Let's Not Kid Ourselves

Maruchi Santana was born in 1959 in Cuba. When Castro came to power four years later her family fled to Puerto Rico. With the assistance of Sacred Heart nuns and La Salle priests who were family friends, her parents got work there as university professors. At the age of twenty, Maruchi moved to New York City to pursue a master’s degree. She and John met their first day on campus and married in 1883 when Maruchi was twenty-three.

Not ready to start a family—too young, thesis incomplete, relationship still new—Maruchi and John discussed their options. On both moral and health grounds, the Pill was out. “It didn’t feel right,” Maruchi says. “I didn’t want to put anything in my body.” They used condoms for the next five years, and as soon as they stopped she got pregnant. That pregnancy ended in miscarriage as did the next. Their son was born in 1988, a daughter in 1992 and, after another miscarriage, a second daughter in 1997.

Maruchi and John did a lot of talking and collaboration to come to a vision of what their family would be. Since she was working full time in the company they founded in 1985, she wanted to space her babies about three years apart. That way she could take each baby to work with her for the early months and leave older children at home with a nanny. (Maruchi breastfed and had many “accidents” at work. But people were very nice, she says, at a time when her situation was unusual.)

Maruchi says that although there’s never a right time to have a baby, the couple needs time together first to build a relationship and should feel responsible and ready. Her own mother—and, she conjectures, her mother-in-law, too—got pregnant on her wedding night.  Too abrupt, Maruchi says. Although children bring great love and happiness, the couple needs at least the first year without the stress of pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood.

 Maruchi has experienced mixed emotions in trying to balance family life and weigh options. She feels that every couple should give the topic of family planning a yearly review. She’s seen friends become so complacent with birth control that, to their regret, they wait until pregnancy is no longer easy—or even possible.

The Church, she feels, is remiss in not being open to birth control options and making distinctions among them. “They’re kidding themselves,” she says. In order to act responsibly, young adults need more education on the topic of family planning. She doesn’t like the Morning after Pill, which substitutes abortion for prevention. “The couple should be able to plan at least a day ahead,” she says. “And it’s not a matter of means, because if they can afford the Morning after Pill they can afford prevention.”

Maruchi does not presume to dictate to her daughters regarding birth control. She wishes for them and for all women to be happy and safe and to have children when they feel ready, not before.

More Hazy Hysterectomies

Reading about Rita Joe's experience reminded me that when I worked as an aide in a small Catholic hospital  50 years ago many of the major surgeries were hysterectomies. Were at least some of them stealth sterilizations? Did the mother superior, the Catholic patients, their doctors and perhaps the priest view hysterectomy as an acceptable form of birth control?  Or, rather, as a medical necessity that had infertility as a side effect?  I believe my mother had her hysterectomy because of uncontrollable bleeding although I imagine she was relieved after four children and at midlife to put any childbearing potential behind her. 

Recently a friend my age mentioned that her mother had a hysterectomy because after eight children she didn’t think she had the health or stamina for another.  She had hesitated to have the operation—which her doctor was willing to perform—because birth control was the purpose of it not a side effect. “Are you crazy?” her sister asked in a "Rita Joe" kind of a moment. "Think of the children you already have."

Birth Control Via Hysterectomy

I’m very taken with “Song of Rita Joe, Autobiography of and a Mi'maq poet,"which my summer reading group will be discussing later this week. Rita Joe was born in 1932 on an Indian reservation in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.  Her very early life was poor but also warm and happy.  After her mother died in childbirth, when Rita was five, the child live in a series of Native foster homes until her father was able to reunite the family for one year.  Then when she was ten her father died, and she went to live with a much older half brother and his wife.  That household was so bedeviled by alcohol and neglect that Rita contacted the authorities and asked to be sent to a residential school. The school, run by nuns, operated in a highly regimented manner.  Rita lived there from ages 12 to 16.  After graduating from eighth grade she left to work in Halifax.  In reaction against having her spiritual life so highly organized, she stayed away from church for a year.  She also began drinking rather freely and got involved in a naive and needy way with any man who paid attention to her.  By the time she was twenty, she had given birth to three babies by three different men.  The first she turned over to her older, married sister to adopt.  

While engaged to be married she met a charming Native man whose impulsive proposal she accepted.  Frank Joe, her husband was fond of one of her two children but persuaded her to give the other one to her sister who could find a home for it.  During the next fifteen years Rita and Frank had eight children together. In spite of his many good qualities and despite the love they bore each other, the marriage was tumultuous in large part because of Frank’s womanizing, his drinking and his abusive behavior. 

