Tag Archives: noah

But which past behavior?

Leave a reply

I was reading this article about relationships (vanilla/romantic primarily) and one sentence really made me think.

“‘I often end up saying the strongest predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.’” The author of the article is sharing what his coworker, a clinical psychologist, usually says to people who are stuck and unable to get out of a bad relationship. Not necessarily abusive bad, just unsatisfying/not meeting your needs sorta bad for the most part.

I had to meet a new psychiatric doctor yesterday. I was nervous because meeting new doctors is a crap shoot. Will they be older men who tell me that all of my testable, long-term health problems are all in my head? Naw, it was a young masculine appearing person who looked like they would fit right in at any party I would throw. I instantly felt comfortable. I was meeting him for the purpose of handing over the management of my ADHD and I needed to explain my history with medication, my other assorted neurological/mental health issues, a VERY brief summary of my physical health history, and about a 20 second primer on my history with assault so that I could explain how I came to cannabis in the first place and please for the love of god don’t tell me to go off it.

In the course of this conversation I came upon the challenge of how to explain that I am both consistent and inconsistent. My “past behavior” is all over the map on a variety of different axis. I managed to complete my bachelors and my teaching credential but I failed out of grad school at the very last minute because I just couldn’t do more of what I had been doing. We’ve lost a lot of money over the years because I fuck things up regularly. I fuck up in every relationship. I am incredibly variable in how intense/defensive/aggressive I am and if you come talk to me on the wrong day or at exactly the wrong minute on an otherwise good day I might react like a complete dick. That’s consistent.

What is also consistent is that I show up when people are having an emergency. I help people fix problems. I am gentle when I really need to be. My kids have figured out a trick. If they tell me, “I need to tell you something and I’m scared to because this is the sort of thing you might get mad over. I need you to not get mad.” Then I take a moment to pause every other single thing going on; I fully focus my mind and my energy on being calm and I say, “Ok I am ready to hear it.” Or I say: “I am not capable of listening until x” where x might be a time or the end of a current activity and then we go through the rest of it like normal. Then we fix whatever is going on.

I know that when they say that they are asking me to put myself aside and just be support. I can’t do that 24/7–it will grind me into dust. It is very high cost to put yourself aside like that. I don’t know how therapists do it. Maybe it helps because they usually aren’t having to do that in their personal lives? Dinno.

Anyway, the reason I put this here instead of my blog is because this idea that past behavior is the strongest indicator of future behavior is both useful and problematic. I started dating Noah when we were 22/26. If you were to look at the first four years of our knowing each other you would think that we would still be doing almost exclusively slightly rough penetrative sex and nothing else. That’s not at all what our relationship is like at this point. Neither of us have the physical energy or the time to have sex 2-4 times a day every day. That’s just not something we can manage in our life. Putting that much energy into sex requires you to not put it into other things (children, work, other hobbies) and we just can’t do that anymore. We made commitments. Commitments to be consistent. Oh, shit.

This is something I’m thinking about as I’m trying to learn how to deal with my body in the late-stage motherhood zone I’m in. I may have up to 10 more years until I pass into being a crone (a phase of life I am absolutely ecstatic about getting to because long story I’m not going to write here) and I need to figure out how to manage my body in the meantime.

I have PMDD along with all of my other things. Basically what that means is that I am exquisitely sensitive to every hormonal variation in my body. I think of my menstrual cycle like riding a dragon. There are times when it is wild and bumpy and I hold on to functionality with my fingernails and there are times when it is placid and easy and there are times when it takes every ounce of self control I have not to go get in trouble. I really like getting in trouble, except when I don’t.

A lot of the PMDD extremes were dulled by the postpartum period. It is amazing to me how much difference there is in inhabiting my body when I am not still reeling from the influences of parasites who would have been happy to kill me. Did you know that embryos/fetuses colonize the host body? There is a theory that it happened that way because it is a way for the first fetus to have influence over the future of the parent that will care for them. My body was not real interested in having another baby for most of the last four years. I don’t want another child but right now my body is telling me that the only important thing in the world is getting pregnant. At other times in my life when I did not want a child but my body said, “Hey let’s make a baby” that’s when I would go get into trouble.

You would think this would be a bonanza for Noah. He isn’t in his 20’s anymore and he’s had a lot of years of consciously dampening his sex drive because we just couldn’t do much about it even at the rare times I was even a tiny bit interested. Mostly I wasn’t interested and the idea was appalling.

So which past behavior should we look at to decide what I am going to do in the future? Yeah, that’s tricky shit. I mean, if I look at how Noah was behaving from 26-35 I should think he isn’t capable of getting up every day like clockwork and making breakfast for the family. He wasn’t a regular sleeper/riser at other points in his life. He chose to learn how to do that.

We go through phases. We go through stages. Noah wooed me by telling me that if you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say, “Wow I really sucked” then you aren’t trying hard enough.

So now we have to figure out how to transition into how to ride out the next phase. We can’t run off for weekends together to break rules together to do wildly-inappropriate-for-children activities for hours and hours. We get a three hour date a week in a space that isn’t perfectly soundproof. We can have sex at night before going to sleep knowing that we need to be really really really quiet because you can hear freaking everything through the walls in this house. It’s a real buzzkill when it starts getting good and you hear a knock on the door and, “I need you; I can’t sleep without you.” Sigh. This is not forever.

Don’t have kids unless you believe you will never be ok without them because this shit is a lot.

There are lessons here I need to learn. Lessons about patience and being consistent enough and forgiveness and love and what it looks like to accept that you have to make mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake if you want to get good at something.

I want to learn what it means to be in a happy family, this is my one shot.

So how do I figure out how to manage the part of the dragon ride where all I want is to make decisions other people would view as “bad”. I’m not in that life phase anymore. I can’t go to a Burner party and do drugs with my friends and hunt for interesting prey. I can’t do a lot of things. I get to behave. I get to be a good role model. This shit is boring, y’all. I’m like a zoo animal. I hurt myself when I get bored.

You know how I have 97 projects going at once… most of which I will finish… eventually… I am not a person who stays bored.

But I have to. I have to figure out how to make furtive sex happen. I need to find a way to inspire Noah to continue on this road to queering our sex. Sex is not dependent on a hard cock. There are a lot of reasons that a 40-something dad who hasn’t been having a lot of sex for a decade and a half is not going to be able to get and stay hard for 3-5 hours a day.

It’s not fair to say that what a person has done is the only thing they will ever do. Our sex life once upon a time was tremendously centered around a hard cock and now it isn’t. If I am going to stay out of trouble then our sex life needs to be a much more diverse experience. That’s not a lot of fun when you have to be almost completely silent.

