Finding Room...In from the Deep

The most difficult part of writing is telling the truth. From the story: “The Affair” “We made love that day. It was a blazing afternoon in July, and I felt madly in love with him. I needed touch so badly and some relief from the minutiae of the daily existence of cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, grocery shopping, and tending to my husband, children, and aging parents. I was out of gas and feeling revved up now. I had had enough of running around and servicing. I was thinking of myself now. I had been in a small-town girl where I had an impeccable reputation. I had tried to pull off the perfection exemplified by the Virgin Mary until it almost killed me. In fact, I was given her first name, Mary. I contained all kinds of projections and found myself representing the virtuous woman—the nice and kind. I lived according to all the prescriptions made by my religion and culture. ‘O clement, O holy, O sweet, Virgin Mary.’ I was a very good woman. My body had almost become marbleized just like the statue of the Madonna at the front of my church. My breath was consistently shallow, and I wasn’t connected to my real feelings and emotions that could inform me of a better way to live. I was about to become impure by my religion’s standards. “All that I have ever wanted was to know in my bones what a good time might consist of. I had been stopped by a sense of over-responsibility and blind obedience to my church and my culture’s dictates. I had broken some rules here and there as best I could. “Now, I felt it was clever to break some rules and not get caught. I began to wonder how many women like me had been set up to sneak a life. My thoughts and Kevin began to free me from not needing so much permission to live my life more self-fully. My church and my culture with all their assigned “a good woman’s virtues” seemed unalterable until that moment when a man’s and a woman’s knees touched in that restaurant. I wasn’t rebelling against authority, I was evading it.”