Maybe It Depends on How You Look at It

In her comment to my last post,  morningstar said...

i will follow this (what shall I call it???) journey??? i don't know what to call it swan.. but i will be interested to see how it goes....
i have been trying to be submissive without a "leader" so to speak.... some days it is just damn frustrating.... 
i wish you luck  

I'm not at all sure if she meant that to say that I am "trying to be a slave without a Master," or if she was really only speaking to her own current situation.  I know I tend to do that in comments on a regular basis -- read someone's words about their life and their experience, and then speak to whatever that brings up for me about my own life and circumstances. 

 I know that the implication that I am somehow trying to do the submissive/slave side of the power dynamic without the accompanying Dominant/Master side caught me off guard.  I never wrote those words, and I'm surprised to find what I did say interpreted in that fashion.  So let me try to clarify --

What I discovered, Saturday morning, sitting in my therapist's office, was a truth about myself.  More accurately, I suppose, it was rediscovered... because I have known it for years.  I am, if it can be possible, happiest and most fulfilled when I live from the place of "slave" within my most intimate relationship.  It is what I wanted through nearly three decades of marriage, and it is what I chose when I came here to be with Tom some 9-1/2 years ago.  It is what I choose for myself today -- and for as long as I live.  For myself.

 The changes we've come through have rocked us to our foundations.  We've been lucky to survive.  We are, I hope, through the worst of it, but we are still in the early days of clearing the debris and laying the foundations for "new stuff" in our lives.  It is hard work -- exhausting both physically and emotionally.  We haven't yet come to a place where things are easy or simple or familiar.  Every move and every task and every undertaking seems daunting and oppressively complicated and difficult.  Every single success; every triumph; comes about because we've managed to successfully navigate the delicate business of working at it together with whatever tools, skills, and talents we can bring to the effort. 

I am not faced with trying to be "slave" in some vacuum where there is no dominant counterpart.  He is the One that I serve, and the only One that I want to serve.  He is learning His way into our new reality, even as I am, but He is still "Master" to me -- always and all ways.  That is far more about who and what I am than it is about Him.  I belong to Him; bound in heart and mind and body by threads that span our two lives with a strength that is more than steel.  The fact that, as I became fearful and hurt and angry and resentful, I pulled myself away from those anchor points does not change the truth of their existence.  It is only evidence of my own willful foolishness and blind panic.  

I needed to flail around in that place until I realized where I'd gone wrong.  I needed to correct my own course.  I needed to come back to my home and my center.  That has been my work and my healing in these months -- to come to understand that, and then to accept that it was within my power to choose to do it.  He couldn't "lead" me to this.  I would have battled with Him and fought Him -- just as a drowning swimmer may fight her rescuer.  Far better, I imagine, that He let me work through this on my own, and find my own way back to "us."  

I know that there is a common belief, in the lifestyle community, that it is the Dominant partner who leads, and the submissive partner who follows that lead.  That may, in fact, be precisely the model that prevails in many of our relationships most of the time, but I have come to believe that it isn't always so.  If the goal is to build strong and healthy relationships that endure and work for the partners, then the power flows between them in natural and organic ways, and the leadership can pass back and forth depending on what the circumstances demand.  Just as climbers might share the lead in ascending to the summit, so we move in and out of "leadership" roles in our relationship.  I have skills and knowledge and wisdom to share, and sometimes it makes sense for me to be the one to take the lead.  That doesn't mean I am less slave or that He is less "Master."  It only means that each of us offers the best we have to this life we are creating together.  

So, I will be "slave" as best I can.  I will work on the things that still bedevil me in that context -- my fears, and my tendency to extrapolate from bits of nothingness, and my quick leaps to judgement, and my jealousies, and my insecurities.  I will do the best to serve Him, to anticipate what He might need and want from me, to be where He needs me to be, and to cultivate the graceful, respectful, kind, and loving attitudes toward loving Him that were once my habit.  He'll give me whatever guidance and direction seem appropriate and necessary from His perspective, I'm sure.  We'll grow together into this -- even as we have over the years that have gone before.  I doubt that we will avoid all the frustrations and battles and pitfalls that may be lurking along the path.  I hope we manage to bypass some of them.  

