SIMCHA FISHER

[img attachment=”98244″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”whats for supper aleteia” /]

Last friday was all about raffles and NFP, so I skipped the Friday food post. There was only really one meal worth reporting on last week anyway, but it was a doozy:

Coconut curry shrimp on basmati rice.

Eh? Eh? I used Pioneer Woman’s Coconut Curry Shrimp recipe, which she claims is “scrumptious and exceedingly fast/easy.” AND IT WAS. The thing that took the longest was peeling all the shrimp. The rest of it went together in no time, and it was swoonfully delicious.

[img attachment=”115088″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”shrimp curry” /]

Next time I will use less honey and more curry, but man oh man. Next time shrimp is on sale, look out! (I’m talking to the shrimp, I guess.)

We had leftover coconut milk and leftover lime juice, so we threw it in a blender with some sugar, ice, and some rum. It was okay — a little too “Tahitian Tee-Hee” for my tastes,

but I could have used less sugar and more ice. I mean, I drank two of them, but I didn’t like it or anything. Needed more ice. We never have enough ice. Those rotten kids eat it all day long, and then when the adults get home and really need some ice, there’s only a little bit left.

***

SATURDAY
French dip beef sandwiches, broccoli, farro

Completely delicious again. I splurged a little so we could have a nice meal together before I went away for a speaking gig in Colorado. My husband slathered the steak with melted butter, salted and peppered it, and put it under the broiler, then sliced it thin. We piled the meat on rolls with provolone and sauteed onions and mushrooms. I put horseradish sauce on mine, and put the whole thing under the broiler to toast it up.

[img attachment=”115087″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”french dip sandwiches” /]

The French dip was made of beef broth with pan drippings and scraping from the meat, plus Worcestershire sauce and some bourbon. In the picture, you’ll see that I had my French dip in a drinking glass. This is not because I was just drinking it straight, no sir. I would never!

I think the broccoli was just served raw. I think I may have dipped it in the French dip.

The farro was completely unnecessary. I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough food, even though there was actually leftover steak — leftover steak — after everyone was staggering around with round bellies like Rotten Ralph after his tragic catharsis is complete and his family gives him lobster and cupcakes because they still love him, even though sometimes he is hard to love.

But I ate the farro anyway. I doused it in French dip, too.

***

SUNDAY
Grilled chicken and salad, oven fried potatoes

I made a marinade out of fresh garlic, fresh basil, freshly ground pepper, salt, oregano, oil, and fresh lime juice. I hate how much of a difference it makes to use fresh ingredients. Boo! Work! Boo!

My husband sliced the potatoes up thin and fried some on the stove top, and mixed up the rest with oil and seasonings and put them under the broiler. It was one of those meals where you don’t have enough of something, so you decided to stretch it, but then it turns out to be more work than you expected, so you use another method, but you’ve already committed to the first method, so you end up having not quite enough food, but twice the effort. At least it’s an ethos!

Oh, the salad was organic baby arugula. What have I become?

***

MONDAY
Tacos, tortilla chips

Nothing to report.

***

TUESDAY
Hamburgers and chips

This was the first day of my trip. My husband is an excellent cook (cf. above: “slathered the steak with melted butter”), but we thought it made sense to keep meals simple while I was gone.

So I’m in my hotel enjoying a fine dinner of Dasani and granola from a pouch (I like to keep it simple when I’m gone, too), and I get this missive from home:

[img attachment=”115078″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”hamburger and ketchup” /]

Protein and a vegetable! And I’m pretty sure someone ate the plate, too, so fiber.

***

WEDNESDAY
Pizza

They had pizza. I had stuffed mushrooms and hot crab dip, blushingly tender beef medallions, baked potatoes stuffed with cheese, bacon, and green things, tournée-cut zucchini*, and what may have been caramel flan with white chocolate garnishes. I had to abandon my dessert because they apparently wanted me to give a speech, not just sit there shoveling food into my face.

