October Birthdays

In my family of origin, that was the phrase we always used, "The October birthdays."  The October birthdays were a beginning point for what, in that long ago era, was known as the holiday season.  It was a slower and simpler time, and in those days, the Christmas shopping madness did not begin until after Halloween.  So, the holiday season, began for us with The October birthdays, and then proceeded through Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, The New Year, Mother's birthday, and finally, in February, my birthday.  In my memory, that time of the year was always fraught with a wash of conflicts, and emotions.  It was never a settled time; never easy to navigate.

Next week, on Thursday and Friday, I will mark the passage of The October birthdays...

The 17th of October would have been my Dad's 92nd birthday.  He has been gone twenty-one years now; taken at the age of 71 by the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis.  He was a quiet man; a veteran of the second World War.  Although both of my parents were drinkers, my father tended to be the voice of reason, holding my mother's rages in check.  He seldom raised his voice, but when he took that deep, quiet, serious tone, people listened.  He was my champion and my hero and the deep connection of my childhood.  I spent many happy hours standing on a stool next to him, as he tinkered under the hood of the car.  Although I had three younger brothers, I was the one who went with my Dad to the baseball games he loved.  With him, I learned to rejoice in the double play and the throw down to pick off a runner trying to steal second.

The day after Dad's birthday, October 18th, was my brother, Gregg's birthday.  He was the middle one of my three younger brothers, five years my junior.  He and I were, in temperament and appearance, like twins.  Except for the years that separated us, we were mirror images of one another; the only two in our family who saw the world in the same ways.  Gregg, who, because he was a colicky baby with a very healthy set of lungs, was dubbed "Moose" by my Dad, was always a bit of a loner.  He was a child who thought his own thoughts and went his own way.  He was the little tag-along behind the oldest of the boys, Hank, and I.  We were forever getting him into one fix or another, and because he was younger and more gullible, it most often ended up with him being injured in some way.  We would take him sledding on "the big kids hill," even though he really wasn't old enough.  All of us knew to bail out before we hit the bottom, because there was a ditch at the end of the run.  None of us thought to tell Gregg about that little detail before we launched him down the hill for the first time.  Our frantic shoutings from the top of the steep slope were useless, and he rode that sled right off the edge and stuck it, like an arrow, in the dirt wall on the other side of the ditch.  He was a mess when we dragged him home.  It was always like that.  The great wonder is that he survived being our little brother.  Gregg was always an odd child, and he grew into an interesting and awkward teenager.  Theater was his passion... and music.  He was a natural born showman.  His attempts at traditional dating, the boy meets girl thing, were just awful.  He was terrible at it.  When he finally "came out," at the age of 19, it was an absolute "Duh" moment for most of us.  My parents, sadly, were appalled, and never, ever came to terms with the truth of who he was.  That rift was painful in the extreme.  For a number of years, Gregg and I worked as a team, speaking and presenting to church groups and others who were confronting the issues of accepting and loving a family member who was gay.  We were a good pair, and we loved doing it together.  I don't know what difference we made for others, but I know it was a time when he and I were intensely bonded to each other -- a bond that I will forever treasure.  When Gregg died of the complications of AIDS, 22 years ago, he was just 31 years old.  It was the anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy.  I believe to this day, that he chose that date.  When I arrived at the hospital that morning, he was sitting up in bed, paging with his sardonic wit, through what he always referred to as the "Needless Markup" (Nieman Marcus) catalog.  He was quite tickled by the 24-carat gold, jewel encrusted, Hummer.  That was morning, by evening, he was clearly dying, unresponsive, pale and wasted, just a shadow lingering in the room.  And yet, he would not let go...  Finally, at about 10 PM, I went out to the nurses' station, and begged them to let me bring his beloved dog up to the hospital so he could "say goodbye."  They reluctantly agreed that we could bring her up the stairs.  I called my husband, at home with our two adolescents, and he went over to Gregg's house and got Teela, the golden retriever.  He brought her up the six flights, and we walked her down the dimly lit hallway to Gregg's room.  The dog crawled into Gregg's bed, laid her head on his chest with a whimper.  He put his hand up to pet her head, and was gone.  Just like that...  It has been 22 years and I still see him every now and then -- in the face of a stranger; peering out from an intense and beautiful face.  How I miss him...

So, Thursday and Friday will be days of intense remembering.  Longing.  Missing those parts of myself.

swan

Beginning to Write for Me

It must be obvious by now, that I have struggled to figure out how to write here in the last few years.  

In the beginning, I blogged to make connections with others who lived like I do.  In the beginning, I blogged to help myself sort through my uncertainties, doubts, and struggles.  In the beginning, I blogged so that I could define for myself what it was I was trying to do and be.  In the beginning, I blogged because He commanded it.

