NFP and teamwork

not empowering

By Mary C. Tillotson

It always surprises me when I find yet another person who is totally shocked to find out that there’s some actual science behind Natural Family Planning. Women bleed for a few days every month for most of their adult life and nobody bothered to wonder why? The article I saw most recently insisted that, while there was legitimate science to NFP, “The Catholic Church’s official stance condemning contraception is, in my view, dubious and disempowering to women.”

Taken out of context, NFP is disempowering. I’m envisioning college parties where women only attend if they’re in Phase 3 (infertile), high school girls encouraged to keep track of their physical symptoms, and, when they’re fertile, say “catch me next week!” to their teenage boyfriends. Despite being way more fertile than women (compare the number of gametes average men and women produce), men get to have sex whenever they can find a phase 3 woman; women are confined to certain days out of their cycle. Disempowering to women? Absolutely. Men obviously have the upper hand.

But NFP isn’t just another form of birth control.

Regret-less Sex

By Julie Baldwin

Life isn't always what you expect, and this post I'm writing was not my initially chosen topic. Instead, I'm writing in response to a few articles I read today, and a conversation I had with one of my husband's classmates.

Today is Will's first day of school for his Master's program, and there was an open reception which I invited myself to as his special guest. Nothing fancy: his classmates, the program directors and corresponding staff, and me, the pregnant lady in the striped dress. The girl next to me and I struck up a conversation, gaining speed as we realized she grew up about 45 minutes from where my husband went to college. We talked about our shared faith, her boyfriend, my pregnancy, where we came from and why we moved to New Orleans.

"Sorry if this is too forward," she said suddenly, "But do you use Natural Family Planning?"

"We do," I said.

"Was the pregnancy planned?" she asked.

"Yes," I said as my husband said "No."

I smiled, and explained that we conceived on my P3 day, which is the third day past my Peak Day and the last day of my fertile time. We knew we could get pregnant if we had sex, and rolled the dice. We got pregnant. Will says "no" because we had originally planned on waiting to try for a mini-us till the fall, but we also had sex knowing we could become pregnant.

Wandering Home: Reflections on Today's Moral Climate

my ninja husband

By Mary C. Tillotson

Home is supposed to be that place of tranquility and comfort, where you can be yourself and know you are loved. It’s supposed to be stable and unchanging. It’s hard for me to imagine that right now: I’ve got a candle and a cup of tea with me, but my kitchen is cluttered with an overflowing wastebasket and a clothes drying rack, complete with two towels and three filthy washrags. I don’t even know where half our stuff is. We helped the previous tenants move out Monday evening and crashed on the floor late that night. It’s been cleaning, cleaning out, and reorganizing since then. My husband is working 9 to 5, and while his elbow grease and moral support were a huge help in the evenings, most of the home-making is falling to me.

I haven’t lived in the same place for more than a year since I was in high school, but it still seems odd to move so often. I don’t like it. There’s a kind of restlessness and instability; also, a holding back, trying not to get too attached to any particular place or routine. A part of me aches to be settled. I know I shouldn’t complain: moving frequently is a normal part of life in my generation. Our world is bigger now; with the internet, freeways, and airports, far-away opportunities are often more available than nearby ones.

There’s an underpinning restlessness to our generation, it seems.

Talking Down to Women, Wendy Davis Edition

By Joy Pullmann

Lots of things infuriate me about this Texas abortion spectacle, but one has to be the patronizing way the media has treated Wendy Davis, the state senator who blocked a bill that would require abortion centers to meet safety standards and restrict abortions after a baby can survive outside the womb. Anti-life protesters rallied around Davis and stormed the Texas capitol with such force that police were overwhelmed periodically and senators could not discuss or vote on the bill.

John McCormack listed 20 questions major TV anchors asked Davis. They include serious questions like "It was a remarkable scene. Did you have any idea that it would grow like this?" from CNN's Anderson Cooper, "Why did you decide to wear your [pink] running shoes? Let’s take a look at those … they’ve kind of been rocketing around the Internet" from ABC's Jeff Zeleny, and "Well, after coming under these attacks, do you regret taking the front row that you did on this and leading this charge?" from CBS's Bob Schieffer.

Let me get this straight. A politician blocks a policy that vast majorities of Americans support (some 80 percent or more) because it would prevent mothers from ending the lives of children who could otherwise survive outside the womb in preemie wards, and she gets asked about her pink running shoes?! How much more patronizing can these male TV anchors get?

A legitimately easy painted flower pot project

By Mary C. Tillotson

The picture says it all, almost, so I'll start with that.

Once I figured out the three-stroke trick, the flowers were easy.