*I just spent a good ten minutes looking up what you call vegetables cut into that football shape. I told my husband that I desperately hope this kind of pointless attention to pointless detail is essential to my writing, and he said that since I was the only one who had vegetables this week, he wasn’t going to argue. I did eat both my little footballs.

***

THURSDAY
Chicken burgers and cheez items

Nothing to report. I got home before dinner, and was not technically still on a trip, but frozen chicken and bags of orange things that my husband put on the table still seemed like a good life choice.

***

FRIDAY
I think we are having spaghetti or something. 

Or granola from a pouch.

Last week, for NFP Awareness Week, I recorded a podcast of Humanae Vitae. I regret that I waited so long to read it myself for the first time, because it’s so short, so easy to understand, so profound, and, most of all, so encouraging. I really wanted other people to enjoy it, too.

The podcast is hung up in Techno-Idiotland, because I guess I pressed a button while editing, and a big chunk of it is missing. Duh. I’ll get back to it as soon as I can, and will post it on this blog when it’s ready.

In the meantime, I wanted to share just a small part of what Paul VI says toward the end of the encyclical.

After he acknowledges where we are at as a society, and acknowledges that population is growing quickly, and kids are expensive and exhausting, and after he reaffirms the Church’s authority to speak on matters of human sexuality, and after he gives a fair hearing to all the reasons the Church ought to rethink her teaching, he talks about what human beings are, and what love is, and what marriage is. (I’m serious, you gotta read it.) Then he famously predicts what will happen if we abandon the Church’s guidance in favor of embracing contraception (and he was right).

And then, he encourages public figures, scientists, doctors, priests, and bishops all to be courageous and faithful in specific ways.

This is the part that kept coming back to me this past week. He says:

[G]reat fruits are to be expected when the divine law is kept by a devout soul. The most outstanding of these fruits results from the frequent desire of spouses to share their experience with other spouses. Thus it happens that a new and especially worthy kind of apostolate is added to the already ample vocation of the laity: like will minister to like. That is, spouses fulfill their apostolic mission [munus] in behalf of other spouses by becoming guides for them. Among all the forms of Christian apostolate this apostolate seems most suitable today.

That is exactly what I’ve seen happen. Everyone likes to complain about how the internet has ruined society, turned us self-centered and crass, and made people cold-hearted toward each other. And yes, it has done those things.

But it has also opened up a great, wide avenue for “like to minister to like” in ways that would have been totally impossible before. Pope Paul VI would approve.

Just think: last week, six people, whom I’ve never met, shelled out $200+ dollars to help six other people, whom neither of us have ever met, to use Marquette NFP. This is not something you do because you want a line or two of ad space on some housewife’s bloggy blog. This is something you do because you are on a mission.

And I’ve seen more: Women encouraging other women when their husbands are not on board with NFP. Men encouraging other men to do the right thing, even when all their pals got “fixed” and think he’s a freak of nature for using NFP (and for not using porn, going to strip clubs, etc.). NFP instructors advising and encouraging strangers when they’re baffled over confusing fertility signs. And people praying, praying, praying for each other.

And making jokes about NFP to encourage each other. And weeping on each other’s shoulders when they are struggling with infertility, or horribly-timed pregnancies, or repeat miscarriages, or the cruel judgment of people who don’t understand why we do what we do. And praying for each other some more.

Imagine how encouraging it is for a fearful NFP newbie to search for an online support group, and to discover that there are hundreds and thousands of us out there (even if they are spread all around the world).

Like is ministering to like, and God is with us.

When I mentioned that I was thinking of recording a podcast of Humanae Vitae, someone asked, “Really? Just for funsies?” Nah, no real funsies involved. It’s just that I realized I’m never going to be an NFP teacher, because, in the words of NFP Barbie, science is hard. I’m never going to be a scholar or an academic, because I make too many butt jokes. However, I do have a mic on my computer. I do spend tons of time on Facebook. I do know a thing or two about love. So I’m going to do what I can do with where I am right now.