And I was paged for breakfast

It’s not about you

Leave a reply

We have played around with hypnosis a couple of times recently. The first time the induction was, in my experience as a bottom to this type of play, not particularly deep given how long it has been since we have played with going under. Given that most of the verbal dialogue was along the line of how we had been playing anyway it made stuff a little more intense but it didn’t feel like being hypnotised

I told him I thought we needed a more intense induction the next time because I didn’t really go down. So a couple of nights later we got to talking about how we were feeling and he mentioned that he kind of misses what we used to do with taking sleeping pills. I said I’d be happy to grab 2 pills and head to bed immediately. I suggested that the going to sleep part might be a good time to practice induction.

He did. One of the things that is interesting to me about hypnosis is how you can remember and not remember it. Like, I know what happened but I could not tell you what he was repeating rhythmically to me. I don’t know exactly what he was suggesting; I just have to trust him.

He asked me how it was for me and I said “It was a better induction, I felt more limp/unable to move around much. I felt like there was a lot of room for more of a goal/story. I know it was very sudden and you didn’t have time to think it out.

I am not sure what/how we should change something to make it easier for you to stay hard.

I also think that if you want me to actually go to sleep for it I will take M first then 3 L instead of 2. I have such a strong metabolism for sedatives. **

We should probably also aim to get started on that as close to 10 as possible.
Perhaps part of doing such play better involve you sending me to prepare for bed earlier so that I am already in bed and sleepy when you arrive.”

What he told me after that when we were lying in bed was quite instructive. He had not particularly wanted to be more hard. He wanted the gentle rubbing–that was for something inside of him. Something young and yearning and almost healing. It made him happy in a quiet way deep inside that it’s ok for him to use an immobilised woman to just rub on the way he has always wanted to. He isn’t bad for wanting it and in this context he isn’t even bad for doing it.

Oh shit, dude. My whiny selfish whore self had been thinking, “Enh it was alright but I didn’t really get fucked enough.” How very embarrassing. I have never been one for denial–people who try to withhold sex/orgasms as a way of making me interested usually find out I just don’t come back. But this is Noah and he gets to do whatever he wants and sometimes not fucking me is better for him.

Oh, shit.

So the thing is: if I want to transition from egalitarian into power imbalanced I have to find a new normal around this. I have to reframe what makes something a successful encounter. I didn’t need to get off. I was there for his use.

If he got to do something he has always wanted to do and he feels like this was a deeply satisfying experience… then it was wildly successful and I need to work on how I feel about it when it is happening and afterwards. I need to take pride in work well done, not feel cranky I didn’t get off. I can masturbate the next day. Well, until he tells me I can’t. Ugh.

Ok. I can work with that.

** For nosey people: my sleep medication usage is necessary for long term health concerns and without the play aspect there are times when I double or triple up. My doctor is aware and is comfortable with the number of pills I ingest on an annual basis.

My safeword is “Long-term trauma’, bitch

Leave a reply

I keep getting comments from complete strangers, which is still slightly surprising to me. I write about myself and I had extensive and varied trauma as a young person. It comes up as I try to figure out how to handle situations in my life as an adult. I function best, as a person who is autistic and has PTSD, by writing out the things that I am having big feelings about rather than trying to talk about these things in real time. My side of the conversation is too big. I like to play in ways that will upset sensitive people. I encourage you to take care of yourself and not read my writing.

Lately we have been having to have the kinds of serious talks that fucked up people need to have before they go wading into the murky morass. Things like: it is ok to harm me if you are doing it on one axis at a time and it isn’t ok to stack traumas because I can’t process my way out of that fast enough to be appropriate with the kids.

My life is still incredibly structured around my ability to be level through my day to day life. I’m homeschooling my kids and I have over a decade to go before I’m done and that requires a high level of emotional regulation from me. (Not debating this choice here.) But this is the rock around which my life is built.

I have a lot of experience with complex trauma. Lucky me? I am a bit of a tight ass and I define trauma in my personal life as circumstances in which my survival has been in question and ongoing issues where my brain is not capable of telling a situation apart from things that might kill me. Being uncomfortable or stressed out is not a trauma in my personal nomenclature. Brains can be difficult. If something was a threat to your survival at a formative time in your life and it continues happening past the point where it can threaten your survival sometimes your brain struggles to turn off the “Oh shit I am going to die” part.

This is relevant because my father liked to tell me that I exist to get men off. I am the product of rape. Like, those fucked up incest stories? That was literally my childhood. He would tell me, from when I was a toddler, that if I am not pleasing there is no point in him continuing to let me be alive. That means that for the rest of my whole life sex is wrapped up in Do I deserve to be alive? Am I going to fail at getting this man off and then he is going to kill me? Or should I kill myself out of shame. That part was a lot less clear.

Noah is getting older. There are biological factors at play that influence when he can come a lot more than I can be the force that decides his orgasm. But if you tell me that I’m not getting you off that I’m just not quite good enough combined with putting your hand on my neck*? That is a singular layer of trauma for me that I can process and internalise and enjoy the mind-fuckery. I know Noah is actually very happy to be married to me and orgasm or not he is absolutely thrilled to fuck me for the rest of his life. He has demonstrated the absolute commitment he has to me not dying–I can deal with that.

But I cannot cope with that if I am already overwhelmingly upset or feeling suicidal for other reasons. This is part of why I cannot play like this if I am not writing. I have to tell you where my brain is so you can make decisions about what is safe.

This is why I don’t play with safewords. It’s not because I’m so bad ass. It’s not because I think someone should read my mind. It’s because either my play is so light that “Hm that’s kinda pinching” is the same as “red” or because I am doing play so intense that “red” isn’t a word I am going to come up with under pressure. I just won’t. My brain isn’t going to go there. I will be unable to use that as a word to help myself.

In the fourth month of our marriage he raped me. I don’t mean we did a rape scene I mean I was hysterically sobbing because I had spent the day talking to CPS about what my sister was doing to her kids and that was an extremely upsetting situation. I was not fucking ok and I felt like I was about to break into a thousand pieces. I have been raped quite a few times in my life. Every other time my brain has coped by freezing. That day with Noah I was completely unhinged and I fought him. I fought him until we were both bleeding. I lost. That had reverberations for years. I was scared of him and I flinched when he tried to touch me. That was before we had children. There was no reason in the world why I should have stayed.

Except I am pretty sure I could not be married to someone if they will not hurt me like that. I am pretty sure I could not maintain interest in a singular person who was not willing to do that to me.

So yeah, we are talking about the role of rape in our life going forward. I am someone who has spent decades teetering on the edge of committing suicide. It is kinda a family tradition: maternal grandmother, father, brother. It’s just there as an option, always.

I am 8 years younger than my father was when he quit. But hey, nobody is going to send me to prison for raping them as a child so I guess I don’t have his good reason to wuss out.

Anyway. When it comes to raping me that’s a topic of some delicacy. We have talked about the fact that what he wants is not a rape scene on a pre-negotiated day… where is the trauma in that? We are discussing ways to upset me/pick a shitty day that isn’t too shitty. As a recent example of oh-god-no: if he had decided to rape me on the day I got the news about Andrew dying I would not have been ok. I would not bounce back from that in a way that would be acceptable for the parameters of my life. The absolute best case scenario is I would get out of bed 10 or so months later and be maybe ok with trying to avoid dying.

