Switching and other Stuff -- swan's View

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want. 

~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Years and years and years of dreaming and hoping and wishing and  wanting and imagining -- that was my story at the beginning of my spanking life.  I'd wanted, or at least thought I wanted, a life that included control and spanking and pain, and that wanting reached all the way back to  the days of my very earliest pre-pubescent stirrings.  I thought I wanted it, but I really wasn't sure -- and I was married, "til death do us part," to a man who found that wanting to be disgusting and "sick."


And ... then I found, through an Internet search, sites that described domestic discipline.  It was a version of spanking within an adult relationship that was dressed up in the context of one partner disciplining the other as a way of creating and maintaining harmony in the household.  It seemed, "nicer" and more "normal" than the things I'd imagined, but I was able to convince my husband to try it...  And so, my journey began.


Very early, on a listserv dedicated to discussing the ins and outs of that particular subset of BDSM, I asked what I might expect of the path ahead.  How, I wondered, would this practice evolve?  It seemed to me that IF my spanking life were entirely tied to a disciplinary framework, then it would, necessarily and logically, come to an end.  Spanking predicated on a supposed need of mine for discipline would be a limited feature of my life because I knew that, if I approached it with integrity and intellect, all the behaviors that might reasonably "earn" me a spanking would surely be extinguished.


THAT was a scary prospect.  I could see that, even as I'd found a way to get what I'd wanted for so long, I'd set up a scenario that would rip it all away again.  None of the "older, wiser, more experienced" practitioners could give me any sort of satisfactory answer to my insistent questions about how it would all play out.  It was my first experience with that particular DD mental contortion that allows them to tell themselves it is all about maintaining discipline, while simultaneously sidestepping the obvious long-range implications of the dynamic.

It wasn't long until my own questing led me away from "pure" DD and into the more honest feeling practice of BDSM.  Along the way, I lost my husband.  The intense honesty of the path I was following was just too much for him.


Turning the last page on the "married" chapter of my life, I plunged into the fiery passions and pleasures of belonging to Master.  The early days, weeks, and months of our life together were driven by our mutual appetites -- and we were insatiable.  I didn't think much about the future in those days.  We spanked and spanked and spanked -- and the wildness of those days allowed me to ignore the quiet knowing voice that whispered to me that it couldn't go on like that FOREVER.  Or at least, I mostly ignored it. 

Things change.  Life is change.  We weren't youngsters when we found each other and we were clear, from the outset, that we didn't have time to waste.  We've been the living manifestation of "seize the moment."

Now, well over eight years have gone by.  We've loved and spanked a whole lot.  We've confronted a host of challenges; endured our share of losses.  We've grown and learned -- but the one unchanging truth of all of it has been change.  Change is inescapable.  And, I can still hear that younger "me" from so many years ago asking her questions, over and over -- "what will happen -- someday?"

What I've learned is that there is no way to answer the someday questions.  Things will inevitably be different someday than they are today.  What I've learned is that it is best to live in the right now as much as possible.  There is no seeing into the misty future, and no way to move it one jot even if I could see it clearly.  And, the happy news is that our "right now" is pretty darn good.  I'm liking it -- a lot:

• We aren't spanking like we did -- once upon a time.  We are, though, spanking way more than we did just a couple of years ago, and I'm liking it more, feeling more secure and more sure -- finding my way back to that peculiar sort of masochism that seems to be my own special gift.  I'm waking up, more and more often, and feeling that "I wish I could get spanked" stirring in my gut.
• We're switching, He and I.  We haven't done that for years -- probably 5 or 6, and I'd missed it.  I really had come to believe that it was a part of our spanking lexicon that was gone for good.  The opportunity to act as Top allows me to engage in spanking play from the other end of the power exchange.  It lets me touch Him,  love Him, pleasure Him, communicate with Him, and share with Him using the intimate language which is our common passion.
• We've ventured into disciplinary dynamics, this time with me in the role of disciplinarian, and doing that has radically changed our lives for the better.  It has been terribly hard for us both, and there have been times when we've been sick at heart as we've struggled to navigate those choppy waters.  However, using the disciplinary tool has given us a chance to reinvent our lives together and reclaim our relationship.  I've learned that I DO have the skills and strengths needed to act in that capacity, and it is important for me to understand those gifts.
• We've regained our evenings.  There are an additional three or four hours available to us each night, and that is time we are enjoying with one another.  We spank at night and we make love.  I am really enjoying the nights when I am bundled off to sleep with a hot, stingy butt.  
• We've made adjustments.  Well, truthfully, He's made adjustments in the style of play He usually engages in with me.  More and more, He is gentler and slower with me, and I am better able to catch up and come along and be with Him.  It has allowed me to regain my sense of confidence and joy in belonging to Him.  It is less intensely sadistic, and more sensitive and mutual.  I am aware that we've likely mellowed to the point where we are now officially out of the ranks of "the cool kids," but it is so good to feel safe and secure again about putting myself in His hands when we play.
• We are "in love" again.  It isn't that we ever really were "not in love," but we'd seen our passions and energies banked and dimmed.  Poly people recognize a phenomenon known as "new relationship energy" (NRE).  Most acknowledge that NRE tends to run its course in about a year.  We seem to have been gifted with a particularly long-lived and robust form of NRE.  I don't know why we seem to keep falling in love over and over again, but I am thrilled -- feeling like a randy sixteen year old.

So there's the state of our union on this day.  I don't have any urge to ask those questions about "someday" anymore.  I've learned that "someday" will take care of itself.  It is enough to live this day hand in hand with the One who holds my heart.

swan