Bad things could happen, but I am not looking for them.  Good things might happen just as easily, and I want that for us.  So that's where I'm going to put my energies.  I want more joy, more pleasure, more intimacy, more love, more sex, more S/M play, more laughter, more adventures, and more friendships.  I am the slave.  I may not be able to make all of that happen by myself, but I can bust my tail to do my share.

swan

Be the Change You Want to See

I started back today seeing the same therapist that I saw a few times back last winter/spring.  I was not happy about beginning that process again.  I am not one who appreciates the soul-baring vulnerability of therapy, and I deeply resent the time and the money and the emotional cost.  However, I finally found myself so tangled up in my own thoughts and fears and hurts and confusions that there was simply no good option.  I am lost and feeling alone, and I need someone from outside myself and our immediate family to listen to me fuss and whine and spin around -- and point me toward the exit.  I can't do it for myself anymore. 

She is J, and she is very good.  She is now, with my return to counseling, working with all of us in individual sessions.  If one were keeping an accounting of the "good things" and "benefits" to accrue from our struggles in this year, surely finding J would be on that list.  We've been lucky to have her wisdom and acceptance and simple affirmation of who we are individually and as a family.

When I worked with her back in the early months of all of this, I felt pretty solid and pretty secure and pretty centered.  She declared, in those days, that I was "the pillar" of our family.  I found that intimidating, but was also flattered and a little proud of my own sturdy strength.  Except that, as time has passed, I've started to wobble and tremble.  I'm not feeling so strong these days.  I am exhausted and weary and scared and desperate.  I veer from hopeful to hopeless and back again at a dizzying speed.  When I sat down in J's office this morning, it took only the simple inquiry as to how I was doing to send me into a flurry of tears and whimpers and a shaky-voiced litany of fears and woes that left me limp and trembling.

She listened to my random, stream-of-consciousness outpouring, and then proposed this version of my dilemma:

You are divided in your approach to the challenges in your relationship.  You could respond to any of the  situations that you are trying to deal with from your strong, powerful, capable, intelligent woman persona -- or you could respond from your slave persona.  It must be hard to figure out what to do with those two possibilities.  Which one do you want?

That stopped me in my tracks.  I could tell, inside myself, that what she said was true.  I know that strong, independent, capable, powerful woman.  She is the one who runs a busy classroom of growing pre-adolescents with a sure and steady hand.  She deftly handles the many unpredictable shifts of the school day, and never breaks a sweat.  She judges and evaluates and decides the course to take through a thousand minor (or maybe not so minor) tumults every single day.  Too, I know the slave who is quiet and calm and secure and soft and yielding.  She is the part of me that waited and waited and waited to be taken in and held close and given the gift of a place to safely lodge a heart that longs to submit.  In my mind, I rolled that question around and around -- if there were a choice to be made here, which would I choose?

Deep breath.  "Slave," I told her.  "If I could choose, I'd choose to respond from the slave mode."  And, saying it, I felt some bound up place inside of me release just a bit...

I've pulled myself back from that place through the last year.  I've chattered away in my mind, and been absolutely convinced that I just COULD NOT continue to live as His slave for a whole variety of reasons.  I've been stiff necked and stubborn and hellbent on having it be the way I think it should be.  The part of me that has "control issues" has put together a very convincing list of whys and wherefores -- all the justifications for pulling myself away from Him and the promises I once made.

This morning, in less than an hour, affirming my stated desire to live and respond from "slave mode," my oh-so-perceptive therapist turned me around; showed me what I wanted; and showed me how I'd been sabotaging that for myself and, possibly, for us.  I sat there breathing and knew that I couldn't do one thing about changing how He feels about me or us or the M/s dynamic we once enjoyed.  He won't be pushed or manipulated or coerced by me.  That doesn't work -- never has.  I can, however, resume the role that I once lived with grace and joy.  Whatever He might choose for Himself, my living as His can't hurt us (at least, I don't think it can).

