Confessions of An Accomplished Career Woman

Nov. 16, 2010 - PRLog -- The following is an abridged article by Marion Fernandez-Cueto, from the November-December 2010 issue of “Family Foundations,” the publication of the Couple to Couple League International (CCL). CCL is the leading organization providing Natural Family Planning (NFP) in the United States.

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There is a line in Scripture that has always infuriated me. It’s Timothy 2:15, and for years I could not read it without wanting to hurl my Bible at the wall. “The woman,” writes St. Paul, “will be saved by childbearing, if only she continue with faith, love and holiness.”

Its baptized misogyny was insulting enough (how typical to posit a woman’s salvation within her social confines of barefoot, pregnant servitude), yet beneath it lurked a more devastating injury: the idea that a woman’s sanctity was tied up in motherhood. That spelled damnation for me, I thought, for the drudgery of child bearing was the last thing I aspired to.

Then I fell in love with a man who wanted kids the way former boyfriends had dreamed of  plasma TVs. As he wooed and pursued me, I realized it was not motherhood per se I had long feared and mocked: it was the utter dying to self that motherhood entails. My individualism and selfishness were alive and well, fostered by nearly a decade of independence, during which my time, decisions, money, plans and body had remained solely my own. The idea of marriage thrilled me (it was no sacrifice to love Andre), but children held no such natural enticement toward self-oblation. Like At. Augustine’s tepid plea for chastity, I didn’t want my selfishness scourged quite yet.

But St. John writes that perfect love casts out fear, and it is true, even of flawed loves like ours: A year after our wedding, we found ourselves praying that I might get pregnant. Two days later, I did. To say I was ecstatic would be a lie – I hadn’t expected an answer to arrive overnight express. But we were awed at this new life God and our union had wrought.

My pregnancy proceeded in a happy glow: I grew fat and contented as a tabby cat. I cleaned and cooked and froze dinners, ordered parenting books, and interviewed doulas in a blissful whirl of organization. I found myself dreaming of long-scorned domestic scenes, a tangle of jolly siblings for our son, and a kitchen fragrant with hot meals and teasing affection. Finally, I thought, I was ready to be a mother.

Then Dominic was born. I still remember my feeling of incredulity when the hospital night nurse first woke me to feed him, seemingly minutes after a searing labor. I looked at the clock – 2:20 a.m. – then at my mewling, scrunchy little baby and knew like Napoleon at Waterloo that the end had come, the end of life as I knew and liked it. This child, this responsibility, was mine forever.

I felt a tidal wave of resentment that God had allowed me to welcome pregnancy while providing barely a shred of fuzzy maternal instinct beyond delivery. I knew my hormones were running amok, but I felt blindsided and betrayed. Where was the grace that had flooded the previous nine months?

Somewhere I’d assumed that if only I prayed hard enough for grace when I accepted pregnancy, a good mother would be born with my son. I had forgotten that elemental wild card of Catholic theology: that grace builds on nature. Prayers are not magic spells, and none would instantly transform my long-fostered habit of selfishness into a spirit of enthusiastic self sacrifice. Instead, over the next weeks and months, a loving Savior would ask me to take up my cross and learn to follow Him. In obeying, I would discover that God rarely calls the equipped; if we are asked to cooperate in our own salvation, it is only because He equips those He calls.

Meanwhile, Dominic didn’t know he was poor and ill-fated. He was a near-perfect baby by every account, with limpid blue eyes and pink, puckish smiles. I coddled and sang to him, boasting shamelessly of his every new feat. When he napped on our bed, flushed with sweet sleep, I would lie beside him and murmur my undying love into his damp blond curls.

Briefcase envy

Yet through it all, I rebelled. A voice in my head echoed the old cry of Lucifer: non serviam, I will not serve. “You’re too good for this,” said the voice. “You were made for better things – not the endless, mind-numbing tedium of diapers and dishes and laundry. Where is the glamour, the intellectual stimulation, the chances and promotions you still deserve? Is this really what God intended for you?”

The voice would resume each morning as I watched the army of lawyers and interns swinging down 16th Street with their lattes and briefcases and careers. Each smartly dressed young woman represented a life I couldn’t have anymore. “You see?” the voice would prod.

A surprising visitor

Not long after, God took me up on my silent challenge: When an old college friend flew in from France, I was given the chance to see, George Bailey-style, what my life might have been like without Dominic.

Veronique – a single, gorgeous, multilingual painter – was living out the very fantasy I tried to articulate to my confessor. She jetted around the globe with no apparent responsibility standing between her next whim and reality. Her family was distant; her jobs, like her love interests, were sporadic and provisional; all were powerless against her lure of new ventures and continents. I couldn’t wait to hear her stories, to soak in the brilliance of her life. Inviting her over for tea one afternoon, I braced myself for the flash of pity I had often glimpsed in her eyes at my increasingly predictable, beige-hued existence (husband, child, mortgage, mini-van).

It never came.

Veronique was miserable and desperately so. Approaching 30 like me, her hard independence, emotional skittishness, and sheer impulsivity were catching up with her. She hated her expensive art school. Her e-mails, dazzling travelogues forwarded to massive lists of friends, were going unacknowledged. The handful of men in her life arrived and then disappeared with a disturbingly familiar, slapdash autonomy. She was tired of being broke.

Veronique seemed haunted by a stirring realization that the years of self-direction, self-discovery, and self-fulfillment – all so greedily panted after by me – had brought her not nirvana, but only herself, a self she was starting to find unbearable. As she watched me wipe applesauce off Dominic’s chin and help him down from the highchair, her eyes reflected not pity but raw, naked wishing. Her next words startled me further. “I wish I had someone to love and give myself to like that, “she said. “Sometimes I’m afraid my heart is going to shrivel up.”

I expected to feel relief at Veronique’s woe. Her admissions amounted to foundational cracks in a lifestyle I had lusted for with near idolatry. But instead I felt only wonder and the spreading epiphany that mothering – that vocation I wore like a penitent’s hair shirt – had spared me the tyranny, the terrible poverty, of unconstrained will. When Veronique left, I clutched my son to my breast and wept with gratitude.

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Natural Family Planning Classes Taught

Classes in Natural Family Planning are taught in 17 locations in the Chicago metro area, including southeast Wisconsin and northwest Indiana. The next series of classes will begin Sunday, Feb 6th, 2011, at 1:30 pm, at Resurrection Medical Center, 7435 West Talcott Avenue, Chicago IL, taught by Dave and Mona Cattapan.


To register, and for a list of classes throughout the U.S., go to CCL International at www.ccli.org, (800) 745-8252. Chicago area NFP information is at www.naturalfamilyplanningchicago.com.


The method taught is the Sympto-Thermal Method, which is also taught via CylePRO software. Sign up for a membership with the Couple to Couple League International at www.ccli.org, and receive “Family Foundations.”

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The Couple to Couple League (CCL) is an international, Catholic, non-profit organization dedicated to teaching Natural Family Planning (NFP) to married and engaged couples. This news article is sponsored by the Chicago chapter of CCL International.