Some other thoughts:

• Those plain, boring, orange clay pots are super cheap. I paid about $2 for the 4-inch pot and tray.
• I like using acrylic paint because it's cheap, easy to find, washable, and fast-drying. It usually comes in 2-oz bottles which cost anywhere from $1.09 to half that, so it's easy to amass a wide variety of colors and store them in a shoebox.
• Acrylic paint is washable, so, not waterproof - which will be a problem if you plan to water your plant. You'll want something for a waterproof finish - I used some spray enamel, which I got at the hardware store for $5.
• I use a paper plate for a palette. Lots of room, easy to see the colors, doesn't leak, and I can throw it out when I'm done. I start putting dabs of paint on it, then try to narrow down to a color scheme that I like. Then, I take all the colors from the color scheme and dab them all in the same area to see if they look good together. This time, I also painted a little bit of blue on the plate, then painted green, pink, and purple over it to see what the colors would look like with a blue background.
• Do some planning about the colors and spacing of the flowers. If you want to make them high-low-high-low like I did, you don't want to get around the pot and realize you can't squeeze another one in to make the pattern work.
• Because acrylic dries quickly, I could do pretty much all the painting in one sitting. I started with the brown rim, then one side of the brown tray. By the time I was done with that, the rim was dry enough that I could paint the blue background, then I flipped the tray and painted the other side. Then some touch-up work, then the green stems, then the flowers.

Let's assume that women get it all wrong.

By Mary C. Tillotson

There's a new study out showing that women, apparently, don't take credit for their work if they're working in a mixed-sex group, but do if they're in an all-women group. (I read about it in The Atlantic.) That's all the study showed. It did not show that women have a problem; calling it a problem is a value judgment that, apparently, everyone involved made.

Here are two sentences from the first two paragraphs of the Atlantic article:

For too many women, the hardest part of being successful might be taking credit for the work that they do, especially when they work in groups. 

...When women worked only with other women, they found, this problem of not taking credit disappears.

I want to question the assumptions here and explore a few possibilities.

1. Maybe being successful in a career isn't the top priority for some of these women. Plenty of women out there do things that are bad for their careers, like go part-time for a while or quit entirely because of kids. And plenty of women want to have kids, and they make this choice freely.

2. Maybe it is actually good to not take credit for your work sometimes. For example, to help someone learn a new skill and instill confidence in them, it might be better not to take credit for your work. If some middle school kids want to put on a play, maybe an adult will reserve the room, print programs, help with rehearsals, then tell the kids what a great job they did. If a three-year-old wants to help make cookies, an adult could measure out the one teaspoon of baking soda and let him dump it in, then praise him profusely.

3. Maybe men have the problem of taking too much credit for their work. Or maybe men and women both have a problem of not having a proper balance of when to take credit. Or maybe we both take credit in a way that's totally fine, but different.

Let's stop assuming that women get it all wrong.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandburg: Why Women Aren't Like Me at Work

By Joy Pullmann

Facebook COO and otherwise wildly career-successful Sheryl Sandburg has a new book out on women in the workforce. She brings her perspective to the tiresome question: Why aren't there more women at the top?

It's a tiresome question because all these quotas and grass-is-greener comparisons smack, to me, of large, steaming piles of envy. If there's some active evil force somewhere pushing down talented women who want to be CEO, fine. Let's discuss that. But, as Sandburg points out, it's women themselves who actually do not prefer to sell their souls to the workplace, which is usually necessary to get to the top. From the Wall Street Journal:

She describes a speech that she gave at Harvard Business School in 2011. During the question-and-answer session afterward, the male students asked such questions as "What did you learn at Google that you are now applying at Facebook?" and "How do you run a platform company and ensure stability for your developers?" The female students asked such questions as "How can I get a mentor?"—the "professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming," as Ms. Sandberg puts it. Her advice: If you want a mentor, impress a higher-up with how good you are at doing your job. She is similarly dismayed by a young woman at Facebook who asked her advice about how to "balance work and family"—even though the young woman wasn't even married. "If current trends continue," Ms. Sandberg told the business-school students, "fifteen years from today, about one-third of the women in this audience will be working full-time and almost all of you will be working for the guy you are sitting next to." 

As the WSJ reviewer points out, Sandburg contradicts herself. She insists women are the same as men, except we can nurse babies, but then frets about and suggests ways to get more women into high positions. If we're the same as men, who cares?

Sandburg also perpetuates this myth that women want to work 100 hours a week and never see their kids, because that's really what it does take to get to the top, as Penelope Trunk points out. That's why Trunk got off the fast track. She also points out a reason women feel so stressed out by doing what we generally actually like (having kids and being around for them): Society no longer respects that choice. Even though it's essential to society's Social Security benefits and the existence of future taxpayers and doctors and people who will not rape and loot them, parenting is no longer a respectable solo occupation.

You can change that, as a woman, by telling any and everyone who makes snide comments about mothering and kids that you believe it a wonderful, difficult, heroic occupation.

Image by Kevin Dooley.