I've wanted Him to fix things for us.  I've wanted Him to make me feel safe again.  I've fallen into the trap of believing that the only way for me to give Him my submission is for Him to "take" it from me.  I don't know what I've been thinking -- I know better than that.  I know how this works, and I know what my part is.  I need to walk the talk.  If I want our current intimate stalemate to be broken and our dynamic to be restored, I need to bend -- to "assume the position" of slave.

It may not be easy.  Probably, it will be very difficult in at least a few places.  I am afraid; terrified even; at the reality of His continuing anger with me.  I don't want to face that -- or deal with what it may mean, but I am ready to lay that down and trust Him to find a way through it for the two of us.  I have been fierce about my efforts to steer things, and it has been catastrophic.  I am not a good ship's captain.  I can't keep insisting that He see it my way, do it my way, make me happy.  I have to let this go; believe in the heart of who He and I are together; and take the risk of trusting once again.

And so, once again, I will be...

swan

Current

It has been such a year.  Things have changed so quickly ... and then there have been times when it seemed as if there was never going to be any change at all.  We've lived together through it all; and we've lived, each of us, locked away in our own private struggles.  We've tried to lean on one another, and we've tried to be strong for each other.  Often, there has been no strength left between us, and we've collapsed in a jumble of swirling feelings and hurts.

Today, I awakened with the word, "current" in my brain.  Long-time readers will know that I have a thing for words; their meanings and their roots.  I love it when a word comes to stay with me for awhile, and I enjoy the act of wandering around with a word in my head -- turning it over and tasting it and seeing what secrets it may have to share.  So...  current...

One of the first things to occur to me as I thought about the word "current" early this morning when things were still quiet and sleepy around here was the multitude of meanings the word carries.  The dictionary gives us a view of the territory that gets covered when we start contemplating this particular linguistic gem --

adj.

1.

a. Belonging to the present time: current events; current leaders.

b. Being in progress now: current negotiations.

2. Passing from one to another; circulating: current bills and coins.

3. Prevalent, especially at the present time: current fashions. See Synonyms at prevailing.

4. Running; flowing.

n.

1. A steady, smooth onward movement: a current of air from a fan; a current of spoken words. See Synonyms at flow.

2. The part of a body of liquid or gas that has a continuous onward movement: rowed out into the river's swift current.

3. A general tendency, movement, or course. See Synonyms at tendency.

4. Symbol i, I Electricity

a. A flow of electric charge.

b. The amount of electric charge flowing past a specified circuit point per unit time.

Interesting, to me at least, is the etymology. The word first appears around 1300, meaning "running, or flowing," from the Old French corant "running, lively, eager, swift."  That seems to derive from the Latin currere meaning "to run, or move quickly."  There's a whole world of words pointing to the eventual meaning of our word, "current."  The Greek -khouros gives us "running," and the Lithuanian karsiu is literally "go quickly."  The Old Norse used the word horskr to mean  "swift," and in Old Irish and Middle Welsh, we find carr which gives us "cart, and wagon." The same word, for the Bretons was karr which turned into "chariot." In Welsh we find carrog which meant "torrent". Meaning "prevalent, generally accepted" is from 1560s.

So, having indulged my fetish for fun with words, I can imagine that some readers will, by now, be wondering what the point might be -- or maybe even if there IS a point...  Be patient with me.  I'll see if I can make my thoughts line up and actually say something coherent here.

I started out this morning with the word current in the sense of flow.  Specifically, I was thinking of the flow of water in a stream or a river or even the rip currents one might find at the ocean's edge.  Currents can be relatively gentle when the body of water is small and the forces that create the directional flow are slight.  A gentle stream can be moved along down a slight slope, and the force of the current makes the water sparkle and gurgle over rocks and logs in a melodic and calming passage.  But change the slope, or the volume of water, or add some additional factor into the mix, and that gently flowing water can change into a deadly torrent that sweeps away everything in its path.  Floods and tsunamis and storm surges and cloud bursts can all bring the destructive power of swiftly flowing water to bear on anything standing in the way.

