I hate birth control. There I said it. People always say how great it is and it regulated their periods or they don’t get periods at all. I hate it. It is literally my worst enemy. I started birth control at 19 years old after Joseph and I started dating and every day following I was a raging bitch. Granted, I’m a bitch to start with, but it definitely doesn’t help.
I’ve had the girl talk with probably dozens of females in my life about birth control. I had never heard any bad stories about it. I had always heard these great stories about how it helped people so much. It made their periods lighter, non existent, or at the least helped with cramps. So when I pulled the trigger and decided to start birth control I was stoked. Who doesn’t want to stop having cramps every month? And I had terrible cramps.
I went to the clinic is Portsmouth, Virginia absolutely terrified because I’d never had any kind of reproductive care before aside from one Pap smear at boot camp. I sat down with one of the doctors and after what seemed like an eternity of discussing options I decided on starting with a low dose pill because it was the least invasive option. And so the adventure began. For the first several weeks everything was fine. I didn’t even really notice any difference for a while. Then, it kicked in and my hormones were on a rollercoaster similar to that of Kingda Ka at Six Flags. I had extreme mood swings, with smaller, less drastic mood changes in between.
Once I started having these hormonal changes I started thinking about maybe trying a different option. But of course, now I started hearing all these scary stories. Seeing articles about women who had the arm implant and having it put in the wrong place, or getting rejected. Stories of people with an IUD whose period has been happening for months straight. Or it getting lodged in their uterine wall. Suddenly the mood swings didn’t seem so bad, so I stuck with it.
Then I became the tiny percentage of people that take their birth control correctly and still conceive and I didn’t have to worry about it for a while. What a glorious time to have not so crazy mood swings. You’d think being pregnant my hormones would be worse, but the break was amazing. I felt more leveled out for the first time in a long time, and it was great.
After Mark was born and I had to talk to my doctor again about my birth control options I chose the same low dose pill, because it was the lesser of the evils in my eyes. Once again, it sucked. At least it’s consistent. So for another year I dealt with my continued cramps, horrible periods, and raging hormones until the sweet relief of pregnancy came around to help me level out again. It was magical, like walking in your first snow storm as a child. Through out all of this Joseph had never even thought about how it was the birth control that was making me crazy, but I had.
A few months after my postpartum appointment with Rose I brought it up to Joseph. It finally clicked with him like flipping on a light switch. We had a long conversation about it. (Yes, he talks to me about “girl issues”, because he cares.) I continued taking my birth control because there isn’t really very much of an option as a woman. You either take the birth control or you get told that you aren’t being responsible with your reproductive health. So I continued to take the pills day after day.
I still don’t know where to go from here, but I know why my attitude gets so bad, and that’s a start. I hope that I can figure out a solution that works for me, but I don’t know what that is. I’m finding a lot more options and have talked with my doctors to help find the right method for more, but there’s a lot more out there than I naively thought all these years. I recently learned about natural family planning and maybe that’s where I go. Who knows? Until I figure it out I’ll continue discussing the options with Joseph, the doctors, and researching for myself. I hope I can figure this out and I wish all the women who have issues with birth control can also figure it out. It’s 2020 and birth control being mostly on women’s shoulders still with very few options for men is dumb. I’ll continue to hope that also changes. Because it sucks. Birth control sucks.
