“To Mary, my little writer,” your husband had scribbled on the white envelope he handed you Christmas morning. Inside was a copy of your registration for this online class, Creative Writing for Moms, the exact one you’d emailed him about months earlier, with the subject line “possible xmas gift?” Your registration was completed on December 24, 11:04pm.

Write the truth, your teacher types into the Zoom chat. Ten minutes.  

You stare at the screen from your home office, the corner of your kitchen island, as the noon sun melts cream cheese on crusty plates. The truth is that your favorite time of day is dropping off the twins at school, when you wave to their handsome first grade teacher from the carpool lane. “Uh oh, here comes double trouble,” he says to the twins, while looking at you, wearing an asymmetrical grin on his thin lips. You want to wink, to remind him of last week, when you ran into him at 7-11 before Back-to-School night, when he said call me Steve, but the other moms hover too close. Your second favorite time of day is picking up the twins in the afternoon. What kind of mother does that make you?

“Write about something other than motherhood,” your teacher had urged. “Writing about motherhood is like writing about writing, it’s low-hanging fruit.” What she means is that moms like you—moms who are called stay-at-home but are always on the run, moms who cling to their writing dreams for one hour per week—don’t want to read about moms like you.

“Think about what your protagonist wants,” your teacher had said, “and what’s standing in her way.” You didn’t raise your tiny yellow Zoom hand to ask what to do if your protagonist doesn’t yet know what she wants, if she doesn’t even know the options.

“My husband was standing in my way,” said that one lady Tina, who had announced in the icebreaker that her greatest risk was leaving her marriage on her ninth wedding anniversary. Tina looked your age, with curly brown hair going gray at her temples. You envied the bounce of her ringlets.

You had said your greatest risk was leaving the twins at home with your husband for your college reunion last month. Everyone laughed, except Tina, who stared into your lie.

Five minutes left, your teacher types. You have all become tiny black squares. Remember, don’t hide from the truth.

The truth is that you took down your wedding photo from the living room wall this morning. The wall looked good without the photo. Less cluttered, less forced.

“Why’d you take it down?” one of the twins asked as he plopped his plate of quarter-eaten bagel into the sink, right next to your husband’s curdled coffee.

“I’m thinking of upgrading the frame before my and Daddy’s ten-year anniversary,” you said.

“Kinda like how the Grinch wanted to fix Cindy Lou-Who’s Christmas tree before bringing it back to her house?”

You nodded. Kids find the truth without trying.

The truth is that you scroll through relationship blogs in incognito windows before bed every night, even though you tell your husband you’re playing Wordle. Your most frequent Google search is “how to be satisfied in marriage.” Second most common is “separation bad for children?” Sometimes you type “does cheating make me horrible,” but you never press enter.

The truth is you thank god for giving you twins, at least they’ll have each other.

One minute left. Find your beginning, middle, and end.

What if, in your final sixty seconds, you wrote about a woman who no longer loves her husband, the man she met in the MFA program she abandoned. This woman hasn’t loved him for years, ever since he holed up in his ‘writing shack’ while their infants screamed, penning winning screenplays about a man who could never satisfy his frigid wife. That is the beginning. In the middle, the woman sleeps with her twins’ teacher, the handsome man at dropoff, who once called her handwriting “exquisite.” She sleeps with him after Back-to-School night, after her husband texted “will do my best” but never showed up. She screws the teacher right there in his colorful classroom, propped up against the whiteboard, her skirt hiked around her waist, the smell of dry erase markers sharp and stirring. And for the first time in half a decade, she lets herself feel pleasure, because no pile of dirty socks sits in the corner, no sink full of dishes clammers in her brain. Because, finally, she can transform that low hum of resentment, the one that has tingled on her tongue since the boys were born, into a wild, marvelous scream.

What would happen if she told all this to her husband?

“The world would split open,” your teacher’s voice returns through the computer speaker as her face repopulates her Zoom square. “The poet Muriel Rukeyser said that’s what would happen if one woman told the truth about her life. The world would split open.”

Before turning your camera back on, you highlight the text of your free writing. Your middle finger hovers over the delete key, but slowly, it gravitates towards control+c.

The world would split open.

You pinch your lip with your teeth until it bleeds, then paste the writing notes into an email. Schedule send for tomorrow morning, subject line: “from Mary, your little writer.”

Your face reappears on Zoom as you sweep your tongue across your mouth. The woman staring back looks different, her eyes a bit browner, her curls a bit bolder. Like a woman who knows what she needs.

You swallow. Bitter, but surprisingly rich.

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Caroline Kahlenberg is a writer and historian based in Charlottesville, VA. Her fiction has appeared in Streetlight Magazine and Five on the Fifth.