I have felt like we have been swept along in currents that simply overwhelmed us this year; currents resulting from storms that we never saw coming.  That's one of the things about a current -- it isn't necessarily easy to see.  It may flow beneath the surface, and capture you by surprise.  I'm sure there will be those who would ask how it was that we didn't see what was bearing down on us.  I'm aware that there are those outside our lives who saw clearly the mistakes that we were making, and of which we were so unaware.  I can understand their frustration.  I often wonder about people who build homes in the flood plain of a major river, or directly in the likely path of some significant number of Atlantic hurricanes.  What do they expect, after all?  Do they somehow believe that they will be immune to the almost certain disasters that are aimed right at them?  Is it the pure and irresistible allure of the shore?  The compelling loveliness of the stream side?  Maybe I understand that set of choices better now than I once did -- I too have walked to the edge and stood there entranced, even as everyone around me shouted that it was shear folly.  And so the currents knocked us down and dragged us under and swirled us against the sharp-edged rocks -- and tossed us, broken, upon the shore.  Current...

Then there is the "present" meaning of "current,"  as in current events or the current state of affairs.  Currently... we are -- or things are -- or life is... like this or that.  Except that, as one describes the present moment, it careens past at the speed of time.  Gone.  And now there is the new moment.  And now that too, is flown past.  The now of the current moment happens and is gone -- like a dream awaking.  Reach out to touch it, pin it down, capture it to think about later -- and it evaporates in a sparkle and a mist and a vague sense of disquiet.  I've always found that to be one of the benefits for me of spanking.  Spanking brings me right smack (I apologize, but I couldn't resist that one) into the present moment.  In fact, it is one of the tricks I've used through the years to get me through an intense spanking -- never think about the last stroke or the next.  In the middle of a spanking, if you could get into my head, what you would hear would be me saying, "now, and now, and now..."   Or, perhaps, "one, one, one, one..."  It may be that there are lessons there for this life we're trying to cobble back together:  Stay away from the past, and don't gaze too far into the future.  Keep it current --  now, and now, and now, and now.  Current.

In another context, current can be about electricity, power, charge, juice, energy.   Between He and I, there remains something electric; something so elemental that we are drawn together -- maybe at the atomic level.  Maybe. George Carlin once opined that electricity is just organized lightning.  Oh yeah!  I well remember being struck by that lightning when, very early on, I found myself drawn, elementally, to the magnetism and power and energy of this man.  He will remind me, these days, that I knew what I was getting into -- knew it all up front and ahead of making the commitments that brought us to this place.  I'd probably argue that point, but there seems no point.  And anyway, I was, like Paul, thrown from my horse and struck blind.  In those high energy, electrically charged early days, He might have explained in careful detail that He was, in fact, an axe murderer and a cannibal and a Republican -- and I'd have still followed the same path.  I have no doubt.  I like electricity.  I like it in my life and I like it in my play.  I am a great fan of the violet wand (although, sadly, He is not).  The current of our lives makes sparks and sometimes one or the other of us gets struck by a bolt from the heavens.  It may turn out that, if we are going to insist on keeping hold of each other (and I do hope we will), that lightning will strike the same place over and over.  Current. 

Don't give up on us, friends...  And for those who are not friends -- I wouldn't count us out.  The current still runs between us.  We're unsure and uncertain as we work our way back to playing in the flow, but we are testing the waters.  There remains the energy and the electricity and the spark.  We've been tossed and left half-drowned, but we are alive and we are still present with one another.  Current.

s.

My God! I Feel Like Writing

I have been locked inside myself, lost, confused, anguished, grief ridden and "crisisy" for a long time now. I have longed to write about what is raging inside me, my head, my feelings, my soul, and "locked up" whenever I attempted to even approach the prospect of writing, let alone doing so. It seems being "locked up" is my life's primary learning the last year.

