Where now?
Revisiting the basics, cos I am doing a metric fuckton of processing right now.
Monogamy doesn’t prevent you from falling for someone else, or stop your partner from falling for someone else.
We’re in situations where we meet new people all the time. Monogamy may mean those situations aren’t acted upon, but it certainly doesn’t switch off the feelings they cause.
Meeting someone new often has nothing to do with the state of the current relationship.
Rather than deliberately looking to fall in love because things are bad at home, the universe throws amazing people into our lives when we least expect them. People in relationships don’t choose when to fall in love anymore than single people do.
If I were monogamous and my partner met someone else he chose to pursue, his options would be pretty bleak.
Do the ‘honourable’ thing and leave me, so he could explore the new relationship without lying or cheating – breaking up our family.
Do the commonplace thing and explore the new relationship in secret – in which case I could be going insane wondering where he was until 3.30am every other night and who he was spending so much time texting.
Makes me wonder how we got to a point where having an affair in more socially acceptable than having two partners with everyone’s informed consent?
“I thought it was a game”
Subspace – the place a bottom’s head goes to when a top pushes their buttons, or rather their limits, in the right way. I suspect it feels different for each person each time, like an acid trip or a live song. Some people fall down a bottomless rabbit hole, others report out-of-body experiences or hyper-real hallucinations.
My trips into subspace take the form of a meditative absence. I simply stop thinking, stop being, beyond the sensations I’m experiencing. It takes a while afterwards to come back to Earth, to reconnect with myself as the woman in the scene.
The headspace, coupled with all the gorgeous neurotransmitters that flood the brain in response to pain, is incredibly cathartic and energizing. Trite I know, but leaving the world for a while is a wonderful way to appreciate living upon it.
* * * * *
Full disclosure: I had an out-of-body experience once, when someone fisted me while I was high on a cocktail of recreational drugs. I rose straight up from the bed along a matrixey Tron-like tunnel, and at the top there was the huge disembodied head of an old Chinese guy, smiling beatifically at me. I think the moral of this story is, for safety and sanity, stick to vanilla sex when you’re high.
This post is intentionally meta
I want to write more, and the only way to do that is to start typing. I’ve been reading old posts, rediscovering happy memories and half-way decent writing. It’s nice to have this archive to look back on, and I think so far I’ve painted a fair picture of the good and bad bits.
I’d like to carry on with the documentation, but the impetus has gone. I used to have ideas queuing up in my head, waiting for me to give them words. Now I have to trawl my brain for suitable topics. There are two things that have probably contributed to this change.
One is facebook. When I write stuff now it goes up there and I don’t tend to cross-post (maybe I should?). But I wonder whether sticking to a forum that includes captive family members (many of them minors) means I pull my punches and put edgier topics aside. Maybe, but at quite a subconscious level if so, because it’s not even like there are dark and stormy things I mean to write about but don’t find the time to address.
Hence the other reason; I think my life is just pretty boring these days. Our poly relationship functions smoothly, I’m not scared of getting married, or moving to a new country. I’m not depressed, and I’m no longer terrified of being a mother. I just am. I do lots of things that make me happy without challenging me – yoga, work, bike rides with Isaac. None of it warrants much examination.
That said, I think motherhood had wrought some changes, and I’m struggling to put my finger on how and why. Maybe there’s some meat there. Why did it take 32 years and a son to call myself a feminist? How can I have so much money compared to most of the world and still sometimes feel poor? The emergence of my social conscious probably does warrant examination, but even that doesn’t feel like it would be interesting to write about.
Maybe I should stick to porn.
Erotica
I wrote this three years ago with a recipient in mind. This is the first time I’ve read it since and I was a bit shocked by how graphic and unapologetic the description is, but I still like the piece.
Needless to say, there is content of an adult nature behind the cut.
