Fortunate Timing: The Prequel to "My Story"

For me and my Catholicism, timing was key.  My family moved back to our home town of Houlton, Maine, when I was nearly ten and we younger kids were enrolled at St. Mary’s School.  All my new friends were Catholic; we mostly lived within walking distance of each other.  It was from Sister Gemma, my teacher in a combined fifth and sixth grade classroom, that I first heard of the primacy of conscience in making moral decisions.  At Sunday Mass, my family knew many of the other parishioners--we were actually related to a good number of them--and all my friends were there.  

Once I started high school, I made new friends, both Catholic and Protestant.  I attended Wednesday evening CCD classes.  One of the nuns at the Catholic hospital ran a sodality.  Each year, we conducted a May procession and crowned a statue of Mary on the back lawn.  We also volunteered in the hospital.  I didn’t expect to go to MYF functions or Rainbow ceremonies or any of the other youth programs sponsored by Protestants.  I was a Catholic.

In recent years, I have learned that for at least one of my Catholic classmates it was painful to be constrained from attending, let alone participating, in the religious or quasi-religious ceremonies of Protestant friends they had known since first grade in public school.  What for me was a feeling of Catholic solidarity was for my friend a cruel and meaningless split existence.

At my secular college, Professor Westervelt,a youngish, gnomish Classics professor, a married Catholic with a passel of kids, was thrilled about Vatican II.  Because I was Catholic and because he supposed me more sophisticated in my thinking than I actually was, he would engage me in conversation about the Council.  In a cover story, Time Magazine declared that the Catholic Church was not a monolith.  I became aware that decisions were being made after “dialogue”—a word associated with the spirit of Vatican II—and voting.  Our Church leaders did not always agree.  Pope John XXIII talked of “aggiornamento,” by which he meant coming to terms with the modern world and “ressourcement,” by which he meant a return to sources, such as the Bible and the early church fathers.  My Church seemed to be catching up with the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation.  Indeed, we began to call ourselves not just Catholics, but Christians.  We were Christians just like the Protestants.

I can’t pretend that at 19 or 20, I understood all this the way Westervelt did, but I caught the spirit of it, the tone of love, dialogue and openness, which was so different from the anathema and legalism that had  dogged the church through what John W. O’Malley in his book "What Happened at Vatican II" calls “The Long Nineteenth Century.”  (Yes, my look back is definitely colored by what I’m presently reading.)

Senior year, a story went around about a classmate of mine and his wife, who had two babies in quick succession.  They were approached by the priest at the downtown parish they attended who said to them, “I hope you’re going to do something to keep from having more babies!”  He obviously wasn't suggesting abstinence.  We assumed he meant artificial birth control.  Was this where the Church was heading? 

Three years later, in 1968, Humane Vitae astonished anyone paying attention by ruling out artificial birth control.  It's obvious looking back that the reaction of many couples in my generation was to ignore that directive--and not to talk about it to much of anyone else.  The topic of birth control, which growing up I had heard alluded to from the pulpit as a matter of "self control," seemed to drop out of sermons altogether.   

  

 A late bloomer, I married at 28.  For the past few years I had been attending Mass at NYU's Newman Center, a decidedly liberal environment. A story going around there was about a young woman who asked the chaplain whether she should sleep with her boyfriend.  He answered that that was a decision he couldn't very well make for her and that she should do whatever would help her become the person God was calling her to be.

In our brief pre-marriage interview, my hometown pastor in Maine said nothing about birth control.  In fact, no priest ever spoke directly to me on the matter—and I never asked for one to, although I knew from my reading what the Church taught.   My husband and I, in good conscience, had already made up our own minds on the matter.  

A couple of years ago, an old friend from St. Mary's School, who is spiritual but no longer a practicing Catholic, pronounced me a cafeteria Catholic.  At the time, I accepted that label, but after thinking about it I've concluded that what I am is a Vatican II Catholic.  I came of age during the council, I married five to ten years later than many of the people I grew up with.  (Not that my husband and I were spared the jolting, sped-up maturation process that marriage and parenthood entail.)  My husband, who is my age, had made a similar journey from a rules orientation to a humanist one, a journey that led many of our confreres to leave the Church.  So much that happens in life is a matter of timing.

Odette's Separate Peace

Odette grew up in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, a French Canadian town on the Maine border.  She recalls hearing very specific counsel from the pulpit and very memorable talk among grown women:  a woman should never refuse her husband lest he be tempted to stray; the man should not withdraw, catching his discharge in a hankie or the bed sheet; each baby should be accepted gladly, not to do so is cheating a gift from God.  She feels the Church was motivated to produce more babies to swell the Catholic population.  In spite of breastfeeding, her mother had three babies in the first three years of marriage.  The family lived on a farm, the young husband gone for many months at a time in the woods.  Then the priest on his yearly visit told Odette’s mother that she needn’t go on to have a baby every year.  He told her there were times of the month when she was fertile and times when she wasn’t.  To Odette’s mother, who grew up without a mother to counsel her and had no notion of ovulation, this was all news.  She began using rhythm and went five and one half years before having another child.

