Variations on a Theme

It was probably Monday last week when two conflicting parts of our current reality brought us square up against how we (and especially I) have changed in the last couple of years.


I began to write about it that day and simply could not work my way through enough of the frustration and confusion and anger to feel reasonable about my thinking. What works here is a swirling and volatile mixture of powerful tides from several different directions. The confluence becomes pretty turbulent, and the two of us get tossed around in the vortex.


A very signigicant factor for the two of us is the duality of our time. Life shifts enormously for us twice each year -- spring and late summer, as the school year dictates my schedule. Throughout the almost ten months of the year when I am teaching, our lives are to a very large degree driven by my routines. We rise at 5:00 each morning, eat a very quick breakfast, and part quickly as I fly off to sometimes very long days. Our evenings revolve around meetings and work, and the weekends are most often a matter of one day of relaxation and one day of work as I try to prepare for the next week. The time and flexibility of that routine is pretty limited.


Then summer comes and things change radically and suddenly. It is as if I "retire" each year in June. While we look forward to that, it does entail some major adjustments that invariably challenge us in ways we never have learned to anticipate. During the school year, once He gets us wives launched, the house and the hours of His days are pretty much His to manage in whatever way He chooses. Depending on His schedule, He may or may not leave home, and His time at home is uniquely His. When I come back home each summer, that "space and private time" is altered by my simple presence. No matter how thrilled we might be to have the extra time, things change. It is about learning different patterns and rythms; getting used to being around each other; establishing the understanding and routines that take us through the minutes and hours and really do allow us to enjoy being around each other.


Further complicating things for He and I in the last year and a half is the fact of my altered sexual status. The precise combination of circumstances that result in my achieving orgasm are still largely a mystery to the two of us. When we do seem to "hit" the jackpot and arrive at that point, we are usually simultaneously thrilled and baffled as to the actual path that brought us there. That makes it particularly difficult to recreate the event with any sort of reliability. One thing that has become abundantly clear to me is that the whole business is remarkably fragile -- if I get started along the way to an orgasm, it is not at all difficult to knock me off my horse and end the whole thing. Sometimes, it really does feel like it would be easier to just forget the whole thing rather than try and fail time after time... Or get close and then have it evaporate just when the prize is within sight.


And we practice in the SM realm of BDSM. He is a sadist. I am a masochist. He derives a significant level of His pleasure from hurting me. I need, crave, want to be hurt. That should be simple and if the "match up" of those two drives were exact, I suppose it might be, but His sadism easily outruns my ability to match Him from the masochistic side. Being taken past where there is anything at all pleasurable in it fills a deep drive to be controlled and owned within my psyche -- but it does not "turn me on." It pushes one set of buttons, but not the other. The kind of SM play that most engages His sadism, takes me to fear, to panic, to anger, to despair, to total exhaustion and surrender -- sometimes it even takes me to subspace, but it does not take me to sexual release generally. That is a different pathway. Complexity within complexity.


We can work it out. We DO work it out. It just requires that we learn again and again and again, that not every session is the same, and that not all outcomes will be achieved in every encounter. Part of what "saves" us is that we are not new with one another. We know each other well enough to have a difficult spot and keep hold of the core of our relational dynamic. We can be hurt and frustrated and fearful and baffled, but the framework remains and gives us a pathway to follow as we work to find a way forward.


That's why, today, I can report on the contrast between last Monday and this morning. I'm going to go ahead and put up what I had started to write about last Monday, so that you can see the contrast.


Last Monday I wrote --


I really do understand the position that I occupy. I really do understand the nature of my relationship and who I am within that. I really do understand what it is that I have chosen and how that works.

None of what I am struggling with or trying to get settled for myself are intended to deny any of that. This is just me, looking inward, processing the reactions and emotions that come up for me with some parts of this. This is just me, coping with paddles. Again. Or trying to.

As long as we've been at this, I've struggled to come to terms with His love of paddles. It was, as I wrote here so long ago, one of the places where we began, and it continues to be a place that we come back to over and over. And, for me, it is never any easier.

