birth control as a rite of passage
I can't remember when I got on the pill. I think it was junior or senior year of highschool. I wasn’t having sex regularly. I was having sex sometimes. In my limited experience, if I didn’t say anything we didn’t use a condom. I had resorted to plan b nearly as many times as I’d had sex.
When my blood had come a few years before, my family system had no ceremony to initiate me into my changing body. I understood my period as a shameful physical limitation that could distort my reality and twist my mind. My grasp on fertility was simply that because I bled conception was possible.
Getting on the pill was one way for me to begin interacting with my body and my reproductive health. It allowed me to bypass conversations about protection that I was not yet capable of, and it prevented me from becoming pregnant when I was sexually active, which I believed was the worst thing that could happen to me.
I got the pill for free at my local family planning and I didnt tell my mom. It felt both responsible and rebellious. I was a part of a culture that feared puberty and birth control was the only way I knew how to hold space for myself.
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Despite the cultural shame shrouding my physical transformation, there was a subconscious desire to celebrate my menarche and growing ability to carry life. I found a kind of recognition in the ritual of taking aspirin to avoid the pain of my period, and in the alarm that would go off at lunchtime reminding me to take the pill.
I created these rituals as my own rites of passage. Placing the pill underneath my tongue in front of whoever sat with me at lunch was a sort of declaration to the world that I bled, that my womb was a portal of life and death. It was also a subconscious attempt to become more desirable by announcing that my fertility was not a threat.
I got on and off the pill a few different times until I turned 22. I hadn’t felt like myself for a long time and I wanted to know who I was without it. For years I believed anxiety and depression were a normal part of growing up, but when I got off hormonal birth control I felt relief from so much of the heaviness that had accompanied my early adulthood.
I began to identify my intuition by allowing my body to cycle naturally for some time. I started to recognize behavior that fractured me from myself. I took a more active role in my life. When I was sexually active, I still prayed for my blood to come each month.
A couple years later I got an IUD. Again, the decision was driven by a desire to avoid pregnancy and to have more liberated sex. But still, it was still flavored by an indoctrinated pressure to be good and moral. I claimed a version of empowerment by taking care to avoid making hard and real choices between abortion, adoption or motherhood. I wanted to relieve my partner from the burden of worry that I had accepted as a normal part of being in a female body. I was operating from a belief system in which removing fertility from the experience of sex would make me more agreeable—bring me freedom even.
I had the IUD removed after three years when I started to experience pain during sex and my periods had essentially all but disappeared. During the time between the pill and the IUD, I had come to rely on my period as what I now understand as an opportunity to work with my shadow. The grief and turmoil that grew as my hormone levels dropped became an invitation to explore root causes of dis-ease and make adjustments. When I stopped bleeding I couldn’t access myself in the same way and I was no longer willing to accept the compromise that came from suppressing my body's natural function.
This month marks one year of charting my cycles using fertility awareness method. Learning to map my cycle has been the rite of passage that I’ve been missing for 15 years. A reclamation of my personal authority, a better way for me to witness and hold space for myself, an initiation into my feminine spirit through the melting away of some of the shame that I’ve held in my tissues as a result of relating to my body as a threat for so many years.
The practice of cycle mapping has given me data and language to understand and explore the increasingly more obvious mental, emotional, and physical shifts that take place throughout the month as my hormones do their brilliant thing. It’s helped me to understand the gravity of stress in my life, given me proof that some physical symptoms are not in my head, and has been a catalyst for repair in many parts of my life.
I’m giving my body permission to exist. I’m beginning to love the shape of my thighs and my soft belly. I’m letting go of my addiction to control, and feeling trust in my ability to care for myself. I’m calling back the fractured parts of my true being, learning about what it means to be present and embodied, beginning to understand how freezing around trauma and pain reduces capacity for pleasure and joy. I am accepting what it is to be human, to be a woman. I am reveling in my physiologic design and in the magic that is holding space for life and death inside the home of my own womb.
February 2021
Resources:
Learn Fertility Awareness Method on your own Taking Charge of Your Fertility
Learn with a Fertility Awareness Educator
