As one newlywed to another, I advise lots of prayer and overall striving to trust our Lord. You may want to try reading Humanae Vitae or any number of commentaries on it to see the Church’s full attitude on NFP and responsible parenthood.
My own husband and I really struggled in the first two months of our marriage. Without getting into a lot of details, I struggled with a condition that made it impossible and terribly painful for me to even attempt to consumate our marriage. In just the two months we were suffering with this, it had a profoundly negative effect on our marriage. My husband was patient and supportive of me in the beginning, but soon we were both consumed in feelings of rejection and failure and we felt threatened by the other person’s feelings. NFP was not helping this. A week of not attempting was turning into a week of me forgetting all the progress we had made and anticipating that regardless of where my mood was, it was only fair to my husband that we try again as soon as I was infertile again. Soon I couldn’t muster a single desire. I didn’t know why any woman would want to engage in the activity.
I was going through treatment (a treatment I adjusted as they do encourage some immoral behavior to overcome the problem), but eventually and through lots of prayer we realized that it was more important to our marriage to be able to consumate our marriage than to avoid a baby. It was scary to be that open, but it was also something I prepared my heart for. Because I knew it was such a high possibility, I went in knowing and totally accepting that possibility. I still prayed to God that even though we had used our fertile time, I wouldn’t be pregnant. Then at the end of that first cycle, I found out I wasn’t pregnant and cried. It was heartbreaking to not be pregnant and disappointing. Here this is what I had been praying for and I was disappointed for getting it.
We thus decided to continue on this path as it was giving us success and overall God seemed to be opening our hearts and building up our desire to have children. We were hyperaware of all children around us. It was like God was beckoning us. And very shortly after that, we got pregnant.
We were both scared. Now this was real. It was such a mixed bag of feelings. But as time as gone by and we’ve been working diligently to figure out our financial situation, we’ve grown more and more excited and much less afraid. God will provide for us in some way. I feel completely confident of that now. And my attitude toward my husband’s unemployment is much more optimistic. I want him to be employed, but I have also learned to appreciate this extra time God has given us together. I get to see my husband so much and he’s been able to be there for me through this pregnancy in so many ways. Moreover, we are enjoying this time so much. Those first 2 struggling months is like a short blip. All my happiness now seems to make those days of real suffering seem almost like they didn’t happen, except that I appreciate this happiness more.
I know had we lost our baby, we wouldn’t go back to trying to conceive for awhile. I still do think that we had a good reason to avoid. This is going to be harder to get through. I have to say that when we went on a belated honeymoon, we had a big scare. (We didn’t spend a lot on our honeymoon, but we really felt we needed the break. I’d been working 50 hours a week, worked holidays and pretty much had only taken time off for wedding stuff. I was desperate!). Anyway, during the honeymoon, I ran to the bathroom thinking I might be miscarrying. I wasn’t, but after that both of us were crying. My husband was just holding me and praying to God that we wouldn’t lose this baby. He was just like “I want this baby. This one growing here. Its not replaceable.” That’s overall our feelings of it. We overcame our problem, became pregnant through it and at this point if I wasn’t pregnant, we’d be trying to avoid. But, we love our unborn baby intensely and will do all we can to figure out how to provide for it.
Its important to remember that the faith journey with God is a real faith journey. Do you trust Him on the path He’s leading you or are you resistant and saying “Look, I’ll go with you this far, but that’s it.” Trust God and bring all that you are going through in prayer. Let Him guide your wills and unit the two of you even closer together. He may very well change your plans. Don’t be afraid.
Oh and by the way, when we started our treatment, we were told it would be like 5 or 6 months before we’d get through the entire treatment. Even beyond that, I’ve since been made aware of couples struggling with this for years, getting abandoned by their husbands and divorced, etc. God has certainly blessed us for our faithfulness.
My dearest dream was always to be a wife and mother, and I knew that waiting to have a baby would have been extremely hard. If I had waited years to start, those years would have been a complete waste of time and I would have been miserable. I had known my husband 14 months before we got married, and there will be an 11 month gap between our wedding day and the birth of our first child if the pregnancy progesses normally. That means we will have had 2 years of “us” time before baby and that is definitely enough. Our relationship passed from the honeymoon phase into a deeper, more mature love around the one year mark and now I’m looking forward to having a family with the man I love more and more each day.