About Last Night...

Let me start by saying that I've unpublished all my blog posts for the moment, because I feel like the people who are most likely to read them right now are the ones who will do it for all the wrong reasons. I'll go through later and repost all my favorites, maybe leave out all the promotional stuff because it's old anyway.

So, I've been mostly in the closet about my writing career because of my mother-in-law. She's deeply religious, and at the time I started writing, she was also depressed because of the death of her husband three years earlier. Although she retreated into her bible and her faith, she remained depressed for eight years, something she said she didn't even realize until she met her new husband. She'd lost her joy when she lost my father-in-law and I didn't see any point in adding to her sorrow.

Her new husband, as it turns out, is even more religious and very outspoken about it. Although my views have become much more liberal over the years, I've done my best to respect their beliefs while remaining true to my own. I believe this is the only way any family can ever get along. Rather than being confrontational and flaunting my career, I've kept it low-key, both to avoid upsetting my mother-in-law unnecessarily and to keep my writing from influencing the children in the family.

Now, fast-forward to last night. My mother-in-law called my husband and me to her house for a family discussion that turned out to be a confrontation about my writing. To "clear the air" and basically convict me and question my spirituality because I write erotic romance novels that include sex outside of marriage, polyamory and alternative sexuality. It wasn't pleasant for any of us, especially when they began trying to convict Mr Robin too. Both of us thought about getting up and walking out, but ultimately I wound up explaining my views very calmly and rationally, which is amazing to me considering I had no advance notice that I was the topic at hand.
So what do I believe? I believe Jesus preached love and acceptance, not hate. I believe He would be the first to open His arms to a loving "sinner" and turn away from a self-righteous "believer" who's anxious to cast the first stone. I believe He would rather see a relationship built on love and mutual respect between two men, or two women or three people, than a "traditional" marriage where the wife is forced to submit to an abusive husband. I believe that in the end, we'll be judged on how much love we had for others, not how much hate we had for their sins.
My husband and I are each other's first and only loves, and we're happily married and will stay that way until one or both of us die. That doesn't mean our marriage is perfect, or that it's not hard work sometimes. It doesn't mean he doesn't still appreciate the sight of beautiful women or that he doesn't still think about sex more than his mother would be comfortable with. It doesn't mean I don't sometimes long for more emotional talk and more open affection. But these are just minor issues in a strong, loving, trusting marriage based on mutual respect.
This is who I am. Who we are. We're the same people we've always been--time and experience have simply made us more tolerant, more patient, and more loving toward others. If you can't accept that, it's your problem, not mine.