So strategy is important.

But like, I’ve started running again. I haven’t paid the fee yet but right now I’m thinking my self-masochistic act of physical pain for my birthday this year is running another marathon. If he were, say, to wait until I am tired and focused and all I want to be thinking about is the race to absolutely insist and piss me off and hurt me so that I have to feel that while I’m running?

Oh yeah I could still behave how I am supposed to behave in my day to day life. That is a reminder that my body isn’t mine. I have accepted that I like having times when my inconsiderate asshole of a husband lets me feel pain and additional physical burden outside of my usual standard chronic pain because I’m a lucky whore.

I know that there are a lot of feminists who would be extremely unhappy about the fact that I need my marriage to involve explicit sexual violence as the trade for my comfy rich bitch life. I would say that I am a lady of leisure if I ever stopped working. The working won’t stop because it is ingrained into my bones that you work until you die and that rest is for other people. But mixed in with that is constant gratitude that I get to choose my work and I get to choose the scale of my projects with almost no limitations.

Hi newish people. I grew up in really deep poverty. I didn’t have a “permanent address” until I got married. I moved every few months–more than 50 times before I was 18 and then 9 more times in the 7 years of being an adult before I got married. I went through more than a dozen different foster homes and when I was with my mom things were often bad enough that I stole food in order to eat. I mostly crawled out of that poverty thanks to a dog bite settlement. It’s why I am fervently in favour of universal basic income. My lawyer set me up so that the settlement could pay for college. Without it I would not have gone; there was no chance.

So marrying a trust fund baby has been weird. It wasn’t a big trustfund by such standards but he was able to buy a house in his mid 20’s in California in an intense housing market. He was able to go to a good school without loans and he has had a really blessed career in tech.

I get to do what I want. I get to focus on what I want. He lets me control a lot of pieces of our life and I get to decide how money is spent and how it is saved and invested. It blows my tiny little mind that I do the things I do on a daily basis. I was not fucking trained for this shit. I feel wildly out of my depth. I feel incompetent in the extreme even as according to all metrics that can be validated by outside professional sources I am doing extremely well. It feels like a farce. It feels like the house of cards will collapse at any minute.

Now that’s kinda a loophole you can drive a truck through. Because that’s not existentialist trauma. Fucking with me around those insecurities? Oh yeah, that’ll be fine.

Fucking me when I’m sick and I feel terrible and I am not going to enjoy any bit of it at all? I mean… not like cancer sick–don’t be ridiculous. (I’ve already had cancer twice so it’s a reasonable part of the conversation.) But a bad cold? The flu? Oh sure. Mock the fuck out of me. Great time to shove my face in a pillow so you don’t catch anything.

I have heard from other people with PMDD that they too have times of the month, every month, when they don’t have any interest in sex and it is very repellant. For the past almost decade and a half of having small children it’s been very questionable fucking with me when I’m on the low end of that cycle. I’m less stable if you do and the level of stable I have needed has been pretty difficult for me. I am not naturally a stable person. I have no useful training in stability.

Things are changing. I don’t have super little kids anymore. I have support in the day for me to duck in and out for a few minutes so I can take breaks and have time alone in my brain–I have literally never had this like it is now before we moved to Scotland. The way our life is set up now feels like an utter fucking miracle. This is beyond my wildest dreams.

Noah is nervous that this is a short uptick and it won’t continue. That’s a reasonable worry. The little kids part of our life has been hard on both of us. It has been hard to trust that there is a far side that will be fun. (If you do not feel in your bones that you must have children or your life will be incomplete don’t fucking do it. This shit is exhausting and frustrating and steals all your fucking time.)

The thing is: I have been in the bdsm community looking for people to do mean things to me from as soon as it was legal. I was desperately masturbating thinking about it and hurting myself before that. I think that being at a low ebb while I am going through the intensity of early parenting is reasonable. I’m just been fucking surviving. I don’t think that having kids is going to turn me vanilla in the long run of my life. I like it when people are crying way too much. I don’t care if it is me or someone else–if we are fucking someone should be crying. And bleeding at the same time is even better.

I miss you D. I will love you forever and I wish you only happiness.

Just like the growing tightness in my legs feels like carving off a layer of shell I don’t need anymore–a return to who I have been. My legs feel like I have been running. My legs feel like I have been bouncing up and down like I am dancing. I miss dancing so much. I used to dance 5 nights a week doing a wide variety of styles–most of which were extremely energetic. I’d go running at lunchtime.

I want that back. I tried to start running not long after we moved but I think it was too close to the more recent cancer and the house repair has been really demanding. I’m just to the point where it feels like I can.

I feel like that with sex. I feel like that with needing Noah to hurt me. I think there were reasons I could never walk away from the scene. I think there are reasons I started making friends before I was even playing again. I am a shark and I like swimming near other scary creatures.

Also: fucking terrified of the ocean. I am completely convinced I am going to be eaten in the ocean. It is not rational. FUCK MY OLDER SIBLINGS.

Anyway. I think I have followed this train of thought far enough. mwah

  • = Don’t even come for me about breath play. I didn’t say he choked me. He can’t choke me. I have had a significant number of brain injuries and I am at high risk for stroke. He is deeply invested in keeping me for a long time and that means I can’t be choked anymore. I miss it.

Just keep swimming

Leave a reply

Last night Noah was being a sensitive new age guy and he checked in if the current level of increase in meanness/friction on my cunt is a problem. He said he knows it is a lot compared to what had been happening and he just wants to make sure I’m ok.

I said, “Well I did tell you I’d be ok with you fucking me pretty much whenever and I’m still mostly initiating all of our sex. So mostly I’m thinking that you aren’t fucking me enough…. loser.” (We are having sex pretty much every day lately.)

He threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Well! Ok then!” Then he ripped his pajamas off real fast and started poking at my clothes. So I undressed and we, like the fully mature people we are, proceeded to spend about 40 minutes rolling back and forth naked telling stupid jokes and not getting around to having sex.

Finally I said, “This is my downfall. I am too funny. You can’t bear the seriousness of fucking someone as funny as me–it might ruin the mood.”

Really it just felt like we were young again and we had all the time in the world to just enjoy being naked together and of course eventually we will get around to sex.. it’s inevitable. Also inevitable: when we did it was of course very fucked up roleplay about how to manipulate a child into not having the right vocabulary for even reporting sexual abuse. After all, he is just having me pray every night and giving me a relaxing massage.

I met Noah when he was 26, we spent his 27th birthday together. I was 22 when we met. On one hand I felt so very worldly when we met but now I look back on it and I giggle. What does it mean to be worldly anyway? I was in such a rush to gain “experience” as if that would somehow make my life better. In some ways it was a good thing.

I have friends who settled down permanently with the first or second person they ever dated or had sex with. Most of them have told me that they have mixed feelings about the fact that they have little or no sexual experience outside of this primary relationship. They feel like they don’t know as much about what they do or don’t like.

