People who have known me since I was a kid tell me that I don’t seem like the same person any more; I have changed so much. I changed a lot in my time in the scene, then being a teacher was a huge shift, being a parent has kind of forced me to complete a lot of huge seismic level differences in my life.

For the first few years I had kids I went through a Madonna/whore problem where my body stopped wanting sex or bdsm. It was the way that my brain managed to pick a path through my personal history of having no healthy boundaries around sex. It wasn’t a healthy response because it was bad for my marriage.

But I grew up watching all of the adults in my family have sex. I needed to have some kind of shift in my brain that ensured that my children would not see me have sex. My kids have still never walked in on me having sex and I’ve been doing this gig almost a decade. It is a huge accomplishment for someone with my background.

I think that my libido partially shut off because that was a lot of what I saw happen to my mom’s life. She had a few boyfriends (all of whom I saw her have sex with) and she realized that I was acting out a WHOLE LOT and she… shut it down and to the best of my knowledge has never had sex again. I think she stopped when I was around 10. That was a quarter of a century ago. I’m pretty sure my mom has been celibate because she decided she didn’t know how to have a healthy sex life.

She might be right. She picked some awful people.

I feel this kind of long drawn out pleasure and shock that the vast majority of people I slept with are really awesome people and they are still all invited to my house if I have a Christmas party. Only a few people have fallen off the list because mostly… gosh I picked good people.

I read in a book about postpartum recovery that it takes a body 4 years to fully reset after having a baby. My libido came back like a sledge hammer about 5 years after having kids. 4-5 years is a natural child spacing in nomadic societies so it isn’t that shocking that my body picked that window for saying, “Moar seks please.”

It’s been complicated since then. My poor husband has adjusted from the extreme hypersexuality I experienced when we first got married and before our marriage to me shutting down completely to me being a bitch and fucking lots of people as my libido exploded and… now I’m pregnant again.

What is going to happen next?

I don’t know but healthier sex has to be part of this experience.

It is complicated for a masochist to stop something because it hurts. But there are kinds of pain that are positive/emotionally expressive for me and there are kinds of pain where I shut down my brain and go to a bad place. There are kinds of pain that increase my general feeling that I should die because I have no other escape from pain in this lifetime.

My kids and my husband tell me all the time that they want me to live for A VERY LONG TIME and I’ve tried to change how I live to reflect the fact that they don’t want me to die young.

I have to figure out how to convince my body that I can be in less pain. (Fibromyalgia makes this super complicated.) I have to figure out how to stop shutting down my self-protection mechanisms during sex. Because the specific pain I have during vaginal sex sometimes (it’s not all the time) is a problem. It is directly tied into the abuse from my father. It is a mainline to my internal reaction that I was born from rape; I was born to be raped; that is all I should deserve to expect until I die.

I have changed so much about my destiny. I didn’t think I would ever have a forever home. I didn’t think I would ever be part of a family.

I have a really cool family. I mean, we are all flaming weirdos… but we like each other a lot and we spend a lot of time together and it is all so intensely positive…

I didn’t think someone like me would ever get this far, let me tell you. But I did it.

My current shrink is probably the most bdsm aware/positive shrink I’ve ever seen. They suggested that I’m going to have to face my dissociation head on and in their opinion I am going to have to do it within the structure of my M/s relationship.

Now that’s some awesome feedback to get from a shrink. I’ve never had a shrink talk so specifically about the difference between therapy and therapeutic and bdsm can be so very therapeutic…

I know. I used to not be able to set any boundaries at all with my body. Bdsm taught me how. My beautiful friends and play partners taught me how. Very therapeutic.

It is complicated on so many because having my husband hit me a lot is different from having my lovely friends hit me a lot. My husband is the only person on this god-forsaken planet who has given me any real safety. It’s complicated when he hits me. It isn’t that I never like it. It’s that there are so many layers of psychological events that happen around the physical events that… it’s hard to manage that and bounce back into my life.

My life is very constrained. I have to “behave” and project a kind of behavior that is very hard for me. I believe that children learn primarily through modeling and if I want to show my kids making good choices I have to make good choices and I’m really more inclined towards being a fuck up and doing everything wrong.

But the children. Sigh.

My kids are the reason I get up in the morning. My kids are the reason I put breathtaking amounts of effort into being a healthier person. My kids are the reason I’m trying to learn how to stop hurting myself so that I can handle being alive long enough to watch them grow up.

I haven’t cut myself in over half a decade. I have burned myself in longer than that. I haven’t beat my head on concrete in a bit longer than that. I have made a lot of progress on my self mutilation.

I really want to know what happens to my kids. I think they are so neat. I feel so lucky that I get to have another child. These people are the best people in my life. I wake up and go to sleep seeing their smiling faces.

I did not believe that my children would like me. I expected to be the recipient of contempt and apathy. Instead my children adore me like I adore them. It feels like magic.

Is it magical enough to propel me through figuring out how to stop allowing more pain into my body that damages me?