New Year's Eve

Tomorrow is a holy day of obligation and I'm totally going to go. I'm 28 years old and have only gone once, when I was in college. It's odd because by that time I had pretty much lapsed in terms of my church attendance, but for some reason I felt that it was very important to drag my hung-over self to Mass that morning. I don't remember much except the feeling of misery and the knowledge that if I took any Communion wine I'd probably hurl.

Mike and I didn't go last year because he had an asthma attack after midnight which was pretty severe. I think he had a respiratory infection at the time too...anyway, he spent New Year's Day in bed and I stayed home to watch over him.

I've always thought that it was rather cruel to have a holy day of obligation after a late-night celebration like New Year's Eve. But I suppose it's another situation where you have to make a choice that's right either for your secular life or your religious life.

At least this year the pregnancy will make that choice easier. No partying, and certainly no drinking. Making it to Mass by 10 AM won't be tough this year.

Questions

I regularly read Ask Metafilter. I was going to post this question anonymously, but chickened out.

I’m a good Roman Catholic woman who decided to eschew her birth control pills in favor of Natural Family Planning. I was never really happy with my pills and their side effects, and I also found the idea of my husband being so involved with, accepting of, and intimately familiar with my body and its processes quite a turn-on (I grew up with a lot of body shame issues).

So we gave it a shot. I got pregnant within six months. One night we were on a vacation, in a hotel, it was at the very end of the “don’t have sex” period, and we thought we could take a chance and have it turn out okay. We were wrong.

Now, don’t get me wrong. After we got over our initial shock we were very happy, and I’d never want anything to go wrong with this pregnancy or my baby. However…before when my husband and I would have sex it was entirely recreational. It was about me and my husband having fun and being in love. This experience has been a crash course reminder that sex is actually for procreation…whenever we get intimate now, I just keep thinking, Oh yeah, this is how babies are made.

Maybe it’s because I’m still pregnant and still very much the victim of my own hormones, but I feel like sex will never be the fun, carefree, loving experience it once was. Now it feels like an obligation, and I’m afraid that later it’ll feel like the consequences of another pregnancy are too dire to really enjoy the experience.

I really want to shift the focus of sex off of procreation and onto recreation, but I don’t know how. If anyone can give me advice about recapturing the fun of sex without suggesting that I change birth control methods or bashing my religious beliefs I would really appreciate it. I like sex too much to never enjoy it again!

I guess part of the reason I didn't do it because I figured I'd get two types of responses:

a) people telling me to just go back to the pills anyway

b) people telling me that if I was really Catholic I'd just resign myself to having a zillion kids

I guess if having a zillion kids is in my future, that's what it is. I'm certainly grateful for the one I'm gestating, perhaps I'd be thrilled to pop out ten more. But right now sex seems like more of a risk than a romp, and I'm not sure that it'll feel any less risky after my pregnancy.

I guess I'm worried that if I approach my friends about this problem, they'll have the same reaction...just change your birth control. If I ask someone who's more religious, they'll tell me to just accept it. And if I ask my priest...cripes, how weird would that be. I can just imagine him sitting there thinking, Wow, you can't have sex whenever you want it. How incredibly rough for you.

I guess I just miss the carefree attitude I used to have. I guess if I tried to embrace God's fate for me more fully I wouldn't feel the need to worry so much. Or maybe if I took a class in NFP at the local Catholic hospital (yes, they do have them!) I'd feel confident enough in it again to feel comfortable.

I also feel weird talking about it, as if I complain too much about the way I feel God will take away my baby because I'm ungrateful. I want to just re-iterate a thousand times that I'm intensely grateful for the son I'm carrying and I don't want anyone to think otherwise. I'd be devastated if something happened to him and I pray every day that if it's God's will he'll be born alive and healthy. Although judging by the state of the world today, God doesn't automatically take things away just because you're ungrateful for them. And not thinking about it out of fear isn't going to help me address the problem. I need to be honest about how I'm feeling if I'm going to figure things out and do what's right for me, my husband, and our religion.

My husband says to wait until the pregnancy hormones die down and then see how I feel. I guess he's right. We've got another four months and 22 days before I can get knocked up again. We have time to work it out.