So good job, everyone who contributed even in the smallest way to spreading the word about NFP!  And that includes people who are willing to admit that they’re struggling, because you can’t spread the truth if you’re not going to be honest.

If you’re talking about the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, reaching out, praying for each other, asking for prayers, willing to answer questions honestly, and picking yourself up and trying again when you fail, then you’re doing what you’re supposed to do. Paul VI specifically asked us to do just this. Paul VI knows it’s hard, and it makes you feel weird, and it’s not what everyone else is doing. Paul VI just wants you to try, because he loves you, and so does God.

I’m on a mission, and so are you.

***

So, about the picture. I’m far from home and didn’t sleep much and gotta get dressed and find a shuttle to get to town to give a speech, and I had a long, draw-out nightmare all night about trying to get an unwilling  Mother Teresa to buy me lunch. So I Googled “on a mission” and this is what came up with no copyright issues.

You clicked, right? Ha! Mission accomplished!

By Yves Tennevin (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I’m headed to the airport on the way to Colorado Springs, so this will be a quickie!  I seem to be on a jaunt back to my childhood of the late 70’s and early 80’s in my spare time. Here’s what I’ve been enjoying lately:

I’m watching . . . 

Stranger Things, that Netflix original series. Love it. As several people have noted, this is by far the most authentic early 80’s world I’ve ever seen recreated on the screen. (Everybody’s smoking! When I was little, my father used to turn out the light and spell out our names with the end of his cigarette, and it was wonderful.) This series grabs and exploits all the sensations of movies of this era, but somehow boils off all the cheapness, so it feels like you’re meeting very familiar, beloved movie that’s grown up since you saw it last.

And who knew Winona Ryder could act? I’m only up to episode 3, so don’t spoil anything for me, but wow, what an episode. No wasted scenes or dialogue, and it’s truly creepy and thrilling. You care about not one but several characters. Top notch. Recommended for age 12 and up. The first few episodes have a sex scene or two to skip over (although they nicely portray casual fornication as cheap and depressing).

Here’s the trailer:

I’m reading . . . 

Live Free or Die by Ernest Hebert. This is book five in the Darby series, the first of which I recommended earlier as the ultimate “yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like where I live” book.  Live Free Or Die is set in the late 70’s, a “two world collide” kind of book (rich and poor, upper and lower class, wilderness vs. development, etc.), and I’m a little disappointed. He keeps telling you what the characters are thinking and why, and explaining what it means that it’s uphill from one part of town to the other, and I already got it. Oh well. That “show, don’t tell” advice is really worth taking, even though it means lots of readers will miss important stuff. Unless you’re writing for a newspaper or for Ikea, it’s okay to let the reader do some work, as long as you do your work.

I’m listening to . . .
ABBA.  What? I’m not made of stone. This is the music of my childhood, when my neurons were still fresh and malleable, and when my high school-aged sisters looked like they were seven feet tall and moved around in a cloud of disco awesomeness. The little kids and I sometimes watch music videos when Daddy is working late, and ABBA is a huge favorite. Check out “Take a Chance On Me”

So. Much. Winking. I love how the blonde lady can’t actually dance at all; she just kind of swoops back and forth.

Okay, and now “Mama Mia”

But beware the permanent retinal impression of Benny Andersson in ruffled shorty overalls that you’ll bear with you for the rest of your life. WORTH IT.

 

In the US, the winner of Friday’s contest, sponsored by St. Clement ePress, is:

Kelly Heffron

and in the UK, the winner of Friday’s contest, sponsored by an anonymous UK donor, is:

Vicky Davila. 

Congratulations to the winners! I’ve sent you an email with instructions about what to do next. Thanks, once again, to all the generous donors who made last week so great.