What the priest told Odette’s mother, Odette never heard from the pulpit.  The priest was a holy man and what he said was law.  Women did not get together to discuss these things over coffee.  Any rebellion was secretive.  The midwife herself had 16 children.  Large families were the norm.

When Odette got married her mother told her, “When we were young, we had big families, but I can’t see it today.”  Odette says her mother considered that she had a good life.  She had eleven live births and three miscarriages.  After the first three babies, the others were three to four years apart.

Soon after the Pill came in, Odette’s mother’s doctor prescribed it for her.  She had had a baby in the hospital and nearly bled to death.  She started on the Pill, but reported to her doctor that it gave her headaches.  “That’s your conscience talking,” the doctor said.  “Take an aspirin.”  She did go on eventually to have three more children; so perhaps she stopped taking the Pill.

Or maybe the Pill didn’t work.  Odette’s aunt had seven children, all while using birth control.  “If she’s ovulating you can’t stay away from her,” her husband said.  “If she’s wearing a brown dress, look out!”

Some women, of course, are not designed to have a baby every year.  One of Odette’s sisters had two kids, didn’t use birth control and never got pregnant again.

After Odette’s first baby was born, and after talking the matter over with her sisters, she got fitted for a diaphragm.  She did not tell her husband until afterwards.  When the baby was ten months old, they had to leave him overnight in the hospital.  This made them feel they wanted another child and Odette abandoned the diaphragm.  After the second baby they used condoms.  After one broke and Odette found it necessary to douche in the middle of the night, she started using the Pill.  First she went to confession.  “Father,” she said, “This is Odette.  I am going to start taking the pill.”

“I can’t give you permission to do that,” the priest said.  “Rome and the Pope don’t allow it.” 

Odette noticed that he hadn’t actually forbidden her.  If he had, she says now, she would have stayed away from Church rather than have a third baby right away.  "I told my confessor that the Pope should stay out of my bedroom now that we were married. I felt they (the Church or the Pope)  had enough restrictions over  us during our courting and dating lives that if we couldn't shape our own intimacy after marriage, what was the point?  I further volunteered to speak to our teenage members and to hear their perceptions of what to expect after marriage."   

The priest made no more comment and gave her three Hail Mary’s for her penance.  Odette remained active in the Church community.  She built a support group for young mothers, but did not share with them that she was on the Pill.  Birth control was not a topic of their conversation.

A Reader's Comment: A Less Than Heavenly Life

Here is a reader's comment on "Two Old Stories."

Women of all religions, and poor women for the most part, were treated with disdain by religious leaders, doctors, etc....

My mother, Jewish, was allowed to be in labor for days...when my father was asked: Who do you want us to save--the baby or your wife? My sister, Penelope, choked by the umbilical cord, was born dead. My mother survived to have 3 children. My father who asked in response to the doctors' question: Can't you save both? was forever mistrusted by my mother's sister as a result.

My mother was in the same generation of women who wrote about their experiences above. Similar attitudes towards women condemning them to a less than heavenly life here on earth.

A Changed Norm

There was a time--only a generation or two ago--when large families were admired and desired.There must always have been an undercurrent of dismay over “too many babies,” especially in poor families, but that was not the norm.  My mother quoted a sister-in-law saying that child number five was just one more.  The father of a friend of mine said something similar regarding his seven children.  When my third and youngest was born I felt that although the mothering role had become longer for me, it was not harder.  In fact, in some ways it was easier.  Children form their own society, and the last was born into a going concern whereas with the first everything was new.  With my youngest, I had the older children to take up her attention and amuse her.  If I'd had more and more, would it have become easier and easier?

I remember reading something years ago about a Harvard class having its 50^th reunion.  The writer was surprised—and appalled—to discover that having ten children and taking them on a cross country camping trip was what many of the men were most proud of.  The Kennedys and the Buckleys and other prominent families made big seem ideal.  They filled a whole pew at church.  Even people who wouldn’t have wanted ten were pleased to have four, five or six.  Couples with only one or two children were to be pitied.  A single child was to be especially pitied.  It was only when I got to college that I noticed that some of the singletons were among the happiest and the most well adjusted—good at making friends, too, because they hadn’t had siblings to fall back on.
 

A Mormon couple my husband and I met waiting for the bus in Portland have seven children and 13 grandchildren.  The wife, a convert to Mormonism, said that she and her husband had not expected to have as many children as his parents had had, but they did.  The couple are farmers as were his parents, but the next generation have gone into the professions.  She doesn’t expect any of them to have as many children as she did.  She mentioned how expensive children are now.  The couple talked happily about their large family, but for their children they see a new norm.  They reminded me of Roman Catholics a generation back.

Of course, not everyone follows the current norm.  I'd like this blog to reflect attitudes of people who wanted large families as well as ones who didn’t.  I also want to include people who use or have used natural methods.  And people who let nature take its course.

