February looms

In spite of all my irrationality, he stuck to his New Year' resolution.

 He made up all the cumulative dates, and carried on.

He's gone again, so today plus tomorrow is 61.

Then it's February.

And he hasn't decided, or isn't saying, what happens then.

Keep counting up the days of the year?

Start over but switch to the wicked thin cane?

Some other form of torture attention?

irrational

I was away all last week at a conference.  It was a good conference, and went really well for me professionally.  It was warm and sunny, but many time zones away.  I was a different me there, not connected to submissive or not submissive at all.  

I have not slipped back into home and roles here smoothly.

I wanted it.  I missed my husband, I missed my family.  I wanted to come home and relax into our life, catching up, reconnecting, submitting.

Instead we had more travel, big family events, no alone time, and the pressures and demands and things to do that are our actual life.

Looking back, what i guess i really wanted was quiet, warmth, home, ease, and to feel myself slip back into submission. Note the overwhelmingly passive nature of all of that.  I wanted to not listen, not work, not do; i wanted to have done to me.

And boy did i get unpleasant when i didn't get it.  

Unpleasant and irrational:
    i was upset that it seemed like they hadn't needed me while i was gone, but i was upset when he
         admitted it was hard to do everything without me around;
    i was mad at him for not actively taking control and providing lots of dominance, yet i resisted him
          at every turn;
    i wanted to be taken and used, but i pulled away from his touch;
    i wanted to reconnect, but i wouldn't talk to him....

And, oddly enough, my becoming irritable (read - irrational) did nothing to encourage him to provide me with what i really wanted, not that i was able to express what i really wanted in any case.

I wanted to be conquered - i wanted to be conquered when i was at my most belligerent and wound up.  And he will not fight me for the control.




BTW - Tori - here - has a much more rational, useful take on the same thing.

glimpses from the in between

You know that time when you first wake up or are just drifting off to sleep, you are one foot in dreamworld and one foot in the real world, and concepts and ideas take a different form than they do when you are solidly in one world or the other.  Or at least they do for me, sometimes, although not as often anymore

It always frightens me a little - to quote Pink Floyd, "When I was  a child, I had a fever..."  It was a very bad one and i had hallucinations for days, terrifying, inescapable ones, like being my real, physical self in a horrible dreamworld.  Maybe that in-between/both feeling is what drugs do for you - i never wanted to find out.

As I grew up, that feeling would happen sometimes as i just woke up or was just falling asleep, but also  certain very specific sounds would trigger that liminal state.  I learned to be able to choose to shut it out, or to follow it mentally and experience it, but without the terror it once held.

So - now that you all think i'm perfectly crazy...

The other morning i woke up moving through that liminal state pretty heavily.  So i let it happen.  And there is really no way for me to put into words accurately the form that the ideas took, but the idea was of Him and me and our relation to each other: a conceptualization of us and our dynamic.

And somehow we were trees, or mountains, or solid, natural things with a great deal of mass - but also movement, graceful, purposeful movement.  And the mass that was me was as large and as solid and as substantial as His.  And we moved and flowed and stopped and rested and then moved on again. We moved together and then off alone, then back together.  We moved the same - equally, similarly, in the same planes - influenced by and playing off of each other, back and forth.  Yet i was clearly following Him, not lockstep, not rigidly, but happily, joyfully, reverently.     

His resolution, my ass

He told me a few days into the new year that he had made a resolution - to beat me more.  Apparently that is an entirely too ill-defined resolution though.  So he decided to have a systematic way of addressing his goal - he has systematic ways for lots and lots of things.  His system is to cane me daily - the number of the date being the number of thwacks.  Any days missed will be made up, cumulatively, on the first day possible.  So - when he's out of town for three days, for example on the 9th, 10th, and 11th - that's 30 on the 11th.  OK - still somewhat manageable.  But he will be out of town next week too.  And i will be out of town the week after - the 21st to the 25th!    And who knows the week after that?  I can be a little flip about it now - early in the month and from several states away.  But i am deliberately ignoring the real anxiety/fear about it, and the deeper thoughts about what it means, what he wants me to get from this, and how it impacts the rest of me, beyond my backside.  I'm also wondering very much about how the first of next month is going to sit with me, going from many back to just one.

snapshots

Is that even a thing any more - or is it like saying "dial the phone"

Anyhow.....

