Margaret Fisher Testimony

Our Natural Family Planning testimony is also a story of reversion and conversion. In this story what is good, true and beautiful about the Catholic faith is crystal clear and the working of the Holy Spirit is undeniable. We cannot provide a series of tips about the mechanics and details of using sympto-thermal methods for achieving or avoiding pregnancy. We don’t take temps nor do we keep charts. Natural Family Planning (NFP) certainly includes such methods, and they are highly effective, but it is so much MORE than that to us. Even before we were practicing our faith or knew what to call it in Catholic-speak, we were always open to life in our marriage. Looking back, this is hard evidence to us of the reality of God and how, in the beauty and dignity of our humanity, God placed the call to be fruitful and multiply on our hearts. Our understanding of that still, small voice gently calling us deeper into our vocation of the married life has sharpened over the years. Our profound conversions would not have happened without the births and proximal graces experienced from the Baptisms of each and every one of our 7 children. God knows how to reach His children and He knew that he would ultimately win our hearts back through the messy workings of our nuclear family.

Steve and I were married on December 18th, 2005 by a Methodist minister at a reverent, elegant, family-oriented little ceremony at the Springfield Golf and Country Club. I was a fallen-away cradle Catholic and Steve a fallen-away Methodist who had all but turned atheist. We both strived to be Good People. We are a May-December couple with Steve 24 years my senior. Steve had two grown sons from his previous marriage. This was my 1st marriage and I was committed to it being my ONLY marriage. My mother accepted the situation well and was very frank with her advice. She told me that dating the older man seems glamorous now, but this is a decision you make for life. When he’s elderly and you are not, it won’t be so glamorous anymore. Do not get involved if you are not willing to stay with him for the rest of HIS life. She told me that leaving him because he’s elderly one day is simply not an option. This was as close to a “blessing” that I could ever ask for from this straight-shooting pragmatist mother of mine. Steve and I both had a sense that marriage was something sacred to be revered and it was important to us to be married by a Christian man-of-the-cloth. We were both in the Navy at the time and I was planning this wedding from an aircraft carrier. Seeing our way through the details of annulment and adhering to all the “rules” of the Catholic Church seemed to only be an impediment to planning The Big Day. We were not just poorly catechized, we were void of any adult understanding of our childhood faiths.

We were engaged and married rather quickly. We wanted to be married to each other and we both took the institution of marriage very seriously. Steve was divorced but there was never a hint of disrespect or disdain for his previous relationship. His divorce did not deter me. My spotty attention in elementary school religious education never covered the complex issues around divorce and annulments. I didn’t even know to consider this as an “issue”. Our early dating conversations (like, by date #3!) included open discussions about my desires for children. It was even decided that we would raise them Catholic – despite my lack of practicing my faith. Steve was what my beloved Aunt Marla calls a “Yeah, Babe! Kind of Guy”. To this day, he has bolstered me and taught me how to go with the flow and bend but don’t break with the wind. “Yeah, Babe!” is not a weakness or submission; I realize now that it’s a secular way to describe sacrificial love. God had given us the gift of each other and we had accepted it, but we didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what was in the box at that point in time.

We have never used birth control. As healthcare providers, though we did not have the theological words, it was counterintuitive to us to take our physiologically perfect reproductive systems and render them “broken” with “medicine” or condoms. We prescribe drugs when something is wrong or missing. There was nothing WRONG with me, so why take a pill? Chemicals have side-effects. I did not want to deal with the sequelae of said side-effects nor did my husband want to inflict such risks on me. The logic for using contraceptives didn’t line up with sound reasoning to us. Birth control also just didn’t make sense to us because we were married and we were already intent on starting a family right away mostly because of Steve’s age. I wanted nothing more than to be a Mother. This is all I ever wanted since childhood. Now was the time! We had a new baby every 2 years. Steve respected that I just never felt “done”. He would never allow us to utter phrases, “I don’t want any more children” or “We are done” or “This baby was an accident or a ‘whoops’”, for fear that it would diminish the value of any current or any future children.