I am not driven by those motivations anymore, and still, I find that I need to write here.  I have become attached to this place, and the challenges of writing now, cause me to feel as if I have lost something that was and is important to me.  I don't have any reason to write here anymore, except that I want to.  I considered creating another blog that would be more private, but it just doesn't feel right.  I have also imagined that maybe I could engage with some "friends" in a sort of email correspondence circle, but that feels awkward, and I'm not clear that friends wouldn't find it invasive and exhausting.

So, it is time to redefine this place for myself.  All my writing here has carried within it my intention to write as honestly and openly as I could.  Even when things were painful, scary, and embarrassing, I worked to put the truth out here as best as I could.  I cannot and will not do that anymore.  Things here will be filtered.  It is a necessity.  I have no desire to hurt my loves with what I write here, nor am I willing to do anything that would hinder the healing process for our family.  It is, sadly, a fact that some will respond with judgement and insults when confronted with our more difficult realities and struggles.  I've never understood that behavior, and I've also never figured out how to dissuade those people from indulging their mean streaks.  No.  That sort of writing is no longer an option for me.  

It has also been true that I've always felt that I could count on a degree of anonymity here.  I'm not naive, and I do know that anyone who wants to put just a modest bit of effort into it can, pretty easily, figure out who and where I am.  Still, I figured that my BDSM world and my outside world were pretty much parallel, with no likely points of intersection.  A scare at the beginning of the school year, gave me pause.  Too, there are things that I no longer share here because there is a direct conduit to my adult children because their other parent doesn't seem to operate by the same ideals as I do in that realm.  I try very hard to allow my son and daughter to have their relationships with their father without any interference or influence from me.  I guess that is MY ethical stance, and not his.  Oh well.  It does limit what I will say here however.  

So...

I need and want to write here again; to find my voice here again.

I choose not to expose my loves to the mean, nasty, and judgmental types anymore.

I cannot count on my former spouse to maintain any sort of reasonable boundaries with my adult children.

I've resisted shifting the subject matter here, but it is time to do that.  I am tired of looking backwards and bemoaning the things that cannot be anymore.  I want to focus forward on what is now and what can be.  I am closer to 60 than I am to 50, and the life ahead of me isn't going to be about being fresh and young and full of possibilities.  This is the other part of the story; about aging and decline and, hopefully, about some sort of earned wisdom, and maybe just a bit of grace finally.  I'll be writing more generally, more politically, more spiritually.  I'll be talking more about the books I read and the projects I'm working on.  I'll write more about my hopes and dreams and fantasies.  I may even take liberties with my own artificial rules about this place and post meal plans and recipes, and other sort of domestic stuff.  I have no idea what that will all come to look like or sound like, but I am ready to try just the same.    

Bob and Jan's Collaring Song

Years ago, when my "then" husband and I were still living in Colorado, we hosted a group of kinksters from around the country in our home, and together, the bunch of us spent the weekend at Thunder in the Mountains.  Tom and T were with us that weekend, along with a couple that lived in Toledo, Ohio, and another set of online friends from Eugene, Oregon.  We had people all over the house, and mealtimes were quite the production, gathered around our big table.  We rented a mini-van, and so we managed to shuttle back and forth across town to participate in the play parties and presentations.  It was a wild and busy time.

Part of the festivities of the weekend included a collaring ceremony between Bob and Jan, our friends from the west coast.  We all gathered one evening, before we headed for the play party, to witness to their promises to one another, and to support them as they embarked on a new phase of their journey in their life together.  It was a simple ceremony that included, at one point, a paraphrase of a hymn that they had heard at their church.  At the time, I'd never heard the hymn by John Ball called "The Summons:"

Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don't know and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown? Will you let my name be known,
will you let my life be grown in you and you in me?

Will you leave yourself behind if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind and never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare should your life attract or scare?
Will you let me answer prayer in you and you in me?

Will you let the blinded see if I but call your name?
Will you set the prisoners free and never be the same?
Will you kiss the leper clean and do such as this unseen,
and admit to what I mean in you and you in me?

Will you love the "you" you hide if I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside and never be the same?
Will you use the faith you've found to reshape the world around,
through my sight and touch and sound in you and you in me?

Lord your summons echoes true when you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you and never be the same.
In Your company I'll go where Your love and footsteps show.
Thus I'll move and live and grow in you and you in me.

Now, there is plenty of discussion, within the "church music" types about the relative merits of this song.  Some find it insipid, sing-songy, badly written, and derivative.  Church music people seem to take this stuff awfully seriously.  I don't really care that much, to tell the truth.  I "attend" mass once each week with my Catholic school students, and the music is part of the experience that I can sometimes enjoy, given that I am the resident heathen...