My older son is in luv - and suddenly he's gotten stoooopid.  OMG!  He'd give Romeo a run for his money with all the swoony distractedness and the mushy hyperbole and the gushing on about perfection and forever and, and.... and - where in the hell did this come from?  This is the same child who went to grade school with the same 25 kids for 6 straight years and still didn't know all the girls' names.


Things here are still fluxing - i suppose life is like that.  And i'm still trying with more or less success on any given day to flow along with it.  (The aforementioned teenager in love is not helping btw.)

Bleuame wrote a brilliant  post about responsibility, and subs taking some, and falling into taking as the sub rather than giving, and about general impatience. And, wow did that hit home: different issue in question, but the same story here for me.  "Active submission" mouse called it - and i've lost sight of it and am not managing it.  I know this - but that's not the same as fixing it.  Some things to reflect on more earnestly today...

I am always funny about buying my husband an adult present and Christmas was even weirder than usual because of the changes here.  I looked at a number of ideas, but all of them felt wrong so i ended up getting him a spool of leather lacing.  Odd - I know - but he doesn't do rope - it just isn't his thing - and he had seemed to like some of the tmbler pics of more specific bondage with leather.   He has taken one short length of it and periodically ties it around my thigh - at night, during the day, whenever - I wear it until i am allowed it take it off.  It is surprising the power we can give to a silly thing, what the mind can do.  How 18" of rawhide can center and settle a roiling mind.

Nothing surprising about canes though.  Well - there is.  Bent over the bed first thing in the morning, out of the blue but not really un-called for, the cane can be very centering, attitude adjusting, and re-orienting.  The out-of-body thoughts occurred to me before the pain became the real focus - I'm an adult, i have to go to work, this hurts, i'm here with my jeans around my ankles and my ass in the air, for my husband to see, this can't be right, how utterly silly, he must hate to have to see this, what in the hell kind of person allows this, or goes in for this?   And i don't have the answers for those - yes it hurts, yes it is both humiliating and good for me, yes i was calmer and more centered the rest of the day.  But still?

what's old is new

Today is more the first day of the new year than yesterday for us.  Our holiday break is always filled with lots of travel and family and then ends with lots of out of town friends at our house for a long visit.  The timing this year had us up late, late for the New Year's Eve party and up early, early yesterday to see our friends all off on their long drives home.  We spent yesterday cleaning and restoring order, and lounging, and maybe a little of organizing and otherwise getting ready to hit the ground running today. Which is what we are all doing.

My job runs in natural cycles and a new one begins now.  The starts and the ends of the semesters are always more work, more stress, and more transitions than other times.  And this one is a doozy.  There's a lot of new work facing me, and a lot of big things in current projects happening in the next 3 - 4 weeks.   I really like the work i do and the new stuff and the current stuff are all exciting and engaging for me, but still lots of work.

I find myself living in my head, or maybe actually my heart, much less recently than i had been. The time, the previous almost three years now really, that i spent putting so much energy into exploring and learning have been the aberration.  It was new for me to think about my feelings, to learn about my emotions, to dig into that part of myself, and especially to open up that part of myself.  I was never a navel gazer, never a sentimental or in touch with my feelings kind of person.  Even the terms i use for it give that sense.  I was very skewed in the other direction - and skewed one way or the other is not always useful.

I'm sure the time spent living in a different part of my head than i had been used to was what had to happen to allow the changes for my husband and me.  Probably it was good for me individually also.  Balance and learning new skills are good things. No sense pretending i don't have feelings or emotions...

The past few weeks or maybe month i see myself slipping back into my old ways.  Maybe wrapped up in my heart was where i needed to be, maybe that need is waning.  Maybe outside demands are forcing me back to my more comfortable patterns.  Maybe there are just cycles to these sorts of things.

I'm good, my husband is good.  The "Us" is good, albeit in flux somewhat.  We are more and more deeply D and s, although that doesn't always take the appearance i would have expected.  And we remain each kinky -  from fun and light to serious and very intense - and we continue to have not nearly as much time or privacy as we would like to dedicate to that.

I'm not sure what all this means for my blogging.  When i sit to write, the same sorts of thoughts just aren't there.  And they don't hit me throughout the day the way they used to.  I'm just not wondering these days.  But nor am i feeling like i want to walk away.  Maybe i should just change the title.

This seems to be a long-winded post that maybe doesn't really say much.  Something is different though, in me, or in our life.  I suppose this is one where i just sit back and see where it leads.  More newness for the new year.

I hope all of you have the renewal you need this coming year.