I don't like the idea of "trying" for babies. I don't like the idea of tracking your fertility. Taking your temperature every morning. I don't like acronyms like TTC and TWW and DPO. I don't like the idea of obsessing over something that is ultimately out of your control. I'm not even sure I like birth control, but we use it because we are over-responsible eldest children. And because the idea of having lots of children close together in age instills terror in my heart. And our birth control has proven irritatingly reliable, contrary to most reports. It vexed me for 2 years when I was ready for our first child and Stephen wasn't. More recently, it vexed me for 6 months because I was ready for a second child and Stephen wasn't. I don't know that I actually prayed, in words, that my birth control would fail, but I unabashedly hoped for it in my mind. Maybe if I had prayed for it it would have worked. But I was afraid to actually do that, because then, of course, I would never be able to trust it again.

And I read that and I get irritated all over again because why am I even thinking in terms of trusting in birth control and not my sovereign Creator of life? Sometimes I can't wait until my childbearing years are over so I don't have to be at war with myself anymore.

Oddly, I never even considered natural family planning (NFP - another lovely acronym) as a serious option. Perhaps it was a holdover from having a mom who accidentally got pregnant both times, once on birth control and once not ("breastfeeding is birth control, isn't it?"), or perhaps it was purely my own fears of becoming a parent at work. I did wrestle a lot with what God would want, and I do think I am closer to the no-birth-control end of the spectrum than Stephen is, but I just can't make the leap. Certainly not without him on board, of course. That kinda needs to be a dual decisions. ;) But if he said that's what he wanted, I'd agree.

I think mostly I just don't like making decisions and would rather someone else made them for me.

*sigh*

-Stephanie

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