But every few weeks, with amazing regularity, I'll head over to church with my kids, and there, posted on the board, part of the music programme for the service, is "Bob and Jan's Collaring Song."  It always makes me smile...  if they only knew!!!

swan

Flogging

I keep starting to write this, and then finding myself stuck.  For someone who has the capacity to blather on and on and on, I feel strangely awkward; like a newbie; as if all those many, many years (documented in this blog and The Swan's Heart that came before), count as so much nothing with regard to BDSM play.

The weekend days are so precious, and as I indicated in the last post, my Saturday was spoiled to a large degree by a nasty migraine headache.  If I say the "M" word to Himself, that is the death knell for any sort of spanking play or even plain, old, garden-variety sex.  My headaches are taken so very, very seriously, and He won't do anything to make them worse, or make me any more miserable than I already am in the throes of an attack.  So... that was the story on Saturday.

By the time I got sort of over it, and began to feel better, it was late in the evening.  Too late.  And so, we sat up together, watching football (yes, it is the season), and probably baseball (that season, too).  It was well past midnight when we finally headed off to bed.  And so, we slept very late on Sunday morning.

It was a nice waking up time.  I felt pretty good.  He rolled over and put His head on my belly, and I rubbed and scratched His back.  We talked.  Nothing heavy.  Just chatting -- the sort of drowsy, just coming to awareness sort of back and forth that I've always loved.  Back and forth; sharing ideas and tidbits of our lives.

But then, we get hungry, and given our various blood sugar issues, there is no way to delay that -- when it is time to eat, it needs to happen as soon as possible.  Nothing for it.  I piled out of bed and hustled out to the kitchen to put together some pancakes and scrambled eggs and bacon and coffee.

We ate, and then I got busy doing the various weekend chores:  laundry, school work, baking, cleaning chores, garden stuff...  He gets wrapped up in watching the digital video recordings of the Sunday morning news programs; and then, the Sunday TV sports programs -- football/baseball.  Somewhere along the line, in the midst of all of that, I start to figure that the weekend is basically over, and that, since we tend to only spank in the mornings before we get up, it isn't going to happen...maybe next weekend.  I really try not to get all bent out of shape over that, but I can't claim to be entirely easy and sweet about it either.  I miss that intimacy.

So, I was a little surprised when, after dinner on Sunday evening, He looked at me and suggested that maybe we could set up the flogging frame...   No.  I was not just a little surprised.  I was amazed.  And thrilled.

The flogging frame has not been up since long before His shoulder replacement surgery.  Before the surgery, His shoulder was so painful that there was no way we could contemplate wrestling the heavy top off the flogging frame, and even if we could have managed to get it up, the arthritis in His shoulders would have made flogging just impossible.  After the surgery, the recovery and rehabilitation period extends for a full year.  His shoulder healed perfectly, but by the time He was feeling capable of swinging a flogger, He needed another knee replacement.  That was last summer -- just over a year ago.  It wasn't easy, even as knee replacements go, and the rehab course took longer than we anticipated.  Then, His other shoulder started to hurt...  and so it goes.  We are definitely headed for another shoulder replacement.  It is only a question of time, and probably not a lot of time either.

So...  I was torn.  Of course I wanted a flogging, But things are complicated for us.  There is a tentativeness between us that is hard to navigate.  But, beyond that, I did not want Him to hurt that shoulder.  Actually, I didn't want Him to hurt either shoulder.  Not with the flogging itself, and definitely not with the sheer brute strength required to set up the flogging frame.

We wrangled back and forth, considering the possibilities... until, finally, I suggested that maybe we could use the spanking bench instead of the flogging frame.  THAT was the ticket.  He quickly agreed.  I went and pulled the bench out of the bedroom and into position in the living room.  I messed and messed, trying to remember how to get onto the thing and be halfway comfortable, and He rounded up a pile of floggers... and other things.  Of course.

It was good.  The floggers fell this way and that.  He used His hands and a variety of knives, and had me squirming, feeling sensations that haven't visited this part of the world for a very long time.  From soft, sensuous suede and the heavier buffalo flogger; working up to the sharpness of the kangaroo-hide cat, the flogging was amazing.  There were paddles, of course... and the rattan cane, and one of those birch-rod styled thingys.  All the way along, I was entranced and fascinated by the waves of sensation He was causing to play through my body.  It seems I've finally found my way back to "it."  Finally.  Yeah.

It was good.  Good.
swan

Feeling Pissy

I woke up with a migraine.
That spoils the morning.
Happens more often than not anymore.
Ruins the day.
And having the day ruined pisses me off.
There are only just two weekend days, and my stupid, fucking headache spoiled this one.
Damn!

