My biggest secret is my biggest sin. My biggest sin is a desire for freedom – I desire the freedom to dress, think and act as I please without the shackles of rules, guilt and punishment weighing me down. I once decided to sleep with a man I wasn’t married to. My mother taught me, “Nice girls don’t do that. The marriage act is only for having children within the confines of Holy Matrimony”.
Well, this “nice girl” used Holy Matrimony to give birth to nine children, to stay faithful to a man I never desired for seventeen years. Seventeen years is a long time to stay married to someone you never wanted, and the overwhelming unhappiness and numbness in my soul propelled me to divorce my husband.
Over the past three years, I sifted through every belief forced on me by my strict Catholic mother. The belief I’ve struggled with most is about sex. Sex outside of marriage. Sex for fun. It became more and more difficult to ignore the rising desire- a hunger almost- for hot, wild sex. I wanted to feel sexual desire, experience it deep in my body and soul, with no guilty aftermath. Now I’m 39 years old. But desire is still very new to me.
I struggled to reconcile my desires with my beliefs, as I found myself kneeling in the back pew of an empty church in March 2009. My head was bowed, and I was about to confess my tryst to the priest, Father Pat. I considered not going to Confession at all, but the Catholic guilt kept me on my knees. For the hundredth time I went through the conditions of committing a mortal sin: full knowledge, deliberate intent and wilfully committing the act.
I knew all these conditions before I even entered my lover’s house the first time we had sex. They were running on a perpetual loop in my head as I lay naked under his body. These conditions filled my brain so there was no room for me to enjoy even a second of the sex.
My thoughts turned to my kids. What would they think of their mother having sex? Mum’s voice is in my head again. “Leading children to hell is the worst crime. Even worse than dying with a mortal sin on your soul, you suffer in hell forever.” Hell. Forever. This last thought is the clincher. I inched towards the confessional.
“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It’s been one week since my last confession.” The words flew out automatically. I’ve had a lifetime of practice at this. “I had sex outside of marriage,” I mumble quietly. Phew, it’s out. Then I say the act of contrition. Guilt overwhelmed me again because I knew deep inside, I wasn’t just unchaste. I was a liar, too. Yet another condition of confession is that you must be sincerely sorry for your sin, promising never to commit it again. But I didn’t feel an ounce of sorrow for my wilful act. In fact, I decided that I was going to have sex again.
My lover and I met the next week, but I was still frustrated with the lack of fulfillment. I kept going to confession, but the third time I showed up, Father Pat suggested that I couldn’t continue having sex outside of marriage and confessing it. That was a fair call – I clearly didn’t have any remorse for my actions, and that’s when I decided to ditch confession altogether.
I sought reassurance from fellow parishioners who were living together before marriage, and this quietened the guilt I felt. I ended the relationship with my lover for various reasons, and realised he wasn’t such a good lover after all. You know the saying ‘practice makes perfect’? Well despite the apparent practice, he hadn’t perfected much.
Peeling back the layers of my childhood, I discovered that I had been conditioned that shame, humiliation and unworthiness was every Catholic girl’s lot. One Sunday at church, the response “Lord I am not worthy” hit home. Unconsciously, I said these responses thousands of times over the years, and now at 39 it occurred to me: if I really am created in the image and likeness of God and He is worthy, then how come I’m not worthy? Why is sex a sin if God created us with the appetite for it? Why are women made to feel shame and humiliation because they’ve had sex before marriage, yet it’s almost expected that men sow their wild oats? The power of words and how they create our reality was suddenly very clear to me. From that day on I became more careful of the words and phrases that I used, learning to break destructive habits from my childhood.
I was determined my children, especially my daughters, would not grow up like I had – isolated, ignorant of life and the world, without dating or relationship advice. The most exciting times during these past thirteen years have been exploring freedom of mind, body and soul with my daughters. Together we bought our first bikinis and wore them unashamedly on the beach. A whole new world opened up to me when I read books that were previously forbidden. This created new thoughts and conversations with others, reignited my curiosity from childhood and has led me here, to the University of Queensland, where I am thoroughly enjoying my studies and friends.