This morning suddenly I WANT to write....................I need to. I feel like Forrest Gump when he said he felt like running one day and so ran. There was no antecedent. There was just action...........being as a verb not a noun.

It has been almost a year now since last October 28, the day that was my personal 9/11. It kicked off a series of real injuries for me. It culminated a string of losses over the last two and a half years. Little has been good since and nothing is the same.

Over the last two and a half years I lost my parents, lost my thirty-five year long professional career and concomitantly what I stood for publicly as a man, lost 60% of my body through gastric bypass surgery that was medically very difficult, had a crisis bowel resection from a life threatening bowel obstruction that became medically complicated, and lost the majority of my personal income. These losses occurred in the run up to last October 28.

Then October 28 occurred. Sue phoned 911 when she became concerned a comment I made in an IM chat with her reflected suicidal intent. Police hunted me in our condominium complex with rifles, flak jackets, and a shoot on sight order. I had fled to a local WalMart when she told me she had called 911. They found me there and about a dozen of them harassed and interrogated me in handcuffs in the parking lot for a half hour or so, before, having no police record at all, they felt they had nothing on which to base arresting me and so I was released. I was enraged . I lost my trust in the integrity of our D/s. In my drunken raging about that a few days later, I lost my sense of safety in my home, as I was carried screaming and struggling in hand cuffs from my home. I've not felt safe a moment since. I know at any moment anyone, likely those closest to me , can call the police and they will do whatever they want to me for whatever reason. I was released with my first criminal conviction..................suicidality treated as a crime, with no services offered or provided. A month later even after seeking services on our own, I was worse. This time I was psychotic and murderously self-injurious and intent on harming sue and t as well as myself. Again I was in jail in chains. My second conviction......................two years probation...............pending a year in prison if I fail to complete that, or if for any reason at all they decide to violate my probation. Again no services were offered or provided, but they were mandated. I did 8 weeks of alcohol rehabilitation. It was a 6 week program, but my family felt I shouldn't graduate at the end of six weeks, so they took it on themselves without talking to me, to have it extended.

I have no trust or sense of security ever. I am depressed. I am in constant fear. I have lost my trust in the those whom I love. I have no faith in our government. I melt down if I see a cop. I have murderous fantasies of retaliation against police, and rejoice every time I hear of police injury or death.

I attend two mandated AA meetings a week and submit reports about them to the weekly continuing care meeting that I must attend to stay out of prison. AA has helped me at times. More often it makes me feel worse. It is a religious cult that focuses on replacing substance addiction with addiction to magical thinking. One must, to fulfill their program, develop a vision of a higher power, be that Christianity's vision of God, or coming to believe in a "door knob." (I am not exaggerating. That is one of the examples of what AA says you might do if you are an atheist or agnostic). Whatever that vision is, every gathering ends with a remarkably non-secular recitation of the Lord's Prayer, as they sanctimoniously purport they are not a Christian cult. I have jokingly wondered if they ended each meeting with readings from the Koran, they would be able to get away with claiming to not be an Islamic religious cult. I am keeping up my compliance act. I behave as though I have thrown myself into AA and aftercare. My aftercare coordinator called me last week to tell me she enjoys reading the insights in my AA meeting reaction reports as much as any she has seen. I must or I will serve a year in prison.

I've lost a life long love with alcohol, a lover that I traveled every road and experience with for 47 years since I was 15. It was time for that to end, and a very harmful love affair. My feelings towards alcohol are like my feelings for my ex-wife. My life is better for not having her. There is no aspect of my life that is not better without having my ex-wife or my not having alcohol in it.

The loss of my first marriage benefited me hugely. It was a terrible loss after 31 years of marriage and involved huge grief and loss. The loss of alcohol benefits me hugely. It is a source of huge grief and loss.