I’m sure there are people who are completely content with their one lifetime partner, but those folks don’t talk to me about it.

I have never had a moment of pause where I have thought “Oh no if only I had more experience with other people.” Sometimes I miss the hunt because I was good at it and it was fun, but that’s not the same thing. Really I’m not even sure if I would hunt the same way going forward in any case. My life is so different and the Jenga tower is somewhat precarious. I don’t have much time to give anyone and the community in Scotland is so small that hunting with my normal voraciousness would very quickly create a challenging situation. Even if you are being honest and up front, not as many people are happy to be part of a truly extensive network as you think.

It’s a rare person who appreciates the sort of woman who can cheerfully pick up 8 new partners in a weekend. Daddy James you are always and forever the best first date of my whole life. I love you so much.

When you are fucking a lot of people you find out very intimately about peoples’ prejudices. I firmly believe that anyone gets to dislike whatever they want. Depending on how you say that people often assume that you end up on the side of disliking something they are on and they freely explain in great detail.

I asked about whether the older people I know remember a time when things were less judgmental because I saw a comment on a buddy’s post from someone I don’t know (who is ironically, younger than me) who said that they are old enough to remember a time when people in the community didn’t judge and they accepted everyone.

People judge whores. People judge women who use the word whore for themself in complicated ways. I remain grateful for the sex workers in my life who were close friends when I was working through some of my really intense trauma who told me that whatever associations other people have with that word are not my problem. My experiences are mine and no one can take them away from me or say that I am not allowed to experience the world as I am. It’s really weird that my biological father gave me that gift. Apparently whore is a title that a man is allowed to gift to a small child and she can keep it absolutely forever no matter what anyone else thinks.

I think about the judgment that people pass because despite the press releases that the bdsm community likes to put out about how people in the bdsm community tend to have slightly higher than average EQ and they are not significantly more traumatized than the normal population…

I am a traumatized motherfucker. Much of what drives me to seek out predatory and vicious partners is not some abstract “I was born this way”; I was shaped by a monster. When I was young and in the scene I would occasionally hear outlandish stories about how the younger you were when you started being inculcated into “slave life” the better you will be for the rest of your life. There was a woman who claimed her family sold her into a bdsm slave family at 14. This was treated like a hot/good thing?

Yet in reality if the core of your sexuality is formed around extreme trauma and abuse and, frankly, brainwashing you make people fucking uncomfortable. The average person (even in the scene) you want to go play with and fuck is not able to handle even being too aware of the extent of extreme abuse that people like me live through. Because yeah I do want you to act that out with me. Yeah. I do want you to be that fucking evil.

My biological father held a gun to my head while raping me. If Noah wanted to do that we would have to do the scene on top of a Princess and the Pea pile of towels to catch the river of squirting I would do.

Because to be clear if you do to me what I like having done to me… you are going to have to sit real hard with the idea of whether or not you are a bad person. You are going to have to be ok doing fucked up shit to someone who has a documented police record of having incredibly fucked up shit done to them. You have to face it head on. You have to embrace it and really own it and be ok with the fact that other people are absolutely going to judge the fuck out of you if they find out what you do.

I am trickling out stories, yo. I know I have a new audience and I know that is pressure. I know that the Scottish people will get to know what I put out there in writing far faster than they will get to know me in person because I don’t leave the house that often. Nobody sees me week after week at a munch to get used to me slowly over time. I am going to be very much on the fringe for a long time, perhaps forever. Will I ever play publicly here? I don’t know.

I don’t particularly enjoy playing in the safe zone that I used to specifically inhabit in public play spaces. Well, I enjoyed it a lot more in the past but I don’t think I could get back to that headspace. I want to play for me now, not for advertising for the maximum number of potential partners. And I am fucked up.

I watch the age players defend that it isn’t about sex. Oh. Well sometimes it is. And sometimes it is about specifically degrading a little and making it very bad for them.

I watch pet play folks get upset about people bringing up bestiality. Oh. Well… I don’t think I could cross the line with an actual animal for all kinds of very good reasons but the stories are fucking hot. Roleplaying it? Fuck yeah. The more humiliating and disgusting the better.

Rand went down a list of things that most people would reject and it was a challenge for me to find a true hard limit on any of it. Much of it I want to be verbal/roleplay–there are no actual children involved in my sex life and there hasn’t been since I was the child and there never will be again.

I remember saying, “No children, no animals, no dead people other than that let’s talk.” But really if you want to roleplay any of those scenarios… ok.

I don’t find bodies off putting. I don’t find bodily functions to be deal breakers. I don’t have many limits or reasons I will tell someone to stop something in the abstract. There are days when I can’t do a certain thing for a transient reason and there are tons of obstacles to my having space and safety for most of them but that’s not the same thing.

When people get very upset about wanting to get rid of all predators in the scene I can’t help but wonder… but do you really want to? If you do then who are people like me going to play with?

Neither Noah nor I would be as good at crossing social more lines and being degrading and violent and vile as we are if we had never gone too far.

I always say that you learn more from mistakes than you do from always doing things right. I have made a lot of mistakes. A tremendous number of mistakes. I am sure that there are at least a couple of people who think of me and feel really bad sometimes. I know Noah has at least one woman who saw him in her nightmares. She came to me to process it because that is exactly the sort of thing that someone would do, right? I told her that I would support her in any way I could. She was entitled to say or do anything she needed to do to communicate to Noah how badly he fucked up. If she wanted him to pay for her therapy that would be completely legitimate. She wrote some very intense letters. I read them with Noah because he needed to understand fully how he fucked up. I am still friends with her and she says things are much better now. She’s happy.

You learn more from mistakes than you do from always doing it right. I know how badly I can hurt someone. Noah knows how badly he can hurt someone. Hell, he knows how badly he can hurt me. He fucked up really badly in the first six months of being married by the choice of when to rape me. It caused an extra layer of trauma that had to be unpacked.

Do you know how hard it makes me come when he hurts me and tells me that he is so glad that he gets to rape me decade after decade? It is literally completely fucked up. This is vanilla-land “You should run, not walk away from this man.”

Instead I am no longer allowed to say “Jesus Christ” because the only God I am allowed to worship is Noah so it has to be his name I say.

“The difference is consent” except when there is no consent and sometimes that is far better.

“We evaluate the risks to make safe choices” except when we totally fucking don’t and we flail and we hurt people and we traumatize them and then we put our finger on that trauma and push down a little harder because the bruise was starting to fade and we can’t have that.

I don’t do safe things. I do things that any reasonable therapist would tell me is a bad fucking idea and I am totally risking cracking my psyche wide open. Yes. The best orgasms live there.

Bdsm is not therapy. Bdsm is a place where fucked up people can do very fucked up things. I treat the bdsm community like the sea and I am a shark looking for a bigger shark. When I encountered stingrays and eels and angler fish I wished them well and kept looking until I found someone who could appreciate the kind of fucked up I am. Someone with just enough training in mental health to be able to properly enjoy fucking with someone who is as damaged as I am. I found a megalodon; just think of all the nice people I am keeping safe by keeping him off the market.