My 4th pregnancy and birth was unexpectedly difficult. I had trouble with my hips and had gained much more weight this time around and the baby was in the wrong position all the way through delivery. We had welcomed 4 children in 6 years. Steve became concerned about my physical health. He commented once (and it was out of concern for ME) that he thought it was time to consider getting a vasectomy. Hearing my husband – this quintessentially masculine leader of our family – utter these words split my soul in half. I remember almost feeling dizzy or panicked. I could not understand what this feeling was. I was not feeling desirous of another child at the time, but it made me question what would happen to our marriage if I *did* want another baby and Steve did *not*. I realize now that what I was feeling was rejection from the one person I had received into my entire body and soul and to whom I had exposed all of my vulnerabilities. Part of his masculinity that I honored and cherished was tied to his ability to create life with me and he was rejecting this. I was confused and hurt. So here it is again, but we didn’t understand it: the masculinity, the receptivity, the union, being fully known . . . these are all God’s thumbprint on our souls! Rejecting God is what broke my heart. It’s called sin. That’s how it works and feeling split in half is what it feels like. I understand this now; I didn’t then. But I did know that what I was feeling really was hurt. It was right after this statement about vasectomies that we conceived #5. Well, now we are in a pickle! It took me a week to tell my beloved husband that we were expecting another child. There was a separation that had formed between us. I was overcome by fear rather than joy about our new addition. I ended up using my other children as “shields” to share the news. Surely, Steve would not get angry in front of the children! I cloaked a message with a plate of cupcakes – one for each child. There was an “extra” one in the middle with a sparkler stick. They were young so they didn’t get the metaphor, but Steve did and cried tears of JOY. He was so confused and saddened that I would think he’d be upset. Retrospectively, that sterilization conversation really had us all messed up and topsy-turvy, and rightfully so. When you go against God, things just don’t go as well.

As our family size grew and our marriage matured, all of our children were Baptized in the Catholic Church, but Steve and I were still a bit on the peripheries of her Teachings. I was perfectly content in my “cafeteria Catholic” practices. I had started to try to develop a Mass routine, but Steve would not go with me. He was skeptical of “organized religion”. He felt like an outsider at Mass because he didn’t know what to do to participate. Lugging infants and toddlers to Mass alone was a drag. I was the one saying, “I’m not getting anything out of this” . . . so I stopped going to Mass. Once, a parishioner came up to me after Mass and assumed I was a military wife with a deployed husband. She sweetly offered help. I joked that he was “deployed” at home with the little children that I couldn’t handle alone at Mass! We were a hot mess and upside-down and backwards spiritually and didn’t even know it. We were routinely breaking God’s 1st Commandment, but we were steadfast in our complete rejection of birth control!! God knew us and knew how to reach us. He took the one thing we were doing right and used it to our ultimate Good.

It came time to enroll our first-born in Kindergarten Religious Ed. This was the year our 5th child was born. Steve honored his promise to allow me to raise our children as Catholics. So as to understand what our son was learning in CCD, Steve decided to attend RCIA. While our kiddo went to his kindergarten classroom, Steve went to the RCIA class. This is when God started to tug a little harder on Steve’s heartstring. Steve started asking questions about the faith and I had no answer so I became drawn in as well in helping him find those answers. We listened to a lot of EWTN radio. Steve challenged my “cafeteria” ways and it caused a lot of friction and arguments at first. He stood his ground and insisted that he had to be all in or not at all. He believed! He understood! He wanted to be confirmed a Catholic. He was ready! But then came the RCIA class when we fully came to understand that his previous marriage needed to be annulled. The wind was suddenly taken out of our sails.

We made a commitment while unloading the dishwasher together one morning that attending Mass each Sunday was required and had to be presented to the children as a non-negotiable routine. That marked the beginning of the active conversion of our hearts. I had been reminded from radio programs that I should not receive Communion after such a long time until I went through a “General Confession”. Out of a newfound respect for the Church’s ways and with a sense to try to start getting things “right with God”, I scheduled a meeting for a General Confession. The priest invited me into his office and lovingly asked me my story and why I was seeking this confession. I was ready! I had practiced my Act of Contrition. I rehearsed in the car all the way over that it had been “22 years since my last confession . . . “. But it didn’t go as I had planned. The priest told me he could not hear my confession until my husband’s previous marriage was annulled. He was tender and kind and explained how he would accompany us through the process. He expressed his hope that God would help us through this. He said God wants us to be married otherwise he would not have given us the supreme gift of 5 beautiful children. I was truly heartbroken, but not angry. I came home in tears. Steve explains to this day that it was that evening when he realized his feet-dragging on paperwork and essay writing for the annulment packet was endangering his wife’s soul. His paperwork was completed within weeks with the help of priests and a good deacon who held him to meet deadlines. So many people tried to get me to be angry with the priest who denied my confession. The Holy Spirit was clearly already at work, however, because I could only see it as the purest and most beautiful act of mercy and a kind of love I had never experienced. I paid no attention to the naysayers and stayed the course set by this beautiful priest (who I now understand was in persona Christi).

