When I mentioned the name of this blog to Ann, my friend since
fourth grade at St. Mary’s School and like myself turning 70 this year, she
laughed and said Catholic women’s birth control was an oxymoron. Ann describes her childhood self as “a
tomboy [who] loved to play cowboys and Indians, as well as army, mostly with [another
neighbor hood girl] and all the boys, so much fun. We were re-enactors for hours on end. I liked the energy and drama and imagination."
Although I recall her as interested
in dating from seventh and eighth grade on into public high school, Ann says that
despite a keen desire for attention from boys and men, she was not interested
in sex and would not have sought it out.
Halfway through high school it was her new boyfriend, five years older
than she and a charmer, who led her past the “making out” that had
characterized her previous relationships with boys her own age. They married the summer after our junior year,
had their first child a few months later and three more babies in quick
succession. “I didn’t know how it
happened,” she says of her rapid ascent to motherhood. As
nature would have it,” she says, “Ovulation attracts a man. I understand that now. I had no voice, no choice, none.”
She wanted to be a good wife and mother and to obey the laws of the
church. Although early in the marriage
she had intimations that her husband lacked what it took to be a family man,
her feeling was that “I had made my bed and I must lie in it….It was a time of
confusion and uncertainty….I didn’t think of the future. I was so overwhelmed and busy I was in a
fog.”
Birth control was something Ann discussed with no one, not
her mother, her husband or a friend. A
few years later when another young mother in town went on the Pill, Ann was
amazed at her audacity.
When her husband’s alcoholism, negligence and infidelities
became too blatant for her to ignore and when she began to see his aggressive
tendencies mirrored in her young sons, Ann sought a divorce. Her pastor was horrified by the account Ann
gave him of the ordeal her marriage had been and assured her she would qualify
for an annulment. She did not seek one,
however, putting her energies instead into making a future for herself and her
children. To get a fresh start, she
moved from our hometown to a small city two hours away. She became a hairstylist, and in a shop in
her home pursued earning a living with very little financial assistance from
her former husband. Over the years she was
involved in several relationships, including a short, disastrous second
marriage. At one point she started using a
diaphragm. Attention from men—excitement,
romance, and heart-to-heart talks more than sex--still filled a deep craving,
but experience had convinced her that she hadn’t the resources, material or
emotional, to bring another child into the world. She still didn’t discuss birth control with
friends or family members, not even her sister or her young daughter.
Ann had sent her children to parochial school and taken them
to Church on Sundays, but they were growing up in a very different time from
her own. When it looked as though her
teenage daughter was about to become sexually active, Ann finally broke a taboo
and suggested she might pursue birth control.
“Oh, Mom,” her savvy daughter replied, “I’ve been on the Pill for a
year.” When the daughter married—at a
young age—Ann’s mother gave her a booklet with a calendar set up for the rhythm
method. “Oh, Mimi,” C. laughed, “What am
I supposed to do with this? Put it
between my knees?”
Ann was in her forties and reeling from her second divorce
when an acquaintance suggested, “Maybe you’d like to talk to Nancy.” Nancy, an alcohol awareness counselor,
steered Ann into a reading/writing group on codependency. “That group was my life saver,” Ann says
now. “It gave me permission to be me.”
Such permission is not what Ann grew up with. In hindsight, she now sees herself in a line
of women—her mother and her mother’s mother—raised to put the feelings of
others ahead of their own and to give their husbands carte blanche. Growing up as the oldest girl in a large
family, she was her mother’s primary helper; in high school she took the home economics
course. Gifted and well trained in the
domestic arts, she was prepared to make someone a good wife but not necessarily
to develop her own self. “To be
selfless,” she says “was the mark of a good woman.” She thinks, furthermore, that if her father
had taken a more personal interest in her she might not have craved attention
from other males.
While participating in the co-dependency group, Ann sought
out her mother’s sisters and found that their stories bore resemblances to
hers. She came to see co-dependency as as
crippling an affliction as alcoholism—indeed, the two seemed to go hand-in-hand—and
as “part and parcel with the Catholic Church.”
With her new awareness and her children nearly grown, Ann found time to
participate in a community theater group, to take adult education courses and
to read widely in self-help literature.
Too busy to seek her self-esteem in a man, she stopped dating. She was in her late fifties, attending a play
alone, when she met the man who eventually became her third husband—a match, as
the saying goes, made in heaven.
Although Ann continued to think of herself as Catholic long
after her practices diverged from the Church’s teachings on birth control and
sex outside of marriage, she no longer does.
The final break occurred when a friend in her co-dependency group
discovered that the priest who had spent time at the friend’s house and went
camping with the family had molested all five of her children. For Ann, the priest’s heinous behavior underscored
the lack of concern for individual women and children that she had come to
associate with the Church. “I was not
taught to take charge of my life and I became a case of arrested development,”
she says. “Marriage was all about the
other person.” Until her third husband,
the men she was involved with had shown no desire to gratify her sexually. “My sexuality was stunted. It was all about babies.” To Ann’s way of thinking, it is a desire to
populate the world with Catholics that explains the Church’s opposition to
birth control—and what she sees as its indifference to a woman’s hardships or
her sexual development.