Noah didn’t pick someone who compulsively cannot say no to sex even when I really should because of physical damage by accident. He is a fucked up person. I mean that in the very best of ways. He is brilliant and he can hold many contradictory truths in his mind at the same time. He deeply respects me and he wants me to be a big person in the world taking up space. He is the reason I have most of the self confidence I have to just go do whatever I want. I used to doubt myself so much. I don’t have time anymore. He also wants to hurt me emotionally in ways I won’t shake off. He wants to specifically drill down on damage created by my father.

I can’t wait until he can go back to cutting on me.

In many ways it is much better for everyone that Noah put the choke chain on me. Scotland is a small sea and we are very big sharks.

It’s kind of funny

Leave a reply

How come I can beg him to do all kinds of vile things to me and that’s just fun and games but if he mildly observes that he can hear which vibrator I am using from his room because the flooring is thin… I am all of a sudden totally embarrassed and I feel like I should never masturbate again.

Ridiculous.

Time to get back on track.

Leave a reply

I really like it when Noah is on vacation. I will like it when Noah is retired. I know more than a few relationships that have ended after lockdowns because people found out they didn’t like each other as much as they thought. I like Noah more with every passing year. I like alone time too, and time with other people. Every single day I am reminded that I am blessed because Noah is my person. He annoys me. He tells absolutely ridiculous jokes. He squicks me on a regular basis but in a way I apparently find incredibly endearing.

No one else in the whole world wants me to be as big as Noah does. Err, Ironically I do mean that in the feeder sense as well as in the spiritual sense. We were talking about some of the ways in which he is socially deferential, to the point that folks in the local bdsm community are assuming our dynamic is very different than it is. People are complicated. Noah wants me to be complicated and he doesn’t mind that it means my needs keep changing.

I am super scattered this morning. I can’t get into a flow. I stayed up too late, mostly through inertia. I need to get into the house a little early this morning. Time for Noah to go back to work and I need to be trying harder for fewer things, more consistently. I have been really needing, and taking, a fair bit of time off but if Noah needs to be working then I need to check back in.

Get ready for the day, wake the big kids, help Shorty with the morning chore, do planners with the kids. It’s time to teach backward planning. If you need to get all of these things done, when should you do them and how are you going to remind yourself? Getting too big for me to be the one who decides and reminds. It’s your turn, darlings.

Easier to do it with a smile on my face after yesterday’s delicious date. I like my husband a whoooooole lot.

Like a monster uncurling from hibernation

Leave a reply

For most of the time I have had children my sex drive has been utterly wrecked. I have no way of knowing how much is purely biological (for much of history it’s been “normal” for carrying parents to have a new child approximately every four years) as I have started pulling out of the dip when my body is around 4.5 years postpartum both times. Of course I do have a smaller gap in between my oldest kids, but that wasn’t about “whoops I’m pregnant because I was just having sex I wanted”. Naw. Despite my outrageous whoring around I have only ever been pregnant when I intended. I consider myself both A) a stringent user of birth control and B) a completely lucky bitch. [I tell my kids: if you are not ready to be a parent each person participating in sex needs to have birth control in use every single time.] I mean, let’s be real that I was stupid a few times and I just got lucky. But it was a very few times out of a really lot of times of being stringent.

Anyway. Yeah. I think there is a lot of basic biology. Did you know that your body is not 100% postpartum for four years because it takes that long for all of your organs to fully get back into a non-pregnant state? Fucking wild.

There was also a really strong emotional aversion when I was newly a parent that I don’t think was just part of the biological. It took a long time to unpack all of my trauma around sex in a house with children. That was really hard for him and me and getting through it just about wrecked us. I really struggled with it being ok to be touched in any kind of romantic way if a child I was responsible for was even in earshot. I was too deep in abreaction to find any kind of enjoyment there.

So as I was saying I seem to be in an uptick, by which I mean occasionally Noah is all “Yeah….. I literally can’t more.” I feel victorious. It’s reminding me of all the reasons that Noah is my person even though we still have challenges. His cock is fucking amazing. Like, he has the Baby Bear of cocks. Just big enough to hurt when we want it to but it doesn’t have to hurt. Fits nicely in all of the places. Incredible stamina for someone who has been in an almost complete drought for about five years.

Not to mention that he knows exactly how to be mean to me. When we started dating I told him I was looking for an abusive relationship with an on/off switch. He has been really freaking careful to stay in the off position for a long time.

He knows how to dance around my trauma like he is doing a polka on the head of a pin. He trusts me as an authority on a great many topics and he is openly deferential. He also fucks me raw and calls me every filthy name and he loves seeing me cry. He doesn’t use just any filthy names. He knows exactly which parts of my historical trauma will get me off instantly and which parts will get me off the bed and into the bathroom to curl into a ball and sob.

It’s not an adventure until someone is crying!

He knows me at my core in a way no person ever has or ever will. He has spelunked into every twisted corner of my deeply depraved brain. When I no longer have small children hopping into the shower with me on the regular he will go back to carving on me. The absolute hottest sex is the kind where one or both of you is dripping blood onto one another. Taking my blood and wiping it on his cock before putting it inside me is the best fucking feeling. And the taste! chef’s kiss Perfect.

Strange that I don’t like period sex. The friction is just utterly terrible and I end up with jagged awful tearing. Thanks you piece of shit motherfucker who wrecked my cunt before I could even go to fucking primary school. May your name be forgotten.

Anyway, Noah. He has studied me like I am his PhD topic. As my memory degrades he often remembers my stories better than I do. I only believe him when I wrote it down somewhere and I can go check. It was very useful that I wrote so many things down. He has read my entire archive I think 6 times? It isn’t obvious here on Fetlife but I used to blog a lot, including about my kink adventures. My whole archive is in the millions of words. The word count massively went up as I went through college. I can write a 20 page paper (including putting together all the bibliographical information) in about 10 hours once I’ve done the research. I had some stretches where I hit over 100,000 words in my blog in a couple of weeks.

And now my hands are shit. Whoops.

What I like about writing is that it allows me to think through my priorities and go back and forth dithering about what matters.

Noah has supported just about every crazy thing I have ever done. He is the reason I have written books and painted giant murals and created hundreds of square feet of tile mosaics inch by inch. Noah has kissed me goodbye cheerfully every single time I have wanted to run off and have an adventure, whether it was for a few days or weeks or half a year. He holds down the fort and makes sure that things in the house keep going the way I prefer more or less entirely because deferring to my preferences is so automatic at this point.

I met him almost 19 years ago. He was the first person who said, “What happened to you that made you end up like this?” He is the reason I have any coherency in my internal narrative, because he is always my assumed Primary Reader.