So on top of the losses leading up to 10/28/10, I have lost alcohol. I have lost the privilege of ever working as a professional again because of my now permanent criminal record. I might well have not chosen to return to my profession. But there is a huge difference between choosing to never work at your chosen profession, and knowing that your society has said you are too criminal to ever do that again. We have lost about $10,000 in the process of this. I am 233 days sober today and 225 days into probation. We will continue for the next 505 days paying probation to handle my supervision. Probation entails nothing, but a meeting with me every two months to collect my probation fees. They do consider whether to approve a pass for me if I want to travel outside of my community. I am not allowed to travel without their permission. In the midst of this we lost t's Mom. My loss in this compared to t's is minuscule. Her Mom took me in and treated me as a valued and loved son when I was divorced and my own parents shunned me, and accepted our family completely as we came to include sue. Her loss is a painful void.

I've lost self-esteem. I don't correspond with or relate to any of the people I knew before this. I feel such shame and humiliation I don't want to face them.

I've felt a loss of my BDSM orientation and, it has, as sue has written, effected our relationship. I don't know how to have a trust based relationship with loves who clearly had so little trust in me they wanted me locked up, and who even though they thought that the way the police and courts treated me was wrong and harmful, support what was done to me anyway. They do not trust me, and I want desperately to trust them, but often when I try to, my mind flashes to being naked in solitary confinement, freezing, in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, or why.

I am in therapy now for about 10 months with a private psycho-therapist. As we have wound our way through this, it has turned out, that I am a child abuse victim. I certainly knew my childhood was not happy. I've certainly seen other people whose childhoods were far worse than mine. I was an only child and it was the only childhood I knew. I assumed my childhood was as childhood is. My therapist asks me questions about if I had an experience like this or that. I recount experiences that I don't usually think about, but that occurred, usually between my mother and me, some with my father. She then reacts vehemently, and tells me it is no wonder that I have issues I have, and react and feel as I do.

It is her hypothesis that it is this history of child abuse trauma that is the root cause of the intensity of my post traumatic stress reaction, paranoia, grief at the events of the last year. Not that those feelings would not be normal, but that the overwhelming debilitating extent of my feelings is likely me, harkening back to feeling as I did as an abused helpless child when I was four, five, or six. She says I feel as I did then, when now I am in the hands of an abusive system at the hands of the women I love. Friday she is intent on our working together, the therapist and I, through an inner child healing exercise with hypnotic suggestion. I am a Masters prepared counseling psychologist. Psycho-analytical early childhood trauma based theoretical approaches to people's issues, have never had much credence for me, feeling it better to focus behaviorally and affectively on present life on life's terms (the 12-steppers in the crowd will be pleased to see that bit of "Big Book" jargon.) On the other hand, I am being treated for traumatic stress, I am coming to see that my childhood was pathologically abusive, and certainly what I am experiencing now is debilitating. If my childhood abuse is catalytically ratcheting up my trauma exponentially, why not try this? If nothing else, it should be an interesting experience. I don't see it making anything worse. She is very good, this woman I'm seeing and she feels it may well help. I guess it's a classic "in for a penny in for a pound" situation.

She is adamant that I am one of the more intelligent men she has known. She tells me that it is rare for people who have my childhood history (abuse, dyslexia, chronic acute illness, etc.) to have had the fairly highly functional life I've had.

Over the last two days I have had a re-emergence in my consciousness of my BDSM orientation, and a realization too that is it not only a sensual erotic orientation, but a spiritual one. Likely this spiritual twist is a function of my time with the Alcoholism cult folks. I am being reminded that I am who I am. The fact that I have lived through this last two years, and have relationship issues in the aftermath does not change who I am.

I am a Dominant man who is a BDSM practitioner. I am polyamorous. I will recover my strength. My current life is (in the words of my therapist) all scorched earth, but green is beginning to sprout again. I will heal someday.

I realize as I read back over this, how somber this all is. I suppose it is. It could be read or heard as accusatorial or blaming of sue and t. They were overwhelmed and fearful in the throws of dealing with a very distraught, angry, violent, depressed, grief ridden, drunk, paranoid man. They did the best they knew to do for themselves and me. Mistakes were made. None more than by me. Our loves are, I believe, preordained somewhere and sometime before any of us even knew to be. We will heal together. We will be back, not as we were, but better. Our family will be stronger. I feel that as a fact, even more than I desire it.

