20 December 2011

WOMAN

It's now been... wow! Six months to the day that I stopped taking hormonal birth control pills.

And then, nothing happened, for four months. I actually stopped charting for a while, first because I forgot my thermometer when I travelled to England for a week, and by the time I returned, I had fallen out of the habit. I grew tired of taking my temperature every morning and checking my cervical fluid, with no discernible patterns in my chart.

During this time, in mid-October, I checked out a book from the library called Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom by Christiane Northrup, MD.

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Essentially a bible of women's health, clocking in at almost one thousand pages, I was continuously drawn to the sections about hormones and fertility. The author believes that Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (a higher-than-normal level of testosterone and lower-than-normal level of estrogen, which I may or may not have), is a result of a rejection of the feminine self. I initially thought that was absurd. I have always liked being a woman. The more I tried to be objective about this diagnosis, however, the more I realized that I have always struggled with reconciling my more masculine traits with my female genes. I'm kind of a hardass. I have a muscular body. I lift heavy weights alongside meatheads at the gym... and I like it. It's true that I don't often feel very feminine. Is this why I exclusively wear skirts, dresses and scarves? Has this rejection of my feminine self manifested in my body through an abdominal (male) weight gain pattern, higher testosterone levels, a lack of ovulation and very intermittent menstruation?

Dr. Northrup prescribes for sufferers of PCOS a twice-daily affirmation, said out loud while looking oneself in the eyes in a mirror:

"I now give thanks for my fertility and femininity. I am completely safe to be all of who I am."

What the hell - it's worth a shot, I thought. The first time I said it, I was shocked by how hard the process was. It's one thing to think something, it's quite another to verbalize it, especially the second sentence. The difficulty I encountered with saying those two short sentences indicated this exercise was more powerful than it seemed. I wrote the affirmation on a post-it note and taped it next to my bathroom mirror, and tried very hard to remember to say it when I woke up and before I went to sleep. The more I said it, the more I began to believe it. I even tried smiling while affirming the belief out loud. It was very weird - I felt so vulnerable! It's safe to be exactly who I am, no holds barred? I've never been that person! I've had barriers up since puberty, and the next decade wasn't too pretty. I dutifully practiced the affirmation every day. At the same time, I had begun charting again. All that work in the summer... for nothing? It had been almost a month, so I picked up where I left off, and my pink thermometer made a comeback on my bedside table.

Three weeks later, still practicing the affirmation and preparing to fly to the East Coast for a crazy week of travel for work, one of my nipples spent three days in an extremely sensitive and erect state. It was painful. Dressing became a delicate event. Not thinking much of it, I pressed on to my work trip, stopping for a day in Ann Arbor to see my dear friend Claire. During an afternoon of tea and Crazy Wisdom, we both bought copies You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, a book I'd read in college a few years ago, but had forgotten about.

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A 20-year bestselling book, You Can Heal Your Life lays out Hay's belief that we make ourselves ill through self-hatred, fear and anger, and only by practicing self-love and self-compassion through positive thoughts and affirmations can we truly heal ourselves. Hay's affirmation for amenorrhea (absence of menstruation):

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Everything seemed to be lining up for me.

I continued to practice my affirmation twice daily during my work trip, and embellished with some new ones from YCHYL. Four days later I dropped my bags in my Boston hotel room and went to the bathroom. I actually gasped with surprise and joy when I noticed the red swirls in the toilet bowl. It was like seeing an old friend. I think I even said out loud, "Good job, body!" Thank goodness I had been carrying by beloved Diva Cup in my purse for three months.

When I got home a few days later, I updated my chart with the temps for that week (I had been recording them in my iPhone) and looked back for a pattern. My temps were wonky due to the time change on the East Coast, and I had been temping at slightly different times each morning. While the TCOYF Fertility software didn't pick it up, I noticed that there was a discernable rise in my basal body temperature (BBT) - your temperature upon waking, which is the lowest of the day. For those who haven't read Taking Charge of Your Fertility (go read it right now!)...

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... this indicates ovulation!

Had I actually ovulated before I left town? The hard nipple coincided with the temperature rise, and breast tenderness is a secondary sign of ovulation. If I did actually ovulate, there were only 9 days until menstruation, but this is not uncommon, especially when your hormones are still figuring themselves out off the pill. To sustain a pregnancy, this time frame needs to be at least 12 days and ideally 14-16, but I'll take 9 right now!

On the plane home, I spent an hour of the 6-hour flight meditating and repeating in my head a mix of affirmations from Hay's book that resonated with me, and some that formed spontaneously. This is what I ended up saying:

I continued to say some sort of affirmation out loud every day from that point forward. Sometimes it was as simple as, "I approve of myself" or "I now give thanks for my fertility..." and sometimes it was sitting up in bed in the morning, opening my arms wide and saying "I am open and receptive to the good and abundance of the Universe". Occasionally I would forget, or not feel like it, and I noticed that those days were less... fulfilling than when I took a moment to affirm a positive thought out loud.

It has now been two months since I began my very first 'femininity' affirmation, and one month since I got my period in Boston. (Yay Boston!). I was so ecstatic about my body showing me something that I wasn't expecting more hormone action for several months. I was going to be happy if it took another four months to get my next period - as long as it wasn't more than four.

But this past weekend, I was thrilled to notice a significant (and software-approved) temperature spike. I definitely ovulated! I had the same hard nipple thing happening during the temperature jump, and my temps have been 98.0 and above for four days. Do you know how exciting this is?!?! (Texts to close girlfriends: "I OVULATED!") I'm interested to see how long my luteal phase (ovulation --> menstruation) will be. If its 9 days, like before, I'll get my period on Christmas Day. I'm being honest when I say how lovely of a Christmas present to myself that would be. I love my periods. When you lose them, you appreciate the arrival of your period in a way you never did before. The gift of fertility is an immense and precious one.

I can't prove that affirmations were the catalyst for my ovulation(s). It may have happened whether or not I'd read Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom or re-discovered Louise Hay. I think humans seek answers that make sense, and it's easy for me to want to connect the two. The great thing is - there is no way to know if they helped, and also no way to know that they didn't help. So as long as affirmations provide me with a sense of grounding and serenity, I will continue to practice them.




09 December 2011

home alone

It is so nice to be home.

I spent September, October and November in a state of flux - moving apartments 15 miles northeast, three huge workshops in three cities, a wedding across the Atlantic, and the Thanksgiving holiday at my other "home" - my parents' house. It felt like every other week I was preparing for something huge, whether or not I was sleeping in my own bed.

Then last week, three days home since my sixth flight in a month, a huge wind storm hit, slicing my Internet cables and placing me in the middle of the... oh, any decade prior to the 1990s. My office was closed, Kevin was swamped with work and had no time to spend with me if I visited him, and I had nothing to do. After a lovely three-hour nap to make up for a sleepless night, I was faced with being with myself in my apartment -- a place I still felt I hadn't fully fleshed out. I've lived here for 9 weeks and I'd been away for 1/3 of them. So, I settled in to the somewhat uncomfortable feeling of being bored, and started doing something. I cleaned, I did laundry, I read The New Yorker. I even returned something to Macy's and got $61 back on my credit card. But mostly, I just hung out with myself, in my place. And it was fabulous.