Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
8 min @ Mercury Espresso, 1.17.13
My mother refused to marry my father even though that was the thing to do. It was hard to be a single, unwed mother in the forties. But she always said why marry the dog that did her wrong? She’d never rise above her mistake. That was the abiding theme in our little house, ‘learn from your mistakes’. She rented rooms to the new immigrants and acted as a sort of mentor. Three bedrooms, four beds, nine people but we were one family.
Learn from your mistakes. The world was founded on Original Sin, and there is always a snake ready to whisper temptation in your ear. But the choice is always yours. You scream and run and put up whatever fight you can against the devil. And if you ever find yourself overwhelmed, well that’s on you too. And you got to figure out how to make your wrong right.
Mother accepted the whore label, and whored her way into that little yellow house on Brightman Lane. But she made a choice that it was never going to be a whorehouse. When she got that house she was done with men for good.
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