The weirdest thing that ever happened to me
I’m not sure this is definitively the weirdest, but it’s up there. I was wondering how I’d define my weirdest experiences if someone asked, and it struck me that some of the things that might seem weird from the outside (a 300-person orgy in a crumbling central-London mansion for example) actually don’t feel that weird at all. But Ah-um-ah-Andy definitely still rates.
I met him early in my TG days, when he politely, nervously complimented my boots and asked if he might rub my feet.
Me: Yeh, probably, wait… J, can this man rub my feet?
Equally eloquent, J said something along the lines of “Yeh, why not,” and my new foot fetishist friend hoisted me up onto a huge speaker. I was dressed in a style befitting the location: skirt with no sides, pinstriped waistcoat, and platform boots comprising more buckles than leather. I set about removing these beauties without flashing too much muff, and belatedly realized I was also wearing Sleepytime Pooh Bear ankle socks.
I whipped them off hoping to belie my noob status, and hid them in my boots. The guy probably didn’t care anyway, and set about giving me a (mediocre) massage. He didn’t seem particularly comfortable making small talk, and when I asked him his name he paused then came up with “Ah… um…. ah…. Andy.” Nothing too strange about that though* and he was communicative and conscientious when it came to sharing his intent and seeking permission.
After a while he nervously asked me if it was ok if he wanked, and I’ll admit his underdog demeanor contributed to my saying yes. I flicked my eyes over to J, who was hanging out with friends some way off, made some lewd gestures and he nodded his assent. Ah-um-ah-Andy set to it and came fairly quickly. While he was cleaning up (I can’t remember the details – wet wipes, tissues, wipe it on the curtains?) I said, “I’ve never done anything like that before. How was it?”
To which this previously timid, whispering, almost apologetic boy looked at me, shrugged, muttered “You were alright, I s’pose,” and disappeared into the night.
Thanks Ah-um-ah-Andy, you were magical too.
* J and I have never been smart enough to come up with fetish alter egos, but there are plenty of good reasons why people do.
Permissive parenting
I worry a lot about exerting my will over other people. I hate the idea of forcing someone to do something they don’t want to, and worry that even if someone says, or even thinks, they’re happy to do something, deep down somewhere they are resistant to the idea and only complying to please me.
I can see that this is ludicrous. Layers of second-guessing quickly become meaningless – when someone says “This is my answer, this is my reason,” I have to accept that.
I can also see that this might have something to do with being raped. I explained before that it wasn’t a physically violent experience, only emotionally so. His bullying and threats wore me down and in the end I said yes. This presents a thorny issue. If I have to take other people’s words at face value, does that mean the rape was my fault. Could I have prevented it if I’d said no long enough?
Rhetorical question – I know academically my asking “Hey, do you want nachos…? Are you sure?” is not the same as bullying a crying 14-year-old into having sex against her will, but I need to acknowledge all the swirling, competitive thoughts about control and sense of self before I get onto today’s (non-rhetorical) question – what does this mean now I’m raising a child?
Toddlers have their sticky little fingers in EVERYTHING. Plug sockets, toilet bowls, plant pots, eye sockets. Plus they have no impulse control. My instinct is to let Isaac have at it unless there’s a chance he could kill himself. Knife in a plug socket? Not ok. But dumping a bowl of cereal on the table and smacking his hands into it? I’m fine with that, and I’ll clean it up without complaint.
J-dawg and our nanny are not fine with it though, and grumble about manners and things getting broken. But stuff is just stuff, and seriously I think it’s easier to teach manners by being polite yourself than by trying to control another person’s behavior.
I think you can use love and trust to teach children self-discipline – letting them make mistakes, solve problems, have a chance to learn are all part of that. I also think entirely permissive parenting is a form of neglect. The message you end up sending is that you don’t care one way or another what your child does. What I’m trying to find is the line between the two, while avoiding a swing in the other direction – where you control someone because you think you ought to, not because they benefit from it.
Cheese sammiches and sex 