We have winners for the first four fertility monitors! I’ve sent emails notifying these four winners, who were chosen at random. They are:

Marie Heimann
Olivia (Tuesday July 26 at 11 a.m.)
Jenna Gabel
and
Katy ‘Fusz’ Connors

Congratulations! Please check your inboxes for an email from me.
Thanks once more to the sponsors of these wonderful prizes:

Dr. Michael Czerkes
A Simple House
Lori and Eric Doerneman
and Anon in S.D.

I’ll announce the winners of the final two monitors on Saturday. You still have time to enter both contests, one for US residents, and one for UK residents. Good luck!

This is it! The sixth and final Clearblue Fertility Monitor giveaway for NFP Awareness Week 2016.

Today’s sponsor is St. Clement ePress!

St. Clement ePress is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) corporation founded to create great Catholic Apps and eBooks from the wealth of resources available from over 2000 years of Catholic teaching and art.

Thank you, St. Clement ePress! Check them out if only to see one of the prettiest, most elegant websites I’ve ever had the pleasure to visit.

This contest is open only to residents of the US. For the giveaway for UK residents, also running today, click here.  To enter today’s contest, use the Rafflecopter form below. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Today, I want a prize for saying “British eyes.”

NFP week is drawing to a close. Two more monitors to give away! Below is the Rafflecopter form for today’s contest, which is donated anonymously from a sponsor in the UK, for a winner in the UK. If you do not have a UK address, please do not enter this drawing! There will be a second drawing later today for residents of the US. 

This contest will run a little longer since Rafflecopter won’t let me switch time zones without changing all my time zones. I don’t want to talk about it.

Here are the generous sponsors for the previous winners.

Monday: Dr. Michael Czerkes, pro-life and NFP-only OB/GYN at Women’s Health Associates, St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, ME.
Tuesday: Dave Singleton in honor of A Simple House.
Wednesday: Lori and Eric Doerneman, a mother-son duo, who are founding a new online resource to educate parents on how to be positive and effective communicators with their children about porn.  Thursday: an anonymous, loving Catholic family of eight from South Dakota, who would love to have more babies in the world.

Thanks once again, so much, to today’s anonymous sponsors, and to all the sponsors!

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Hello, elephant in the room! I see you, and I’m ready to talk about you.

The NFP community is full of large families like mine. What the heck? How can we say that NFP is effective, and then show up with ten kids in tow? If a told you I had a really great system for losing weight, but I weighed 400 pounds, wouldn’t you snicker and look elsewhere for advice?

It’s a fair question! Here’s my answer:

1. Lots of people who use NFP actually want, and enjoy having, big families. Many couples use NFP mainly to space their much-desired, numerous pregnancies; and many couples use NFP to help them conceive, when pregnancy doesn’t come easily.

Many couples would have even more children than they already do, if it weren’t for NFP. Hello! Despite round-the-clock breastfeeding, I return to fertility within a few months of giving birth. When my babies are spaced two or three years apart, that’s due to diligent charting, not NFP failure. Ten children is a lot, but it’s not as many as the eighteen I’d probably have without NFP. My large family may look like evidence that NFP doesn’t work, but it’s actually evidence that NFP can be useful to people who like kids but aren’t out to break any records.

And something that should be acknowledged more when we talk about NFP: many couples wouldn’t have children at all if it weren’t for NFP. Many fertility problems can be diagnosed and treated with the help of a doctor who can interpret your charts.

Contraception has one purpose: to prevent conception. If you’re using contraception and get pregnant, that’s a clear failure. But NFP is different: NFP can be used to avoid conception, to delay conception, or to conceive. So a good many couples use NFP while still hoping for lots of kids. A big family is not necessarily evidence that NFP has “failed,” because you can use NFP for different reasons at different times.

And don’t forget, these decisions are private. A couple might say they’re done having kids, and then change their minds and decide to try for more babies without first notifying every aunt, cousin, and mom on the playground.

So, in short: it’s complicated.