And around a migraine, I tend to get moody, angry, fussy, and just generally pissy about everything.  It is just part of the package.  Even when I've started to feel physically better (read:  my head doesn't feel like it is about to explode), I tend to be still emotionally volatile.  Sucks.

So...  In no particular order, things that piss me off:

• Miley Cyrus
• I finished reading Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
• I have to do the laundry
• There are floods in Colorado where my kids live
• I've got a boy kid in my math class who simply will not work with me, insisting that he "doesn't get any of it."
• My veggie garden is almost done, and I have lost the joy of having it since my neighbors have been so ugly about it
• Every package of strawberries purchased in the last few weeks have spoiled before we can eat them
• Syria and Obama and Congress and Putin and every single news program that brings any of that up
• I don't drink Coke anymore
• My house is a mess
• I need a shower
• Need to go make coffee
• All shoes hurt my feet after awhile
• Every Fetlife group is contentious and nasty
• I want a cheeseburger and an ice cream cone
• DD-er's seem to be swarming over this blog, while no one else even comes to look anymore
• The baseball season is coming down to the end and the Reds continue to just play subpar ball
• Football season and baseball season are in that period of overlap
• The DVR on the TV works by principles I do not fully comprehend
• It is the season for crazy meetings with crazy parents
• Gas prices are all over the place

I'm sure there is more, but you get the picture.
swan

HOT!!!!!

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.
Garrison Keillor 


The building where I teach is 98 years old.  Built of brick and cinder block, with high ceilings and long, windowless hallways, the place is a sweat box when the temperatures and humidity levels start to climb as they are wont to do here in Cincinnati. There is NO air conditioning.  Oh, there is a window unit in the principal's office, and the cafeteria is a later addition, built with AC, but the classrooms.  Nothing.  Remodeling of the classrooms over the last few years has included ceiling fans, but that's it.  

A first world problem, I know. 

School started for us, on August 20 -- and after what was a remarkably cool and rainy summer, I was hopeful that maybe, this year, we would avoid the sweltering, brain-melting weeks of late summer here in the almost-but-not-quite-south.  Wishing, really.  How does that old nursery rhyme go?  "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride..."

So...

Today...

Outside temperatures reached into the mid-90s.  Humidity levels upwards of 50%, the air in the building was soupy at 7:15 this morning.  With the addition of about 130 young adolescents, we quickly advanced from soupy to stifling to utterly awful.  By the end of the day, every one of us was a droopy, drippy mess.  I can't think in that heat, and neither can they.  How am I supposed to convey the wonder and magic of math when the only numbers any of us can focus on are the temperature and the number of minutes until we can escape from the misery?

If I ever, EVER said that hot was, well, HOT.  I didn't mean it.  Not like this.

swan

Reminded

I have always taken a dim view of submissive partners who require continual attention and reminding of who they are and what their place is.  I've always believed that the purpose of the "one down" partner in a power relationship is to make the Master/Owner/Dominant/Top's life easier and simpler.  Really, the submissive shouldn't require a lot of maintenance.  That is what I believe, and that is what I've said all along.

And then, I found myself in a circumstance where the One Up partner in my power dynamic stopped actively engaging in that "role."  Note, I do not think He has stopped being that.  I still believe that dominance is His innate way of being in the world, and I don't think He can change that.  Still, the reality is that He has had other things on His mind, and His heart has not been in the active work of "keeping me in place."

I have been less that sweet and graceful about that.  I have been sad, lost, pouty, and lonely without the sure sense of His power in my day to day life.  I have felt that as abandonment; as a decision that I was no longer wanted or appreciated.  I have sometimes whined, cajoled, and blamed Him for making that be the way I felt.  I've acted in opposition to all of those things that I have ALWAYS believed and thought.  I've behaved like the bratty submissive I never, ever wanted to be.

But even a brat can learn given enough time.  Here's what I have learned:

He is my Master.  I am His.  Always and all ways.  Master is who He is, not what He does.  I do not require Him to control or micromanage me in order to behave as I know He would have me behave.  I know what is expected, wanted, and needed.  I have the voice of His dominance in my mind.  His voice.  I have the face of His dominance in my mind.  His face.  All I have to do is listen and look inside, and all of it is there; all of the many years of learning and growing in His sight; all of the work and effort that it took to become His.  It is there and I can hear it and feel it without His ever saying a word.

I have not lost my Master.  I can never lose Him.  If He chooses to be quiet for a time; if He chooses to remain quiet for a lifetime; still He will forever be in my head.  I can follow Him as surely as I might walk in His footsteps along a sandy beach.  I remember now.

swan