Ben and Heather

Heather: When we first learned about NFP during our engagement, I was nervous. I had been on and off the pill during my teenage and college years to treat painful menstrual cramps. While the pill reduced these symptoms, I knew that there were a host of dangerous complications that could result from taking it long term, and I also worried about the potential for an early abortion while on it once I was married. For this reason, I was excited by the idea of treating my fertility issues in a more natural way. I started researching nutritional strategies for reducing painful cramps and treating scant cervical mucus from a low thyroid while also learning more about NFP. Changing my diet made a big difference, even before marriage, and this gave me more confidence to use NFP.

 

Heather: I had envisioned having a large family, and sooner rather than later. That said, conceiving on our honeymoon had definitely not been an idea I was terribly excited about at first. But I was already in my early thirties, and if we hoped to have at least several children we knew we didn’t have too much time to waste. After some prayerful discussions following our NFP classes, we decided to go for it! Though Ben was still anxious about the possibility of raising a child so early in our marriage, he had already accepted a promising new job offer before the wedding. We realized that God was providing for us and it was time that we both trusted in his plans more deeply. We began to apply NFP so that we could conceive a child.

Heather: Well, after spending so much time praying and worrying and finding peace in the idea of parenthood so early in our marriage, we did not conceive on our honeymoon…or the month after. I had gone into our marriage thinking that we would certainly get pregnant in our first month of married life. When this didn’t happen, instead of relaxing and putting everything in God’s hands, I started to panic. What had been an attitude of, “We will survive if we get pregnant at the beginning,” turned into, “Why aren’t we pregnant yet?!” Although it only took three months into our marriage to conceive our son Dillon, those two months after our honeymoon brought a radical shift in attitude from nervous acceptance of a pregnancy to a heightened fear of infertility. It seems very silly now, but I had assumed a baby would come from the start. It really taught us that you can do all of the charting “right,” but in the end the gift of life comes from God alone.