He wants to read all of it. No matter how cruel or angry or bitter or nasty I am being. If I keep a separation between my thoughts and my behavior he is happy, and even prefers, to know all the shitty thoughts. My thoughts do not define me; my behavior does. He wants to know how many shitty thoughts I have on the way to manifesting the behavior I do. I haven’t been telling him lately for a whole lot of reasons.

There is this thing about kink. I cannot be a closed box and do this in a healthy way. I tried having an M/s relationship that did not allow for navigating around my trauma. That went pretty poorly and while he was absolutely the best/most healthy relationship of my life at that point I have some deep sadness about some of the permanent harms he caused my body.

So if I want to do this, if I want to let the monster out and fight and lose and hurt and still be ok at the end of it I have to start writing again. He has to know what I am holding on to control of by tip of my fingernails. Following my brain is like trying to binge a new Netflix series every day for a month. It’s really hard to keep all the storylines straight.

He will do it. He will draw fucking diagrams if he has to. He thinks I am worth it. I see the overwhelming magnitude of work he puts into being in a relationship with me. His online organising system is kind of terrifying and he archives everything. He manages his own neurodiversity through a rigid knee jerk response to the system he has in place. He has scripted himself. And he manages me like he manages when to go check the oil in the tank.

It’s kind of overwhelming looking at just how much work he has put into me. He has iterations of the recipes he has refined over the years based on feedback because he wants to cook for my palate. I think he even has lists of gifts he has given me for holidays with how I responded. I’m not fucking kidding when I say I am his PhD.

I may miss the hunt but Noah is my heart and my soul and the only happy family I have ever had.

Did I mention his dick is perfect? And when I tell him that I want him to turn on the abusive switch he barely hesitates. I am enjoying life a lot more recently.

M/s and marriage

Leave a reply

After 11 years of marriage I feel pretty safe saying that I have a fucked up view of matrimony. I came into this with a fairly historical/chattel perception of marriage. I was brought up to believe that wives don’t get to say no. Wives are fairly disposable/replaceable.

I know I keep coming back to this and it’s annoying but you keep coming back to the shit you had indoctrinated into your head as a kid too. I was told that once you get married it doesn’t matter what you want, you are a whore now. I meshed that pervasive belief in with my issues around not feeling like I am a creature worthy of defense and I spent 10 years not expressing boundaries I should have expressed.

To be fair… I’m not sure my husband was ready to hear my boundaries during a fair number of those years. It’s complicated.

But I’ve been around the bdsm community so long that the idea of a “no limits slave” is just… bullshit. Liar. Idiot. No That’s not ok.

So why am I so ok with the idea that wives don’t get to have limits? It’s about presentation and perceived tolerance levels. I’ve been expecting a kind of marriage that has a firm basis in historical fact.

If you look at slavery around the world it functions very differently in different places. It’s kind of rare for slave owners to treat slaves like they are to be worked to death then replaced. Slaves are expensive. Especially well educated highly skilled slaves… you just don’t treat them like they are expendable because replacing them is costly and takes time.

For some reason wives feel so much easier to replace. I’m here to bear the children and clean the house–right? That’s all I am?

This is why my husband made the first line of our M/s contract that I have to prevent him from damaging me. He’s trying to find a work around for my self-destructive instincts. It’s tricky.

This is a lot of why polyamory is not a good choice for us. I believe that as a wife I am highly replaceable. If you start dating I am going to perceive that as it is time for me to exit stage left so you can move on to a different and better stage of your life.

Because surely anything is better if I am not around.

I don’t have the right to perceive my husband that way. He likes me a lot and he tries as hard as he can to demonstrate that he likes my company and he wants to keep me for as many decades as he can.

It really isn’t fair that he has to work uphill against my belief that anything would be better without me.

I think it is kind of cool that he is trying to find a way to hack a route around the damage in my brain. If I am incapable of perceiving myself as having value as a wife… he’ll call me whatever he has to call me to get me to stay.

Evolving sexual dysfunction

Leave a reply

I’ve been documenting the intense pain I feel in my cunt for over a decade and a half. It’s not… news. It’s a fact of my life. I’m 36 and I wasn’t aware for the first several decades of my life that it was weird that I thought cunts were supposed to burn and be in terrible pain most of the time. Oh. What do you mean your body doesn’t feel like it hates you all of the time?

I’ve had a lot of sex even though it hurts. Sometimes the fact that it hurts is part of the reason I seek out the sex, it’s a form of self-harm that people don’t question in the same way that they question me when I open myself up with a scalpel. Oh, you’re hypersexual? That’s fun! Sorta.

But I’ve hit this point in the evolution of my mental illness and suicidality where I need to reduce how much ambient pain I feel in my body. I can’t cope the same way I used to. And there are these people who would be devastated for the rest of their lives if I killed myself so I need to find some kind of way to be in less pain.

I see all the doctors and health practitioners to manage my fibromyalgia and other physical problems that can be managed.

How do I get my cunt to stop hurting? That’s… that’s going to be a big deal.

I’m not in the kind of marriage where declaring my cunt off limits semi-permanently would work out. I’m also not allowed to manage the pain in my cunt by doing the hyper-sexual thing so that my cunt becomes numb and it’s easier to dissociate. The more sex I have with lots of people the less I am capable of noticing the pain in my cunt. It’s not that it is gone… it is that my brain puts it in a compartment and I’m not allowed to look at it in the same way. It’s not a great long-term coping strategy because I cause physical damage as I use it.

Most of my life has been me flip flopping back and forth between various forms of self-harm trying to do slightly less damage with each change. I’m still not sure how to fix this problem without switching to something else that will cause a different kind of damage.

The intensity of my current suicidal jag combined with where I otherwise am in life stage events mean I have to make some progress on this issue that has haunted me since I was a toddler.

I have to make progress on this idea of my body being worthless and only existing for other people to hurt for their pleasure. Yeah yeah masochism/submission/whatever. I need some god damn limits. Only it’s hard to defend a self you don’t believe in. It’s hard to act like you have self worth when you are acting on issues where you have not been allowed to have the word no be effective.

It’s not that I can’t defend myself against anything. It’s that I have gaps in my sense of self where I can’t defend those gaps. Mostly I’m a wildly confrontational person. But not when it comes to defending my cunt.

I gave up that battle as hopeless decades ago. My opinion about what happened to my cunt mattered so little for so long.

But that has to change and it has to change inside of me before I can change how I let people treat me. I don’t know how to think of myself as someone worth defending, not like that.

This is really hard.

Reinventing yourself

Leave a reply

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?

What does being kinky mean anyway?

Leave a reply

I feel like I’m in such a weird place in my body and in my mind. Yes, pregnancy is weird… but this predated the pregnancy. This got started over a year ago.

I still like the idea of being tied up and hit. When it happened last year I still liked the reality of it. But this is compounded by the fact that I don’t have a lot of childcare and when I did… it was not really during hours that were conducive to kinky play. I know that most of my friends have had a “Whoops the kids walked in during sex” story but I don’t. My sex life is off. fucking. screen. My children do not walk in on us having sex. And I don’t think they ever will. I have sturdy locks all the fuck over my house to prevent such a mishap.

