Biological machines?
Cats: Ilona's Take|Ever heard of sympto-thermal?
Not a kind of underwear, no. Birth control, you know — pregnancy avoidance. Back in the day, when I was tired of polluting my body with fake hormones, wearied by the diaphragm and the goo and too cheap to buy condoms — and, let it be said, when a pregnancy would not have been a disaster — back then, I used it for a couple of years.
It involves thermometers and mucous and charting. (And, for us, condoms or diaphragm when I was fertile. Purists just abstain.) If the thought of charting brings back chills of remembered math phobia from grade seven, this method is not for you. Me, I rather enjoyed the charting. In fact, once I had gotten comfortable with the basics I started jotting all sorts of other things onto that chart.
What a revelation.
You want to believe you are an autonomous, independent adult, in control of your mind, your psyche, your response to your surroundings?
Don’t do this.
It was astonishing what was cycle-dependent, or at least cycle-related. Not just the obvious temperature fluctuations and mucous variations. Not just sex drive and pre-menstrual emotional flare-ups. (Back at that age, I was pretty much horny all the time, anyway, and PMS was mild to non-existant. Lucky me.)
Days 1 - 5? Not-hungry days. I could go the whole day and have it occur to me only about 4 in the afternoon that “Oh. I guess I haven’t eaten yet, have I?”
Days 11- 14? Lots of dreaming, and all of them pleasant. (These were also my fertile, ovulatory days: clearly nature was doing its damdest to keep my mood relaxed and compliant.)
Days 21 - 26: STARVING. Could not eat enough. Hungry, hungry, hungry all the live-long day. These were also the days when, if I dreamt, they were nasty. Often with some male coming to a bad end.
Headaches, energy levels, sociability, dreams, what foods I enjoyed, the music I listened to (very mood-dependent, for me), ability to concentrate … For two years, I charted how they all ebbed and flowed as my blood ebbed and flowed.
Fascinating.
And, at the time, a little unnerving. Back then I staunchly asserted my superiority over my biology. I was the master of my fate, not my genes and hormones. I was not prisoner to my body, captive to my hormones, dictated by my DNA.
Life has buffeted those ideas some. I still hold firm to the belief that we virtually always have a choice, that hormones and genes and DNA influence behaviour, but do not, if we are conscious and self-aware, determine it. Now, however, I afford a much larger scope of influence to the hormones and genes and DNA; at the same time, life has shown me that most people are not conscious and self-aware. Which means that most people are, indeed, helpless, hapless pawns of their biology. They don’t have to be, but they are.
The charting was a revelation. Certainly it started the change in my thinking. The funny, quirky odd little bits and pieces of my life that I’d thought were random, turning out, (with remarkable consistency, over a period of two years) to be measured, patterned, cyclical — hard to avoid the implications of that.
I’m curious: Has anyone ever done anything like this? What did you unearth?
February 28th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Charting worked great before I had my first. It really is fascinating and puts you in tune with your body. Like you said it can be pretty humbling.
Now that we have two kids (exactly as planned!) I’m kinda bummed that my nights are too irregular for charting.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
I started charting 1-1/2ish years ago when dh and I met (we knew right away). Stopped for a few months on the pill as I went through the what-have-I-done phase of newly married, then picked up again once we decided we were actually more prepared for a baby. Can’t say that I got too much info, though, since I charted all of two months before getting knocked up with this one!
The main things I would have learned — had I not already known them — is that I don’t normally have a sweet tooth, but the last few days of my cycle, no chocolate is safe from me. Oh, and yeah, I’d get more horny than usual around ovulation, too.
Haven’t decided yet how to control fertility after this one; I hate pregnancy enough (even though I love being a mom) that I seriously doubt we’ll have any more.
March 2nd, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Miguelin - We didn’t use it after our first. I think I was too chronically distracted for something as methodical as charting…
Allison - Once we decided to go for it, two months was all it took us, too. I read somewhere that 90%-ish conceive within 3 months of unprotected sex, so I guess that makes us all pretty average. But not the products of the event, right?