The Good Girl…

We got together when I was twenty.

Five years later, my first daughter was born.

Then two more children arrived at five-year intervals.

We had the family house.

Dog.

Cat.

A shared business.

Holidays.

Everything according to schedule.

On our tenth anniversary, we even got married.

From the outside, it looked like an easy life.

Could it have been?

I do not know where I was for those twenty years.

Even now, looking back, I cannot find myself in them.

My husband always earned the money.

I worked a little in our business and even had a salary.

But almost without noticing it, my main role became raising the children.

I adore them.

They needed me to become the people they are today.

But every attempt I made to spread my own wings was gradually clipped over the years.

I considered sex a necessary part of life.

I rarely experienced anything overwhelming or truly transformative.

I simply accepted that perhaps this was how I was built.

Nothing to do about it.

Because of that — among other things — I received far more criticism than praise inside the marriage.

My confidence had never been especially strong.

Slowly, it eroded in every area.

I barely noticed signals or approaches from men.

Those channels had closed completely.

I did fall in love during those years too.

For ten years, platonically.

Then for another five years, the relationship became real — but secret.

Eventually the hiding extinguished the flame in both of us.

My true awakening began five years ago when I discovered by accident that my husband had been cheating on me for years.

That fact alone shook me.

But what frightened me even more was the realisation:

I could not leave.

I could not support ourselves financially.

After the major drama passed, we reorganised our life.

Since then, we have lived together peacefully as flatmates and friends.

He does not want to leave.

I cannot yet afford to.

Not yet.

Since then, I have been trying to rebuild myself.

To understand myself.

It is slow.

But at least I am already moving.

Now I know how wonderful sex can actually be.

I discovered that in skilled, gentle hands my body responds beautifully.

I am capable of limitless desire.

Of making love without holding back.

During the #MeToo campaign, two memories surfaced from the deepest layers of my mind:

one from early childhood, one from adolescence.

They explained many things.

Among them, why my sexuality had remained stuck at an early teenage stage — where intimacy means several exciting touches and nothing more seems necessary.

What were those memories?

My parents are working.

Our neighbour, old Mr Molnár, is looking after my younger brother and me.

I am somewhere between five and seven.

I remember a thin, weathered old man with a sun-browned face.

That is almost all.

He sits me beside him.

He says nothing bad will happen.

I should be a good girl.

But I must not tell anyone.

Perhaps he gives me sweets too.

He places my hand inside his sweatpants and underwear.

Then asks me to squeeze his penis.

My younger brother keeps playing.

He notices nothing.

I am a good girl.

I do not know how many times it happened.

Then one day, it simply stopped.

Almost ten years later, a female friend only slightly older than me notices that at sixteen I still do not have a boyfriend.

She arranges a date for me with a man ten years older.

I am curious.

So I go.

We meet on the eighth floor of an apartment block.

We move into a tiny room, perhaps two square metres, beside the flat.

Fluorescent light.

A mattress on the floor.

He locks the door.

Then asks me to perform oral sex.

He is not violent.

But he is firm.

His penis is large, red, clean and carefully groomed.

From the apartment next door, I can hear his child crying.

I suppress my gag reflex.

---

I am a good girl.

By the age of forty, I have finally reached the point as a woman where I know what I want.

And what I do not.

I am no longer a good girl.

I am myself.

I am only now beginning to open.

And now I finally dare to live.

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