Today, the paddle, coming right at the outset of our morning encounter; yanking me hard out of the softness of waking up; fierce and without prelude -- simply made me angry. And the anger just sits there with no place to go. Because I know that He can and will spank as He likes -- that there is no obligation for Him to spank me the way I want to be spanked, and that IF He did do that, I'd be devastated.

Still, the ferocity of the pain ripped everything else away and denied the possibilities that I might take anything away from the morning except survival. And that simple reality brought the anger. It felt quiet to me. No roaring, stomping, hands on hips, swearing fury this time. Just bitterly, smoulderingly, sure of the wrongness of the whole business.

Sandwiched in between the paddlings was a good, long whipping with a kangaroo-hide cat that I love, and that I'd asked for in particular this morning. It mattered not at all. I was too awash in the frustration and anger to take it in.

And, of course, being completely bent out of shape is not a recipe for achieving "the heights of ecstasy" sexually either. So, that part of the morning was a write off, too.

Damn! Double Damn!

I can't imagine that, after all this time, I haven't learned how to take a simple paddling without it destroying my whole day. Honestly. I can't even begin to imagine how many paddle strokes there must have been in my life by now. Duh! How tough can this be?

There isn't anything complicated to this. I know the drill. It is the advice that I so glibly give to newbies: "submissives submit." I don't have to like it. I don't have to enjoy it. It isn't my choice or pleasure that is the issue here. Lose the attitude and expectations. Give it up. Give it over. Be what I say I am.



That was where I was, late in the afternoon of that day.

The next morning, or maybe it was two days later, He started off to play with me again -- touching and stroking that "magic spot" that we discovered only a couple of weeks ago. I could feel myself tensing up, and hear myself screaming inside my mind: "NO! Please... Just leave that part of it out, and go straight to the paddling because I don't think I can stand this. I don't think I can bear being brought to the point of almost orgasm, only to have it all blown away by what I know is coming next here..." I didn't say any of that. I told myself that it was not up to me. That whatever He wanted to do was "by definition" supposed to be alright with me.

So there we were, all snuggled up, with Him stroking the spot that is supposed to create "ecstasy" while I cried silent tears into His chest. You can imagine His confusion. In the end, I told Him what it was that I was thinking; how angry and frustrated I was feeling; how I believed that it would just be better to not try for the sexual pleasure part of all of this -- just not do that because having it set up and then blown away was too hard. "So, please," I begged Him, "can't we just do the paddling and skip the stuff that is supposed to make this feel good? It is going to be easier for me if I just give that part up and quit expecting it." In the end, we made love, and let it go at that.

But of course, that wasn't the end of it. Like the good Master He is, He came right back after me, unwilling to let me simply fade back into the place where I submitted without joy or hope.

This morning, waking in the drowsy pleasure of being home after a two-day meeting in our capital city, He pulled me tightly to Him and began that soft but insistent stroking that takes me out of my "head" and puts me IN my body. If I had any thought at all of struggling or resisting, His tight embrace kept me exactly where He wanted me.

In time, I quit thinking, settled into my body, and just let Him take me where He was planning for us to go. Once He had me there, He handled me carefully, avoiding the paddles that He knew would drop me out of the spell He was weaving. Instead, He used a leather strap and a rattan cane to keep building the intensity of the session. Instead, He teased my sensitive and awake skin with a knife. Instead, He kept me pulled in close, keeping me secure, and monitoring the responses that He was eliciting. When, at the end of the caning, He turned me lose only to have me suddenly explode into a spontaneous orgasm, He didn't miss the opportunity to go back after me with the cane and push the event even further.

This time, when we made love, it wasn't about submission; not about service. This morning, it wasn't about me understanding that I am His slave, and that I do as I am required to do. Nor was it about it being my pleasure to serve Him in this way. This morning, it was the two of us connected, joined, taken to the heights of joy and pleasure together. When He achieved His own release this morning, I wasn't far behind Him.

I don't know. We probably still don't have the magical formula. Still, we have more information and a clearer sense of the way the path wanders. It is probably going to keep on being challenging for us. There will be plenty of places where I struggle. He has promised that there WILL be paddlings -- perhaps just not associated with sex. I feel sure though, that He will not let me give up. That is the purest root of my trust in Him.


swan