moon goddess carissa

i highly suggest that any men who do not wish to learn about the intricacies of female fertility and my own personal foray into natural family planning stop reading now.

for the rest of you:

after years of artificially withheld ovulations, i'm finally giving up on hormonal birth control. i was on orthotricyclen for the better part of college. i then took the generic oral contraceptive for a while (disaster!) and as of late have been relying on the nuvaring. for those of you who don't know, the nuvaring looks and feels like a hard, though pliable clear plastic hair tie. to use it, you stick it up your hooha and leave it there for 3 weeks. the nuvaring supposedly has the lowest dose of hormones of all the hormonal birth control options out there. my dr. prescribed it to me when i complained of lowered sex drive.

actually, i had been complaining of low sex drive since about 2001. somehow, everyone seemed to think it was a figment of my imagination. now, i have never been one to have a beef with the medical profession, but at 25 i can feel my resentment growing. every doctor i saw about this issue suggested to me that "other factors" were responsible for my decreasing interest in sex. look around on the internet, low sex drive is RARELY discussed as a potential side effect of hormonal birth control. HOWEVER, look on women's message boards and you will see post after post after post of women complaining that since they got on the pill, their libido has taken a nose dive. why isn't anyone paying attention to this?

i had friends, family and doctors alike tell me that i didn't want sex because i was depressed, stressed, etc. now i'm starting to think that maybe i was depressed, stressed and sexually repressed BECAUSE of the hormones. hormones are not something to fuck around with people. they are what keep us balanced. throw some synthetics in there and it is no wonder that i cry everyday at work and am not up for a roll in the hay.

anyway, i kind of decided to take things into my own hands. the only reason i even suspected i might be better off without the hormones was because during my "off" week (the week in which i remove the ring), i was feeling so much better than during my "on" weeks. i felt happier, more myself and about 100x more into the hanky panky.

so that leaves me with a major dilemma (as bridget would say). what to do to keep me baby free? condoms are no fun, so my first thought was diaphragm. i went to my dr. and got sized for one of those puppies. to my relief, my vagina wears a medium. what i didn't really process about the diaphragm is that before use, you have to fill it with about a tablespoon of spermicide. yes... a tablespoon. then you get the fun task of trying to shove this rather large slippery plastic thing into place in your hooha. holy fucking crap. i've been practicing and STILL haven't got it down. what an effing pain in the ass! THEN... it is only 85% effective. WHAT THE????

THERE'S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY!

lo and behold... there is. why the fertility awareness method isn't really general public knowledge is beyond me. i guess any woman who is trying to concieve knows about it, but i think EVERY woman should know about it. when used correctly it is 98% effective (same as condom w/ perfect use). the downfall is that it does take some effort on your part, but the plus is that it doesn't totally fuck up the natural balance of your body or ruin the spontaneity of the moment.

here's the gist of it. you take your temperature every morning before you get out of bed and the quality of your cervical fluid (the stuff that comes out of your hooha) and then record them on a chart. you can do it manually, or you can do it online at sites like this. it then tells you when you are fertile and when you are not. you don't have sex when you are fertile... and that's that!!! HOORAY! i find this so exciting. i had no idea that this existed at all.

the closest thing i ever heard was when this wiccan chick at some party told me she got her menstrual cycle to coincide with the cycle of the moon. she claimed to have done this by going outside every night and meditating on the lunar body. she also used a minimal amount of electricity in her house so as to not throw of her body's electromagnetic rhythms. all she had to do to avoid pregnancy was not having sex in the days leading up to, during and immediately after a full moon. sounded good to me.