Because given my background having my children SEE me have sex is a major violation and one I won’t be able to shake off.

If I could forget the sight of my mother and my sister fucking people maybe it would be different. My children will not learn from me.

Things with Noah are complicated for a lot of reasons. I have a strong sense of debt. Noah didn’t rescue me from the streets, I did that for myself thank you very much, but he did rescue me from being alone and that’s a big damn deal. Noah gave me a forever home that he’s serious about. If we divorced he would probably want me to have the house and he would leave. I’m a stubborn piece of shit and I wouldn’t accept but that’s different. Noah gave me a family. He didn’t share his family I’m still basically a non-person there (except with his grandmother and his aunties–I am glad for those women) but he gave me children. He helped me create a family where we both get to belong.

I owe Noah a lot. Noah has cared for me through several periods of time when I was all but nonfunctional. He feeds me. He makes sure I take my meds. He asks after my appointments and reminds me to go. When I express my overwhelming shame at stealing so many resources for my health he tells me over and over that keeping me alive and healthy is the point of us having money.

And the primary thing Noah wants from me as a demonstration of love is physical contact. Specifically, sex. The talking is awesome. The snuggling is great. He really gets a lot out of the sex.

My body is complicated though. I arrived at this marriage with sexual dysfunction in place. I arrived in his life with scar tissue and pain through my nether region. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t cause any of the damage. But it’s there and I have to cope with it.

In my brain I want to be available for sex at any moment because that would be hot and fun for him and it would make him feel really loved. I tried to meet that standard for years. I hurt myself in the process and I damaged the trust in my marriage.

It isn’t Noah’s fault that I did that. He was negotiating in good faith. I was doing the best I could and I fucked up.

The thing is… I’ve been hurting myself for almost 30 years. This was just the latest incarnation and in some fucked up ways it was a healthier way of hurting myself than most I have tried. I still need to change it. But I also need to acknowledge that I am not as pathetic and back sliding as I feel.

This is complicated.

I feel like I don’t count as a kinky person anymore because in my mind kink is associated with exhibitionism and public play. The fact that I call my husband Daddy when he’s fucking me is just kind of meh, whatever. Basically vanilla people do that too.

cough

I may have some weird assumptions here and there.

It doesn’t help that when I got into the scene there was a lot of nasty back and forth in email lists about how having a strong focus on sex instead of just the SM part of bdsm meant you weren’t really kinky. And I like fucking lots of people so I’m more of a swinger, right? Only at swinger parties I have to ask humbly for exceptions to the rules because I really want to make this person cry while I’m sucking his dick.

Ok I didn’t actually make him cry. He’s really tough. But he made lovely noises.

I don’t feel like I fit in a community. I’m too sexual to feel properly “kinky” and I’m too kinky for most of the sex-only spaces.

And it doesn’t help that my behavior in private is way more timid and unwilling to set boundaries than I am in public. In public I am responding to the crowd and crowds take rock solid boundaries. I have to protect myself. At home…. I don’t want to. I don’t want to say no. I don’t want to set limits.

Which is incredibly fucking stupid and creates problems all over the place. I know.

Playing at home is complicated because the kids are always god damn here and I don’t want them hearing or seeing anything. Ever. Period.

It isn’t that I will never be “out” with my children. It’s that my sex life will always be off stage and kind of a mystery. I’ll hint. I’ll answer some questions in broad ways. That’s it. I will never discuss my kinks with my children. They know I have not been monogamous all my life. They know I went out with a lot of people before I got married (How are you supposed to know if someone is right for you without trying out lots and lots and lots of wrong people first?!) and they know I’ve been on dates since getting married.

I think that’s plenty.

I’m ok with talking to my kids about sex in the abstract or in ways that will increase their future safety… they don’t need to learn how to have sex from me. My way is kinda fucked up. Like at one point my daughter asked if there is one kind of sex (or something very like that question) and I said, “Oh no! There are lots of kinds of sex. There’s manual sex (with fingers/hands); there’s oral sex (that involves a mouth and a set of genitals); there’s anal sex (playing with a butt–can be with fingers or a penis); and vaginal sex (can be with a penis or with toys).”

My daughter’s response was to raise her eyebrows and kind of say “hunh.” We didn’t keep talking after that. It wasn’t a conversation that needed a lot of in depth follow up at that point.

I just will never have a child who is talked into anal sex because it “doesn’t count”. What bullshit. Also: a huge swath of teenage girls these days are being pressured into oral sex because it “doesn’t count” and it’s a way to keep from having “more happen” and oh hell no.

My children will have language about sex and about their body. They will know what they are saying yes to and what they are saying no to. And I’m pretty damn sure my kids are growing up with the idea that sex is a super fun thing to do when you are ready and with the right person(s) but until you are ready it’s a problem.

And that all feels weirdly tied up in my kinky. Because I still struggle to set the boundaries I want them to have. I still struggle to say out loud “I want _____.” I can ask for abasing things very easily. Not affirming things.

I still struggle with the idea that sex is supposed to feel good for me. When the first several decades of your sex life is incredibly painful… that’s a hard thing to rewire in your body. It is hard to change my expectation.

What does being kinky mean?

I think it is funny that my current M/s contract has been going on for 9 months and I still don’t think I’m that kinky. Even though I have rules around my body and my sexuality that I follow.

WHAT IS BEING KINKY?

Failure and growing up

5 Replies

I think that the best thing I have gotten from Noah (other than a cushy life and two of the best kids on the planet, of course) is a willingness to fail. I have recently jumped off a lot of cliffs in terms of trying things I’m not good at. I’m cooking from scratch with whatever random ingredients I have around and I’m adding spices and things turn out ok or awesome. When something sucks I think, “Ok… this didn’t quite work. Why not?” Instead of, “I’m so stupid and pathetic. I should never have tried this. I obviously failed because *I* am a failure.” It sounds kind of melodramatic when I phrase it that way but that’s been my internal dialogue for most of my life. I’m not doing that–I want to say any more but that’s not quite true–as much as I used to. Now when something fails I look at it as an opportunity to learn more about the process and what I should do next time. I keep trying until I figure it out and I have fewer temper tantrums. Far, far fewer temper tantrums. I feel kind of embarrassed admitting out loud how often I have had temper tantrums through my adulthood when I fail at doing something. But that’s just kind of naturally scaling back. And part of it is just that I’m getting older and lowering my standards, but mostly it is that I am just plain more ok with failing being part of learning.

And that’s because of Noah. I don’t know what I did right in my past lives to deserve him, but please God I hope I never fuck this up.

qotd: Can’t be said on Mothering edition

2 Replies

Shanna got a little doctor kit for Christmas and she’s having a whole lot of fun examining people. Her favorite part is giving them shots so they can stay healthy though. I told Noah that I wasn’t sure how that would go down with playgroup because they are non-vaxxers. His response: “It’s ok. Just tell them it’s a shot of penicillin for syphilis.” Cue me looking horrified but laughing. He continues, “Well that’s better… right?”

