Favorite Posts -- Caning Sue

Every enduring relationship has stories to tell -- those bits of shared history that form the context and syntax of day to day relatedness.  Like creation myths, the stories of "how we began" tell those of us who love and live as intimate partners where we come from and what our shared passage might mean.  For me, that notion that beginnings hold the kernel of the whole is part of the enchantment that I feel each time I am drawn back to the story of the very first time He and I played at any sort of "serious" sadomasochism.  The post that I wrote, some years after the fact (in June of 2005), about our very first caning, tells the story of a magical and prophetic sort of evening that He and I shared in the very early days before it had occured to either of us that there was a long term and deeply connected future that we were destined to share...

First times are important ... the time came for Thunder in the Mountains, a major BDSM event held annually in Denver, Colorado ... As the plans began to form, a conversation started, slowly at first, about including, as part of the festivities of the event, The Heretic caning me ... caning just scared the willies out of me, and He knew it. He loved knowing it, and played my fears to a fever pitch ... teased and tormented me and worried me like a cat plays a mouse ... I tried not to wheedle, whine, or beg, although at one point, He actually made it clear to me that He wished I would ... Eventually ... began the long awaited caning ... the sweetest, gentlest, softest, and most sensuous of sessions .... He took me as gently as a lover…the first time.

We've played together, since that time, perhaps thousands of times -- and canes have been included in many, many of those sessions.  We broke one very nice cane, in a session that was neither sweet or gentle.  I've been caned with rattan (which I generally appreciate) as well as a variety of synthetics including delrin.  He owns multiple variants of the basic school cane, and some I love while I hate others with a deep and abiding fury and animosity.  Still, no matter the intensity; no matter my personal sense of affinity with each particular long and whippy implement, each caning hearkens back to that first time, and so calls up a sweetness and a sense of falling in love which does not inure to any other implement in the arsenal.

swan

Fantasy vs. Reality

I couldn't write last week.

Last weekend was "difficult." He and I seemed out of sync with one another all weekend, and there was no play. We made love a couple of times, but I just felt disconnected -- and somehow cheated. I never really notice how much I rely on and count on our weekend time, until something happens to disrupt it. Without that time to reconnect and simply BE together, I end up feeling like I am getting by on starvation rations. I know it makes no sense. I know it isn't a big thing in the overall course of life. I know that there'll be time when the weekend comes around again. I know it all, and I still struggle. It is the oddest emotional ride...

So when yesterday morning came around and He indicated that He wanted to head out to the couch for a session OTK, I was glad. I felt like it went well, and I felt like I was "into" it physically and emotionally, and the lovemaking afterwards was good. Somehow, though, after it was all over with, I didn't find myself in that "soft" place that is the norm after a good session. I didn't have that "gathered in," and "given over" feeling that I associate with a good beating. There was a lingering and annoying sense of disconnect that I just couldn't shake. It left me feeling angry and irritated for a good part of the day. Nothing big... just a weird, unsettled place.

It subsided as the day went on, and by the time we got ready to go out for our walk, late last night, I was happy enough and glad to be able to walk and talk with Him.

This morning, when we first woke up, He seemed disinterested in a repeat, and when He headed off to the bathroom, I figured we were not going to play, and so I switched on the television to see what the Sunday morning talking heads were up to -- something I almost never do. The television and the remote control are His domain, and unless I'm here alone, it just doesn't occur to me to turn the one-eyed-monster on most of the time. He was a little surprised. And I wandered around and folded some laundry all sort of fussed and agitated.

Because ... I was walking around with a fantasy that was rattling in my head, and driving a need that I simply couldn't shake. I was imagining a caning. Thinking about caning. Wishing for a caning. All hot and bothered about the whole idea of caning.

I just hate when that happens. It makes me just crazy. And I know how I am; once that sort of thing gets started, it lodges in my brain and won't leave me alone.

So, finally, when He was clearly deciding that I wasn't "in the mood," and was about to get up and get dressed and head off to the "rest of the day," I said, "I guess I'll just go make the breakfast ... unless, of course, You are in the mood to cane someone?"

His eyes lit up and He grinned. He was clearly amazed, but definitely in the mood. Surprise, surprise! He wandered around gathering up implements, and I began to see that my simple little caning fantasy was going to blow up into a giant, multi-implement event.

One of the most complicated things about sharing my drives and desires with Him, is that once I do that, I lose control of them. They only really "belong" to me as long as they stay in my head. The minute He gets hold of them, they become His, and the shape of that almost never matches what I had in my mind's eye. It doesn't feel right to me to attempt to script them so tightly that He ends up "dancing my tune." I doubt, in any event, that He'd willingly do that anyway, and if He did, I think I'd find that disturbing -- one of those places where we smack right into the paradox that is consensual power exchange.

So, He directed me to the end of the couch, and I got myself all organized and in position. He decided that He'd take some pictures, and I told Him that I thought that this particular set of pictures has been played to death. "How many times," I asked Him, "do You think people are going to want to see that same old view?"

He was undeterred. "They don't seem to get tired of seeing it," He told me as He snapped away with the digital camera.

I told Him that I thought that it was a little like the view from the backside of Mt. Rushmore, and that made Him laugh. He declared that it was likely if the view at Rushmore was like this, then the visitor numbers would increase dramatically. Yeah.

Then He got down to business. He started stroking my back and but and legs with the bunny fur paddle, and I was working to get my head into the idea that this was going to involve something way more than the caning that I'd fantasized. Then, He got down to it in earnest, whack my backside with the hard leather side of that paddle. It lands with a flat slap but doesn't give, and the sting is sharp. It wasn't very many strokes before I was rocked out of my happy fantasy into the reality, and realized the mistake I'd made.

I tried to tell Him that I was just wrong, should never have started this, and couldn't do it. No dice.

"You can do it. You will do it. Get back down."

I got back down. Mad. Furious. Livid. My mind was chattering a thousand words a minute about the unfairness of it all, and how He didn't care, and how if only He were on the end of all the evil straps and paddles, this would all be different, and on, and on, and on...

It is one of the more perverse and frustrating features of my particular flavor of masochism. I can go from all soft and pleading and needy to angry and defeated and inconsolable -- in less time than it takes to say, "OK, can we just think about this for a second?" And that is where I spent this morning's session. Lost in the dark morass of self-pity and the sure certainty that it doesn't matter how I feel because He clearly doesn't care! And so, I missed out on enjoying my caning. Blech!

None of that is fair. Not to Him and not to me. I know it is silly even as I fall into it. That internal monologue keeps me from being able to find the place where I can actually go with the sensations and find the energy that makes it all good. It is a towering kind of self-sabotage, and I hate it even as I do it to myself.

Luckily -- or not (depending on your point of view) -- once we get started, it isn't my decision. He took me all the way through, exactly as He chose to do. We finished. He took that "after the fact" picture that He likes so much, and we wandered off to make love. I was feeling defeated and deflated and disappointed that it hadn't been what I'd wished it would be. The feeling lingered for a few hours. It dissipated very slowly. Eventually, though, I found my emotional "feet" and the day seemed to brighten up (in spite of the gray and rainy skies outside), and I felt better and better. When I noticed that, it almost made me giggle -- there it is finally: the post-beating softness that I'd been missing all week. Tah dah!

And so, tonight, we're tucked in warm and safe on a rainy night. The week will start again tomorrow, and it promises to be intense. But we'll be fine. The connection has been re-established.

swan