Fertility Awareness: Testimonials

I supported myself as a writer and an actor for the last four years, so that I’m pretty proud of. It’s been hard. It’s been very, very hard. There are times when – there are months, actually, several months where I think, oh, God, I’m not going to be able to pay my health insurance. I’m not going to be able to make my car insurance payment, or I owe this bill. But then I realize, really it’s just money, and I’ll – I will have more money next month. I first heard about the FAM being used in modern times in an article I read on birth control throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. When I read about it in this article, the way that the author talked about it and it – she made it very easy to understand. It was very simple, and all it boiled down to was just knowing your body. And that really stuck with me. And when I decided to pursue alternate methods of birth control, that was the first thing that popped in my mind, because I was – I didn’t want to use the pill any more; I didn’t want to rely on condoms any more; I didn’t want to use spermicides or any of that any more. So reading that article, it was like a light went on in my head, like oh, this – I can do this. When I started to use the FAM, I spent the better part of a year tracking my cycles, the changes in my body – everything from backaches to breaking out, to how greasy my skin and hair felt, to cervical mucus – everything. I kept very detailed track of this. During the year I was charting my cycles before I started using the FAM, I relied on condoms and spermicide. And even though – even though I –halfway through the year I was figuring out when my safe and unsafe days were, I still relied on that, because I wanted to get as accurate a chart as possible. Just because you can’t have sex doesn’t mean – doesn’t mean that you and your partner can’t be together. You get creative. I mean, it doesn’t mean you abstain for those 10, 11 days. There’s nothing wrong with oral sex, messing around with your boyfriend or your partner. It doesn’t mean sexless, basically. You rely on your own body to make sure you don’t get pregnant. You rely on your own body to tell you, well, I’m getting sick today, or my muscle is sore, perhaps I should rest. You know, really I take better care of myself because of this just in general. Not even in terms of birth control, just health in general – keeping healthy, eating better, getting more sleep when I need it. Because all of those, staying healthy is really, to me – it’s really integral for the FAM to be –to work, you have to stay healthy, because you need your body to be as consistent as humanly possible. My name is Rachel. I’m 26, and I use the fertility awareness method.