Tag Archives: noah

Just keep swimming

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It’s a good thing I have the best husband ever.

The problem is that I’m a pretty hardcore extrovert. It takes a lot of people time before my cup feels full. Noah has been trying really hard lately to help meet my needs. I appreciate that. It’s hard for him. He’s not an extrovert. He needs alone time. But he’s paying great attention to me and I need to focus on that for a bit. Best husband ever!

For all that I’m really frustrated with attempting to be social (and boy howdy I am) I’m overall doing ok with my life. I’m not bitter or miserable minute by minute. Just frustrated when I think about how crappy many people are.

Appreciation

Today I am feeling very happy with the world and everything in it, so I’ll talk a little bit about what I appreciate today. 🙂

I appreciate that my wonderful Marcie let me have huge blocks of wood for my yard. Soon I will get around to finishing that project and I will have the coolest sandbox ever!

I appreciate that my darling husband tolerates my ongoing projects and obsessions. 😀

I appreciate that my daughter loves books so much. And that she is picking up words at a prodigious rate. It is getting so much easier to communicate with her.

I appreciate that my house is small enough to be easy to clean. The older I get and the more stuff I have to get done in a day the more I appreciate this. 🙂

I appreciate that Taylor offered to come help me finish the garage. It is almost entirely cleaned out! It will be done by Friday! This is so exciting. (At this point there is probably about an hour of moving stuff and an hour or two of cleaning left.)

I appreciate the heck out of the chest freezer. Man that thing makes my life better. I have a whole mess of (organic) beef and chicken. I have a huge stash of raw milk, butter, cream, and cheese. I have a freak-ton of ice cream (I buy it on sale and stock up). And then there are the ’emergency’ tv-dinner lunches for Noah’s lunch when we have nothing else. It’s so awesome. I think I have enough meat to last me the next six months and maybe longer. This pleases me immensely. We will need more ice cream and milk before then. 🙂

I appreciate the wonderful variety of food available to me here in the bay area. I like that my taste buds have been expanded in ways they wouldn’t have if I lived in middle America.

I appreciate the awesome cookbooks available to me that have taught me how to cook some of the amazing food I enjoy so much. And the baking. *swoon* The baking! I’m pretty good at baking, I have discovered. I really enjoy it.

I appreciate being comfortable financially at a time when many people aren’t. It’s a luxury. I have the luxury of staying home with my kids as long as I want to. It’s really nice.

I appreciate my new roof. Holy crap on toast do I appreciate my new roof. And I really love that we are basically off grid for our electricity usage. That makes me feel good about my impact on the planet. I’m wasteful in other places (like travel and eating meat) so I try to do what I can elsewhere.

I appreciate our wonderful car. It is fantastically efficient and well functioning. It is still pretty through absolutely no effort of mine.

I appreciate having the luxury to sit around and think extensively about what is best for my family. My life is non-stressful and non-traumatic. I get to think about family planning in a safe and comfortable environment where many options are possible. That’s amazing.

I appreciate having yards big enough to worry about. 🙂 It means that Shanna has lots of room to play and explore. And I appreciate how much she loves being outside. That bodes well. 🙂

I appreciate Ikea. My house is turning into an Ikea showroom. It’s kind of funny. But man is it useful and cheap! And I think all the stuff we bought there looks perfectly decent. Yay Ikea!

I appreciate that when I have computer problems I always find a friend to help me fix them. 😀 Man living in the valley rocks. 😀