2. NFP is easier to mess up than artificial birth control. There, I said it. If couples with normal fertility want to use NFP to avoid getting pregnant, they have to stay on their toes and be committed, and there’s no such thing as “set it and forget it.” If you make a mistake in charting, or if you know you’re probably fertile and decide to have sex anyway, you can get pregnant when you really didn’t want to. And there are occasional head-scratchers, where you follow all the rules to avoid, and you get pregnant anyway. It does happen.

Of course, these things happen to couples using contraception, too. Raise your hand if you know someone who conceived despite using condoms, or the Pill, or an IUD, or even some combination, or someone who trusts the Pill but skipped a day because life is hectic. Heck, I know couples who conceived even after a tubal or a vasectomy. Life is so life-y.

So, while some couples find NFP simple and easy and effective, other couples find it difficult and unpredictable, especially at first; and yes, they may have unplanned pregnancies because NFP is harder than they expected. NFP is an entire approach to life, not just a pill to pop. There are physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological benefits to deliberately embracing the NFP lifestyle, but the stakes are high. NFP-promoters would do well to be more upfront about the level of commitment NFP takes. The stakes are always high in acts of love, but it’s much easier to forget this fact when you’re taking shelter behind contraception.

In short, it’s complicated.

3. But people who use NFP are far less likely to abort a baby who was conceived by mistake. There, I said that, too.

This is what John Paul II was talking about when he coined that much-abused phrase “the contraceptive mentality.” He meant that when we insert contraception between two lovers, we’re not truly embracing love, with its glories and its crosses — and when we chase love out, death comes rushing in. When whole societies embrace contraception, abortion (and euthanasia, and child abuse, and pornography, and sex trafficking, and every other way to kill love and use people as objects) worms its way into that embrace.

According to Planned Parenthood, over half of the women in the US who have abortions were using contraception in the month they got pregnant. If you are using contraception because it would be intolerable to have a baby, then you may not tolerate giving birth to a baby that appears anyway. You may even be pressured to abort for the good of the baby himself if you conceived while on a contraceptive that increases your risk of ectopic pregnancy, pelvic infections, or other delights that empower women. And of course, your contraception may cause miscarriage. NFP oopsies may mean big families, but contraception oopsies may mean babies with very short lives.

I don’t mean that contracepting couples are all abortion-minded, utilitarian brutes (I know they’re not) and I don’t mean that NFP-using couples are all life-embracing, God-trusting martyrs (I know we’re not). I mean that if you’re already in deep enough to commit to NFP, you’re probably in too deep to seek abortion, even if the thought of pregnancy makes you want to run away screaming.

It’s complicated.

4. Did I mention it’s complicated? NFP isn’t a lifelong club with a set of firm bylaws that you swear fealty to the minute you say “I do,” and it isn’t a system you necessarily keep using the whole time you’re fertile. It’s something you can stop and start at any time; and lots of couples do stop and start NFP throughout the course of their marriage. Many couples use it more or less conservatively at different times in their marriage. Many many couples aren’t sure if they want more kids or not, so they chart carelessly, or cut corners, and if they get pregnant, they deal (or are amazed at how happy they are). There’s even an acronym for this mindset: TTW, meaning “trying to whatever” (as opposed to Trying To Conceive or Trying To Avoid).

I know a couple who conceived out of wedlock, then had a bunch more kids, then left the church and got sterilized, then came back and got the sterilization reversed, then had to put off having more children, and then decided to have a bunch more, and then had some miscarriages, and then decided they had enough. They have a big family. Is it evidence that NFP doesn’t work? Not really. It’s complicated.

Lots of people only start using NFP after they already have a bunch of kids. Hello, me again: I had three babies in three years before I said, “We need to slow this train down” and signed up for instruction.  My family is a combination of babies conceived while making no effort to avoid conception, babies conceived while kinda sorta trying not to conceive, babies conceived because God thought it was a good time even though we did not, and babies conceived joyfully on purpose because we like babies. And a baby who was conceived joyfully on purpose and then quietly died while we were still happily calculating the due date.

