Sunday, March 6, 2011

Reasonable Expectations

At Mass this morning the priest announced a couple in the church was celebrating their first wedding anniversary.  I know the husband professionally and the wife through a ministry at the parish.  When I put in that intention last year for infertile couples, my husband and I went to the priest who would be presiding at the Mass to talk to him about why I put the intention in.  The priest mentioned the aforementioned couple and talked about how the wife was very anxious too that she was not getting pregnant.  She did get pregnant and she looks at if she's due any day now.  So, if they got married in March 2010, it appears as if it took all of three months to get pregnant.

What bothers me is that she let her anxiety take her over to the point that she consults a priest after she couldn't get pregnant by the second try.  I seriously didn't even think about consulting a priest on this infertility issue until I was about one year down that road.  Of course, I'm judging her but I think people need to adopt reasonable expectations about getting pregnant.  It doesn't benefit the community to think getting pregnant is easy and that it is controllable.  I'm not sure if people look at me and assume that I'm too career focused and Catholics think we're using contraception and that wouldn't have crossed my mind until another blogger mentioned they assumed that about married couples in their church who don't have children.

What Christ preached against, judging others and feeling anxious seems to be rampant.  Perhaps this is a good thing to look at we get into Lent, especially for me.  

5 comments:

  1. Argh. It's been almost six years for us and I think that it may be time to talk to our priest!

    I can't wait for Lent either! I definitely need it too!

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  2. I went into TTC very naively as well. I thought we would get pregnant right away since everyone I knew either planned their children or had "accidents". No one had problems conceiving, so the idea was foreign to me. As a result, I was devastated every month (especially in the beginning) when we didn't get pregnant. DH was always very practical about it, saying that we shouldn't worry until at least the 1 year mark, but I always knew that something wasn't right. It took us 3 different prescription medications to conceive.

    I think one of the reasons why I thought we wouldn't have any problems getting pregnant was because society DOES tell you that you're "in control" of your fertility, and if you have "unprotected" sex, you'll get pregnant. That couldn't be more wrong, though!

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  3. 3 months! Hah! I am ashamed to say, I would have judged the lady as well. But it's all about education ...

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  4. That ignorance...I had it! I thought I'd be preggers in no time. Little did I know that I'd loose a baby, a tube and have 3 surgeries. Yikes.

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  5. Ahh, I can't stand the ignorance in some people! We just had a priest pray over us after almost 6 years.. (not that it helped much)

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