I need to write more. I need to write here. Sue and t and my therapist and my inner self tell me that I have books to write. I may in fact begin that process.

It is good that, despite the absence of our input here, this Blog still exists for me to be able to do this. That is because sue, in this awful interim has (at times quite laboriously), stirred the ashes here to keep this option alive, and to keep us connected to the love of the many friends here who have so supported us as we have struggled through so many challenges over the past two and a half years.

This period has been/is more traumatic than any evolution I have gone through before....whether adolescence, or any other of my life passages. I have made it traumatic for those around me.

Finding my voice here again is, I suspect, a milestone on the way through it.

Tom

Icky Dream

My sleep is often troubled; fitful and filled with ugly dreams.

Last night, well actually early this morning, I dreamed myself into an unpleasant and ugly situation...

There was a party -- a dinner party.  It wasn't at our house; we'd been invited to another person's home.  The details are fuzzy, but my sense is that it was some sort of kinky gathering. 

I was in the kitchen -- alone.  Everyone else was in the dining room, separated from the kitchen by a swinging door.  For some reason, I was trying to warm a bowl of chicken noodle soup in the microwave.  Suddenly, someone was behind me, smacking me on the ass.  I just assumed that it was Tom, and I smiled to myself, but continued to watch the microwave and my soup.  Then, the butt-smacker began to rub against me -- humping on my back, and I knew instantly that it wasn't Tom. 

I whirled around, in a fury, to confront a beak nosed, man with a fringe of dark greasy hair around his shiny bald head.  His dark, glittering eyes were glazed and glassy.  He fumbled and pawed at me, trying to turn me back around.  I planted both palms on his chest and pushed him away, croaking out a strangled, "NO!"  In my dream, it felt as if my throat was constricted so that the sound wouldn't come out.  He stumbled but then puffed all up and lunged back at me with renewed determination -- as if he was somehow entitled.  This time, I managed to kick at him, and my "NO!" was much stronger.  I ran from the kitchen and found myself out on the front lawn of the house.  My attacker was right behind me, but I had room now to maneuver and fight -- and that is exactly what I did.  The "party" had emptied itself out onto the front porch, and the railing was lined with curious, excited people.  I didn't recognize a single friendly face.  I was completely, utterly, and profoundly alone...

And when I woke up, I was right in the middle of a full fledged knock-down, drag-out fight -- and I'd found my voice:  "Mother-fucker...cock-sucker...cum-wad...limp dick...asshole...dickhead...cunt-face..."  

"Maybe You Should Try Something Else For Awhile"

That's the advice left here by sin, when I determined that I had completely exhausted my capacity to keep writing here as I have for nearly 7 years.  It feels to me like that is a bit of wise guidance -- just let things be and go on to write something different...

It shouldn't be hard to do.  Things are different, so just go with the flow and write what is.  That will be different, by definition.  No need to get fancy or even fanciful.

Maybe I just need to start from the simplest of facts about NOW and go from there.

We keep assuring one another that we still have each other; that we are still together.  That is true.

He says that he doesn't feel dominant anymore, so there will be no more of our former Master/slave dynamic.

I guess that necessitates a shift in how people are labeled as I write here -- time for me to resume being Sue.

Probably, there will be very little, going forward for me to say about the practice of BDSM between us.  I don't expect that to play much of a role in our lives together.  Still, I may find things, in general, to say about BDSM and the community.  I hope I can do that without it feeling dishonest.

I'm not likely to write much anymore about polyamory.  I've discovered, through all of this that I have little interest in submerging myself in a plethora of "relationships."  It isn't for me.  I understand the concept.  I am just not interested.  And, yes, I do "get" the irony of my situation in light of that reality.

I still teach.  I still am the "mom" to two adults who were once my children.  I still read widely and follow politics.  I still dream dreams and think thoughts.  What rolls across the screen here in the future is not likely to be sexy and I doubt there'll be anymore butt pictures, but I need the place for the words to live.

Sue