From the outside, it looks like I’m a crazy woman who has babies nonstop and yet somehow wants to persuade people that I know something about family planning. From my point of view, the story is stranger and harder and funnier and sadder and sweeter and, most of all, much more complicated than that.

So, why do couples who use NFP have so many kids? It’s complicated. It’s complicated. Like life is complicated, love is complicated, our relationship with God is complicated. That’s why.

***

For more about the emotional, psychological, spiritual, and sociological issues surrounding the NFP lifestyle, read my book, The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning (OSV, 2013), available in paperback, ebook, or audio form.

Elephant photo by Robin Arm via Unsplash

 

 

Today, I would like credit for not making a single Pokémon Go/NFP joke about catching the elusive peak-achu until well after Pokémon has exited the news cycle. Please! I am not from Havana!

Although I would be interested in knowing how much overlap there is between the “Pokémon monsters are patterned after real live demons, like cat demons and fire demons! How blind can you be!” crowd and the “The smoke of satan has infiltrated Catholic bedroom, and those smoke signals spell out “N . . .F . .  P! How blind can you be!” crowd. Hey, if I’m gonna go blind, it’s not from using NFP, if you know what I mean. Which I don’t.

Onward and upward.

Oh, but maybe you’d like to know that my two sons are currently squabbling over whose turn it is to tape his phone to the hamster wheel so he can hatch eggs without getting off the couch. All this means is that they are their father’s sons, and will soon graduate from searching for a Snorlax to searching for a loophole.

Today’s Fertility Monitor is sponsored by an anonymous donor who is also not from Havana, and who is in no way responsible for the stupidity above, and who says:

This is from an anonymous, loving Catholic family of eight from South Dakota, who would love to have more babies in the world.

Thank you, anon! And a great reminder for Catholics that a good many people use natural family planning to help them conceive. I know an awful lot of long-desired babies who wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for NFP. (More about that in a post later today.)

Here are the other generous sponsors of the other monitors:

Monday: Dr. Michael Czerkes, pro-life and NFP-only OB/GYN at Women’s Health Associates, St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, ME.
Tuesday: Dave Singleton in honor of A Simple House.
Wednesday: Lori and Eric Doerneman, a mother-son duo, who are founding a new online resource to educate parents on how to be positive and effective communicators with their children about porn. 
Friday (US): An anonymous donor
Friday (UK): An anonymous donor

And now les details d’raffle:

How do I enter? Use the Rafflecopter form below. It gives you several ways to enter. If the form doesn’t show up, click on the link that says “a Rafflecopter giveaway” at the bottom of the post. Only one prize per household.

How often can I enter? You may enter once per day, using as many options as you like from the Rafflecopter form. It will show up as “x/6” — so, for instance, if you complete two types of entries today, it will say “2/6” at the top of the form. If it says “0/6,” then your entry did not go through.
Each day is a separate raffle, so you must enter each day to have a chance of winning each day’s prize. Each raffle runs from midnight to midnight, eastern time.

Can I win if I live outside the US? Not Monday through Thursday. HOWEVER, if you have a mailing address in the UK, you can enter on Friday. I’ll be giving away two monitors on Friday: one for a winner in the US, and one for a winner in the UK. If you live in the UK, please only enter the UK contest on Friday! Sorry, residents of other countries are not eligible to win. Sorry with a chain saw!

When will winners be announced? I’ll choose one winner each day on Monday through Thursday, and two winners on Friday (one winner in the US, and one in the UK). I’ll announce all the winners on Friday, or possibly on Saturday if I am a terrible person.
If you are a winner, I will notify you using the address you provided to Rafflecopter.

Do I have to provide my actual email address, even though I worry that you will use it to steal my soul and then go on a shopping spree at Forever 21? Yes, please use an actual email address. I don’t even want your soul. Your valid email is the only way I have of getting in touch with you if you win, so please make sure that when you sign up for Rafflecopter, you use an active address! If I can’t get in touch with you, I’ll pick a different winner.

I think that’s it! Good luck, and thanks again to today’s anonymous sponsor.
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