CONFESSIONS
by Broderick Barker
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by Jim Holman.
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CONFESSIONS
July/August 2003
A YOUNG FATHER'S CRY
I was a virgin when I married, an achievement best credited to grace, formation, and the avoidance of the occasion. I remained a virgin for the first four days of my marriage, an achievement best credited to a strong desire not to conceive a child. To a young Catholic trying to toe the party line, it can seem a cruel joke -- you manage to save sex for the marriage bed, only to arrive and find the event cancelled due to ovulation. Contraception is forbidden, as are the standard sexual substitutes of fellatio and masturbation. If you don't want to conceive, you're left with Natural Family Planning -- monitoring the woman's temperature and cervical mucous for signs of fertility and abstaining from sex accordingly. NFP works -- my brother and his wife waited two and a half years to conceive their first -- and besides submitting to authority, I concur with the Church's reasoning in these matters. But that was cold comfort during those first four nights.
We could have just gone ahead and conceived. Children are one of the two great ends of marriage, and we promised during our wedding Mass to accept them as gifts from the Lord. The Church teaches that even licit means of avoiding conception should be employed only for grave reasons. What constitutes a "grave" reason is a matter of prudential judgement. Here was mine: I wanted a year to rejoice over my bride, to develop the ease of living together and to solidify the marital bonds between us.
I did okay for three months. By "okay," I mean I merely pestered my poor bride incessantly for sex during our periods of abstention, without quite breaking down and saying, "Bring on the kids; I want lovin'!" I wanted It, but I didn't want Them, and my wife was forced again and again to confront me with this fact. My halfhearted demands made her feel like I was accusing her of holding out, like it was somehow her fault for being fertile. Hardly loving; hardly the spirit of Natural Family Planning. But I didn't reform. I made up songs.
To the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas":
On the fifth day of Dry Times my true love said to me,
At least a week
The chart says I'm fertile
My fluid's stretchy
Let's hold hands And you can't have any more nookie.
It got to the point where I scratched "nookie" in the leather of my shoe with my fingernail, an event my wife has never forgotten. During that third month, we got lazy about charting the signs, and a slight milkiness in her mucous was all the sign I needed that we were good to go. Needless to say, we conceived.
My wife got a yeast infection, then missed her period. We went to a women's health clinic. The nurse chuckled as she told my wife she was pregnant -- of course! My wife came out and told me the news with an air of quiet excitement. I was, ridiculously, stunned. While she paid the bill, I left the clinic's lobby and stepped out onto a concrete balcony. I actually stared at the sky. I knew that I would eventually become a father. I did not want to become a father yet. I was 23; I was terrified. I offered God an absurd deal (almost as absurd as offering God a deal at all): If I surrendered my will and accepted this child, perhaps he would then take it away. Perhaps my wife would miscarry. Perhaps this could all be just a test. I held on to that notion for maybe three days before I did break down and accept that my wife was pregnant, and was likely to stay that way until the birth of our first child.
Opponents of abortion are fond of this quote from Mother Teresa: "It is a poverty that a child must die so that you may live as you wish." Procuring an abortion never entered my mind. Instead, I asked for one from God. I asked Him to terminate the pregnancy. God would not be culpable -- as the author of life, He may take life when He wishes. And I would have had no active part in the abortion -- except that I would have prayed for it. My first-born son is six now; and seeing him in all his manifest personhood makes my reaction seem monstrous. I see the truth in Mother Teresa's claim: what a tremendous poverty to have wished that he go away and leave me in peace.