It’s the little things

3 Replies

Today is our fourth anniversary. Obviously we will not be going out to celebrate. So instead my wonderful, considerate, thoughtful husband made me breakfast in bed. Not just any breakfast in bed! He went to my favorite tea shop and got my favorite tea and their spectacular home made lemon curd and we had scones with all the trimmings and cucumber sandwiches. I feel so loved. 🙂

Adjusting is slow

2 Replies

Hoo boy. All the people who said that going from 0-1 is way harder than 1-2 must not be talking about the first week. The first week with just Shanna was pretty damn blissful. We all hung out on the bed together and didn’t do much. We alternated who was napping and it was awesome. Uhm… it’s not like that this time. Shanna has So Much Energy. And keeping her from jumping on the bed (HELLO! Healing from internal wounds here!!!) is difficult. Other than that she’s just pushing boundaries slightly more than usual but really she’s not being out of line at all. So yeah. We aren’t as patient as we should be, but we are both working on it. She is quite in love with Calli. 🙂

Thank all the stars in the heaven for tandem nursing. Given how much the rest of me hurts I was about ready to flip my lid when my boobs started hurting last night because my milk came in. So I called my trusty, always hungry, toddler over. Insta-relief. (Yes, there is still plenty of milk for Calli.) Every minute of discomfort while nursing through pregnancy has already paid off. 🙂

We are trying to figure out a sleep schedule that will allow me to heal as quickly as possible. It’s a challenge. I have so much going on in my brain that it takes me forever to fall asleep, nearly an hour after each wake up when I can normally fall asleep in under five minutes, so that’s extra challenging.

I sorta went against orders and took a shower today. My stench was seriously bothering me. For those of you who are childfree, when you have a baby you then have basically hot flashes for a while as you sweat out a lot of the extra fluids you have been carrying around. This is not pretty. But a shower (ok, I sat in the tub with the shower nozzle on because I can’t stand and being submerged isn’t a great plan yet) felt decadent. Huzzah for hygiene.

We have a rather remarkable number of people bringing us food. I cannot express properly my gratitude. I think that I will karmically owe food to every newly delivered mother I ever hear about for the rest of my life. It feels really awesome.

Noah is the most amazing, supportive husband I can imagine having. He has earned so many brownie points that it will be decades before I return them all. I guess I’m going to have to stop whining about his night off. He’s earned several years worth of them recently.

I’m tired and my physical recovery is predictably slow. Walking to the bathroom is easier. Returning a plate to the kitchen is still a stretch and if you’ve seen how small my house is that’s pretty sad. I could not stand long enough to dry off after the shower. After not standing during the shower. Ugh. I’m not feeling patient with this. But it’s only been three days. I need to give myself a lot more time. I feel perkier while I am sitting in bed. Once I am vertical my bravado is revealed.

Calli is… mostly asleep really. 🙂 But she’s sweet and we are already fond of her. Yay hormones.

Thinking

5 Replies

So I’ve been taking some time off. Maybe you noticed, maybe you were grateful that I shut my mouth for once. 😛 But yeah, stuff. I’m going to try a different technique for handling some stuff and see if it works for me. I miss writing here.

I’m nine weeks now. This pregnancy seems pretty willing to stick and that is wonderful. I’m much much much less sick than I was with Shanna (thank all deities everywhere) so I’m even feeling ok. I’m not feeling ‘normal’ and I’m not feeling energetic or anything crazy like that. But I’m not overwhelmingly sick and completely incapacitated so I consider that a win. 🙂 Humble expectations are important. I manage to do an okay job of interacting with Shanna during the day. We do a lot of cuddling on the couch and I am also incredibly grateful that she is so willing and able to entertain herself for long stretches. I know it is unusual. As a result of her playing alone a lot of the day she has been pretty needy in the evenings and the bulk of that is falling to Noah. Let me take a moment to say that my husband has stepped up in a variety of ways and man do I love him. He is doing ALL of the cooking and most of the cleaning and a much larger share of kid-wrangling than usual. As a result this is probably our last kid. That’s… as mixed as that kind of thing might be.

We went to Arizona to see Sarah. That was really awesome. It was occasionally challenging to deal with Shanna, but mostly she was her awesomely obedient and friendly self so it wasn’t too bad. It was really nice to get to sit down and talk to my Sarah again. It’s hard having her so far away. I miss her. Unfortunately we cut the trip a bit short. Has anyone noticed this storm we’re having? Yeah, I had to drive home from Arizona through that and I am really glad I left before things had gotten too established. The drive home was pretty hairy at times and it would have been much worse another day or so later from what I can tell. Also: the Grand Canyon is breathtaking. So far in all of my travels I have set Alaska up as my own personal definition of Most Awe Inspiring Place but the Grand Canyon kicked Alaska’s ass. I would like to go again while not pregnant and seriously hike it.

Oh, side thing: people who bring a two year old on a 2.5 hour train ride without ANY form of amusement or toy are flippin stupid.

I’ve been hibernating a lot more than usual lately. On one hand it’s lonely. On the other hand it feels like what my body needs and I’m drained from the basics of day-to-day life without any extra stress. See, this is why I miss my Sarah so much. I could whine at her about being sad and lonely and not wanting to leave the house and she would come visit. Ok, I’m not really sad. But I am lonely. It’s interesting how sometimes those two things are tied together and sometimes they aren’t. I’m starting to move into that placid slow-moving-brain thing I had when I was pregnant with Shanna. I feel like I’m seeing most of life from under water. Things are just slower and less sharp and that’s kind of nice. I feel … honestly kinda stoned. Ha. But it’s in a very nice way. I’m just drifting through life and that feels ok and good and right. If I could have this mental feel without feeling so physically debilitated I think I would want to be pregnant forever. If I couldn’t talk Noah into being quiverfull I would surrogate over and over. 🙂 But, I don’t get to pick and choose so no permanent pregnancy for me. 🙂

I saw my brother on the drive home from Arizona. That was shocking. I knew I was going to be driving within 2 miles of his house so I called him and asked if he wanted to meet his niece. After double checking that I wasn’t going to force him to deal with our mother he said he wanted to meet her. When I told him that I am not currently speaking with our mother he seemed to feel much better. We had about two and a half hours of sitting around talking. It was a really good conversation. He admitted things out loud that I’ve always suspected. I was shocked and impressed that he has gotten to a point where he can admit those things. He’s grown up a lot. He seemed similarly impressed with my attitude about his behavior of the past few years. I told him that I understand why he has felt he needed to make the choices he made but they still make me sad. I think I managed to convey how much I would like a relationship with him without being pushy or demanding or needy. I’m proud of myself for how I handled my end of things there. I’m really grateful that he gave me a chance. I’m not sure we are going to start having a close relationship any time soon, but maybe it will be a beginning.