Heavenly Lenore

A friend whom I'll call Lenore and I started in high school in 1957-58.  She moved away after freshman year, and we reconnected years later after our children were grown.  By then, she knew she was dying of cancer.  She had long periods of remission, however, during which she lived zestfully.  A group of us women friends began getting together each summer.  A year or so before she died, Lenore talked a lot about the trajectory of her life and of her conviction that she was heaven-bound.  Her optimism, it turned out, was a hard-won victory over the sense of sinfulness she had imbibed from her Catholic training, especially with regard to birth control.  

Lenore left college at nineteen to marry her high school sweetheart and followed him to an Army base in South Carolina.  Her pre-marriage preparation was taught by a nun, who advised the couples to refrain from sexual intercourse on their wedding night and instead spend the time in prayer.  Lenore's first baby came the next year, her second the year after that.  Because of an Rh factor, her doctor advised her not to get pregnant again right away.  She sought out the Army chaplain, who told her that by no means was she permitted to use artificial birth control.  Nor did he suggest any other means.  The implication was abstinence.  Lenore, young, far from home, and medically compromised, made an anguished decision to use birth control.  

Years later, looking back, she was angry at how she had been treated by leaders of the Church.  She had started to go to Mass again while wintering in Florida and to receive the sacraments.  The parish she found there seemed more humane to her.      

Two Old Stories

Last weekend my husband and I attended the 10th Anniversary Convention of VOTF in Boston.  At breakfast on Saturday, we talked with a couple from Massachusetts and a woman from Virginia, all in their late seventies or early eighties.  They told these two stories from fifty years ago.  

 A woman with five sons inquired of the priest about birth control.  “Are you an animal?” the priest responded.

A woman with six children told her priest she wanted to use birth control.  “You’ll go to hell,” he warned her. 

“But I can’t go to hell,” she responded.  I have to be here, to look after my family.”  This woman was a nurse, a well-organized and loving mother, but she felt, the storyteller said, that she’d had enough.

The Pill Became Legal

Hi Barbara,

Just read the blog, and found it very interesting, and entertaining. I'm alway interested in reading about other women's experiences re many things.  I wonder, though, if, beginning with our generation, and, perhaps earlier, the stories will be more alike than not.  I certainly know that my mother's situation re her family of seven was not a great one.  I think she and Dad were happy with a large family, and the first five seemed fine, but having Eileen and Erik when her oldest child was 18 and 21 years old did nothing to make their lives easier, and their early childhoods were a very hard time for my mother.  When I was in college, Mom told me (in cryptic shorthand, so no one else would hear her- which, unfortunately, I was naive enough still not to get at first, either) she had asked the dr. about the pill.  (If I remember the conversation correctly, she said, "I asked him about 'something' but he said I was too old to take it safely.")  It took me a while to figure out what she was talking about.  I'm sure there were many women of her generation who were a bit more savvy about preventing late-life or numerous children, but they weren't among her friends.  I remember one of the other late-40's women who had a "caboose kid" with a cleft palate saying, "Rhythm is great while you've got rhythm!" 

Anyway, I think having heard many of these discussions, and watched my mom's experience, I was already prone to using artificial contraception. The pill became legal in Connecticut during my college years, and seemed a wonderful option.  When Neil and I were in premarital counseling, I remember being fascinated by the language chosen by our priest.  "Are you aware that it is counter to Church teaching to thwart the natural ends of marriage?"  It struck me as interesting that I was asked if I was aware, not compliant, and no definition was given to "natural ends of marriage." 

Our particular relationship and life style early in our marriage cinched the deal for me.  Neil was pursuing a career as an actor at the time, and, while it wasn't a particularly profitable career, it was a fairly successful one by theatrical standards.  He had many jobs in the first ten years of our marriage, often in other cities or on tour.  When possible, I would take trips to visit him (I was working full time in the first five years, and had to plan around my time off.)  When I went to see him, or he came home, neither of us was in a mood to have to determine if it was a "good" time for a sexual encounter.  I couldn't accept the fact that abstinence under those conditions would have been a positive influence on our marriage.  It might have made us "stronger," but neither of us had signed on for the monastic life.  If we had three days together in a particular two week period, we were going to use them well!  That particular situation also included the fact that a time of career-building for Neil made my employment more necessary.  I didn't want to be a working mom - my own personal decision, and one I don't judge others by - and the timing was dicey for that. 

By the end of my child-bearing years, I nursed my third baby far longer and more completely than my other two (another story) and we were a bit more laissez-faire about contraception, but had no unwanted pregnancies.  The pill was not recommended by the time I had our third, and I found most of the barrier types of contraception uncomfortable, and inconvenient.  Had another pregnancy occurrred after my last, we would have been okay, but would probably have become more diligent in our efforts to prevent a fifth until I was no longer fertile.

Through all of this, I felt no guilt or compunction to follow Church law.  I am publicly 'outing' myself as a cafeteria Catholic.  I am, I guess, enough of a cynic to find very practical economic reasons for the Catholic Church to keep its pews full, and husband's needs fulfilled without straying, and very little in Christ's teachings that lead me to a belief that He mandated unmanaged childbearing.

Barbara, I didn't try to write this well - better I should just get it done - and I could expound on a whole lot of it.   Your blog said one could write in the "comments" section.  Am I stupid?  I couldn't find such a section.

Chris Napolitan