All while this was happening spiritually, my “biologic” clock was ticking. I was 39 years old and wanted another baby before I turned 40. I still wasn’t “done”. Steve chuckled that this baby better be born on an even year (like all the others) or else he’d forget the birth date! (Recall his ripe age of 64. Steve entertains me with his self-deprecating sense of humor.) We tried for months . . . no baby. I thought my ship had sailed. I begged and whined to God for another child. I begged Mary to intercede for me. Finally, #6 came along, but on an odd-numbered year. I experienced a dream of God granting me a child, but it came with a sense of the Father’s concern at the same time. So here I was pregnant with #6 but waiting for my husband’s annulment so we could be married in the Church. (Still pretty mixed up, right?!). We understood this baby as a gift, but now it was time for us to make reparations with God. The sequence of “No’s” that Steve and I both experienced created the space required for our total conversion. We had to go through the desert and experience asceticism so that God’s grace could build our faith. Now we could start having a relationship with Jesus and each other that rested on divine footing rather than our own selfish desires. We willingly and intentionally entered a period of prayer and conjugal fasting/abstinence. We agreed that we would abstain from the marital act until the annulment process was completed. The Tribunal’s decision would guide our next steps forward. We placed our trust in God, prayed and waited . . . 2 years and 3 months.

The annulment was granted in December and two weeks later we left our sins behind in the confessional and then Steve was confirmed and we were married in the Church all in the same Mass. Our 7th child was conceived as a gift of that long-awaited sacrament. She was born in the presence of the Eucharist! For the first time in all of my deliveries, we were able to call for the Eucharistic Minister to bring us Communion during my labor. We placed the request at about 9am. A religious sister brought us the Host at about 2:00pm. The docs were expecting the baby to come at about 6:00pm based on how things were progressing, but she arrived at 2:15 with one push and no pain. It is said that the Eucharist stays with us for about 15 minutes after we swallow. You do the math!!!

We recognize that some reading this, and even some who know us may call us looney-tunes, but our children are a singular source of a growth in our faith that cannot be denied. The one constant through our story was our open acceptance to additional children into our family. Our understanding and articulation of being so-called “open to life” has grown and matured. Connecting the dots backwards, Steve and I can see that God crashed into our hearts in the way he knew he could – through His gift of children.

NFP is not just charting and temperature taking. It’s a way of life that is consistent with Church teaching. It’s an acceptance of natural law. It is healthy. It is hard and we will all fail at it at times. Living this way has softened our hearts and made us more open to the other. It requires communication, honesty, trust, love, vulnerability, flexibility and acceptance. It comes with natural periods of both abstinence and fecundity that ebb and flow with your family and marital rhythms and circumstances. This does not mean to throw caution to the wind and behave like reckless rabbits, as Pope Francis once famously said! But it does call us to move God to the center of our marriages. Once that happens, you will begin to *want* to truly follow the Teachings of Christ’s Church. Steve and I are finding that the closer we draw toward God, the simpler our lives and desires become. We trust that God will provide and everything will be OK. Help arrives when you need it. Ideas come to solve the big and little problems. The older children help with the younger ones. Our home is crowded, but with that comes the opportunity to practice politeness and patience. Being open to life and refraining from using birth control requires a surrendering to God’s Will over your own and helps your marriage to become what God truly intended for both you and your spouse. And in the words of a wonderful priest who is beloved by his parish, “If you give Jesus one year of your life, ON HIS TERMS, just watch how He will transform you!”

 

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