A quick background on me:
I grew up in a small town outside of Lake Charles, LA. I went to a small high school with a graduating class of around 100 people. I am one of five daughters. My mom was a stay at home mom and did an amazing job raising all of us while my dad traveled often for work.
Then came puberty and relationships:
Do you ever remember being taught about your body? About sex? What about the actual facts about getting pregnant? Like that it can only happen for 5-6 days out of your cycle versus the possibility that it can happen on any given day?
I don’t!
I don’t remember ever talking to my mom about sex, pregnancy, or my body and the only conversation from school was a brief lesson that didn’t go into many details. I graduated, went to college, got into my first serious relationship, and got on birth control. That was just the thing to do. It still is.
So what’s the deal?
There’s a gap, something missing in our homes, in our education system, in our doctors’ offices. A gap in education about our bodies. That’s why it’s not uncommon for a woman to think she could get pregnant on any day of her cycle. Women are less in tune with their bodies and doctors have been using the pill as a “fix it all” approach for decades. Period pains? Heavy bleeding? Acne? The pill is usually the answer. It was for me. It prevented pregnancy when I wanted it to.
Little did I know, there is an array of birth control side effects, short term and long term that can come with taking a hormonal contraceptive. (I’ll get into those in a later post).
Many years after college, I met my husband, and we decided to have a baby. It nearly took two years and losses to get pregnant with our daughter. There was a big learning curve when I first started trying to conceive. I had to learn my cycle, pinpoint when my fertile window was, confirm I was ovulating and make sure something wasn’t going on hormonally that could have been causing our losses. In the end, I was diagnosed with an underlying thyroid condition. Once that was addressed, we got pregnant with our daughter. All of the stress and sadness could have been avoided if I had been taught about my body, if I could have used my cycle to see that something was off and to have a diagnosis much sooner than I did. For whatever reason, we aren’t provided with these tools. When we tell our doctor that we are planning on trying for a baby, most often the response is to just get off birth control a month ahead of when you want to try and your cycle should return. We aren’t told that it can take up to 18 months for our cycle to return and normalize. 18 months?! Now that’s on the longer end, but regardless this should be information we are given.
My daughter is 2 years old. When she was 1, I decided to become a Fertility Awareness Educator so I could educate women about their bodies and their cycles. Fertility Awareness Methods are used to achieve pregnancy, prevent pregnancy, or just as a vital sign to measure health. Ovulation is a sign of health and knowing if you are ovulating or not is important. It’s a tool for every woman, and every woman should have easy access to the information. I hope you’ll find it interesting and useful, please reach out if you have any questions or want to know about something specifically and I’ll make sure to write a post about it!