Rita did not write about her husband’s abuse until after he’d died.  She did finally speak of it earlier, however, and it’s when she went public that he shaped up.  She would leave their home for days, the older children looking after the younger, and seek out elders and other wise people to confide in.  She had come up with the idea that peer pressure can change abusers for the good.  When Rita was pregnant with her last child, her mother-in-law, who was tough and had never allowed either of her husbands to abuse her and who had come to love Rita as though she were her own, smacked Frank as hard as she could with a block of wood and yelled, “Don’t you ever lay a hand on Rita again as long as you live!”  And he never did. Before this time several people, including her mother-in-law warned Rita that she was acting like a doormat.  It’s when she stopped trying to hide the abuse—which, nevertheless, was obvious to others in the community—that matters began to improve.  Eventually, Frank gave up drinking and pursued higher education.  

In her mid-thirties, Rita had a hysterectomy. Although the author doesn't blame her husband for her gynecological problems I can imagine that the severe beatings she alludes to might have played a role."...I was having a hard time with bleeding, miscarriages and stillborn children.  There came a time when the doctor said to me, 'If you want to live for the other children, you must have a hysterectomy.'

"'Yes!' I said. 'Of course I want to live.' I knew what it was like to be without a mother and I didn't want that for my children.  I went to see a priest and told him about this choice. 'You have to make up your own mind.  I cannot tell you what to do,' he said. 'Do what your heart tells you.'  

My heart told me that I should be with the children I had. Excuse me, God, I said, I do not want to die like my mother. I have to do it this way."

It was about this time that Rita began writing the poetry that eventually led to her national fame in Canada.

 

"Conservative"--Generational Shifts in Meaning

Yikes, my last post was in October. I've been busy with other writing projects, but this summer I'm going to seek out more women to interview.

In the meantime, here are some snippets of stories that have set me contemplating about the shifting meaning of the word "conservative." At a talk at the Catholic Worker in Manhattan, progressive theologian Roger Haight, S.J., said that after he spoke at a university, a group of Catholic men who styled themselves as conservative asked to meet with him. “They considered themselves very Orthodox,” 70-year-old Fr.Haight mused, “Yet, one after the other was living with a girlfriend.”(And, I assume, using artificial birth control.)

After Mass on a  recent Sunday, I overheard a conversation between the 83-year-old pastor of a country parish we attend in the summer and a nineteen-year-old parishioner.  The young woman, who has belonged to the parish all her life and always greets the pastor with a hug, was telling him, apparently in answer to his question, that she wouldn’t be marrying any time soon, that when she did she wouldn’t be having kids right away and that when she did have kids she wouldn’t be staying home with them. “Then who will?” asked the priest, who, based on his homilies I would label conservative. 

“My husband, maybe,” she answered.  Both were laughing, the good feelings between them seemingly undisturbed by the chasm between her mileniall stance and his Orthodox training.

A friend my age described a young couple’s Catholicism as “very conservative.” 

“So, they don’t practice birth control?”  I asked.  

“Oh, they practice birth control. They’re not that conservative!”

Relief for Mind and Body

     Jane, a lifelong Catholic, and Bob, a convert, were married in 1958 at the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three.  Bob was attending college on the GI Bill, augmented by his father, while Jane worked to pay the rent.  Before the wedding, Jane told her priest she and Bob would be using rhythm.  That would be permissible, the priest told her, for up to two years.  Early in the marriage, Jane suffered a miscarriage.  After that, the couple was able to avoid pregnancy during the time it took Bob to finish college.  Their first child was born in 1960, and three more followed in roughly two year intervals.  The fifth child was born four years later, in 1970, after the couple thought they’d had their last.

     Jane did not want to have more children.  If anything happened to her in childbirth, who would take care of the five she already had—the Church?  She consulted the wife of a former priest friend about what the Church permitted.  The answer: her decision was whether or not to use artificial birth control; after that, the Church made no distinction and so the choice of what to use would be hers.  Jane talked the matter over with a Protestant neighbor, who said, “Look, Jane, when I die, God will say, ‘Dee, you were a good Protestant.  You used birth control.  You may go to Heaven.’ But when you die, God will say, ‘Jane, you used birth control. You were not a good Catholic.  You may not go to Heaven.’  Does that make sense?”

     Jane went on the Pill.  A few years later she thought she was pregnant and went to her doctor for the urine test.  During the days she awaited the results, she felt terrified.  Because she was nearing forty, she became convinced that the child would be deformed.  She saw herself smothering the newborn.  Around other people, she was able to hold herself together, but when she was alone, she cried uncontrollably.  Then the doctor called.  “Whatever made you think you were pregnant?” he asked.

     Seeing the distress Jane had been in, Bob volunteered to have a vasectomy.  Jane felt vastly relieved.  He consulted a doctor who explained that the procedure was a simple cut and stitch that could be done in-office in a matter of a few minutes.  Bob took a day off from work and felt some tenderness for a day or two, for which the doctor had recommended ice packs.  Back at work, he told a friend about the vasectomy.  By the end of that day, many colleagues were making joking references to it and several left ice packs on his desk. 

Blindsided

 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.