learn more about this language and my body. One month before our wedding, I started charting, convinced that I could figure everything out and become an NFP-pro by the necessary date.
If I could go back in time and give myself one piece of advice on this topic, and therefore the advice I give you, dear reader, is this—start charting sooner! One month was not nearly enough time to understand the complexities of the mucus cycle. And on top of that, I found out through my charting that my cycle was atypical and harder to predict. I won’t lie to you, this part was really hard. I felt so frustrated with my body—why couldn’t my chart look like one of the beautiful sample charts in my book instead of a jumble of seemingly random and unpredictable stickers?
But slowly, after I had a few months’ worth of information, my NFP provider, a nurse, saw a pattern and suggested that I might have low progesterone. I got my blood drawn to confirm and started taking bio-identical progesterone in pill form every month.
From puberty onward, I had had intense, eye-piercing migraines, constant cystic acne, and long, painful periods. For all of these, I had seen many doctors, especially for the acne. I had tried elimination diets, antibiotics, two cycles of Accutane, and every topical treatment you could think of. But as I built up multiple months of supplemented progesterone, all these symptoms, which I had accepted as “normal” and thought were completely unrelated, stopped. Why had no one told me that my body worked this way? Why had none of the previous doctors suggested this might be a hormonal imbalance? I deeply appreciated that my NFP nurse and doctor truly looked at me as a whole person, helped me find the root of my issues, and worked in harmony with the design of my body to supplement what it already was naturally producing. Ultimately, I’m not sure why other doctors didn’t, and I can’t know. All I can do with my anger at the years I suffered with these symptoms is surrender it and use the energy to advocate for NFP, because it views women’s health holistically and it healed me in many ways.
Anna Frei is a daughter of God and a Catholic neophyte. She lives with her beloved husband in the woods where they enjoy gardening, reading, and birdwatching.