Being open and with friends

We had friends over this weekend, two whole families actually. Two couples with their kids came and stayed the night and it was really nice. Even more special since we're all doing BDSM. Not together, that is, there were no play and no overt dominance going on at all.

But there's something about hanging out with people I can be open with that matters a lot to me. It's not that I say or do anything in particular. It's just that I'm more comfortable, more myself. More in love with Mistress, too. Knowing that I don't have to hide makes a big difference, even if the hiding usually isn't all that taxing.

I guess it's like getting out of uncomfortable clothes. It's one thing to stand it when you have to wear them all the time, but when you can take them off for a while it feels really really good.

Being parents

I left with little S after breakfast this morning and we came home again in the afternoon. It's a fact of life in our family that we all actually have a better time if we split up. It's sad and not at all how we thought it would be to be parents, but it is what it is. We do things all three of us every now and then but we need a lot of time apart too.

So in  a way it's been a really good day, little S and I had a good outing and now she and Mistress are playing downstairs before bedtime and I'm relaxing upstairs. I think the little one has had a good day, and both me and Mistress has gotten time on our own and a chance to rest and recuperate. What we haven't got is anytime together.

We said a brief good morning before breakfast, but we can't have any normal grown up conversations over the meal or around it. And when we came home we pretty much changed shifts at the car. Mistress stayed outside and played and I went inside and rested. Before bed I'll watch a video with little S in bed and tonight it's my turn to read the bedtime story.

When little S is asleep, it's our time, we can be grown ups for an hour or so, and say anything we need to say. Cuddle and hang out and possibly doing something sexy or kinky. But we go to bed at around ten, and we would even if we didn't have to go to work or school because little S always wake up early and can't abide one minute without a parent.

One way to look at it is of course that we have a spoiled kid, that if we just raised her better she would be able to let other people finish a conversation uniterrupted or stand that her parents hug each other. Another view is that she's perfectly normal and behaves like every six year old and that the idea that parents would be able to exchange a sentence during a day together is asking for too much (that's my mothers' view, by the way).

I honestly don't think there's all that much we can do differently, without resorting to threats or physical violence. We've tried a lot of different tactics and I'm pretty convinced little S does everything she can to please us and do what we want her to do. I also don't think she's exactly like every other kid on the planet. I've seen the other kids, and even more, I've talked to their parents. They can do stuff we can't, without even thinking about it.

I do think we have an intense kid with a high need for social interaction and with a low impulse control for her age. She's all over the place and need a lot of time and attention in order to manage ordinary everyday things. If we don't support her, her anxiety levels goes through the roof. She's also really smart, kind, sweet, a good friend, has a great imagination, she's brave and caring and wonderful in many ways. But... no. She's not like most kids.

And that means that we can't do things many parents, many families, can. Get five minutes, or even one minute, alone together during a day, being the one we miss the most. We need to arrange things, make sure we get that time, because it doesn't just happen.

On the other hand this spring we went on a trip to Iceland and we rode Icelandic horses all three of us. Little S rode on a horse on her own, trotting and galopping and climbing the rocks and wading the rivers just like the adults. She had better control over her horse than most of the adult tourists on the tour. There's things we can't do, but there's a lot of things we can do and do that other families wouldn't. I don't want to change her a bit. I just want her to go to sleep soon so that I can cuddle with her other mother...

Shame

Shame is one of the most destructive feelings I know. A lot of the crap that has happened to me, and most of all the crap that I have been instrumental in allowing to happen, has been caused by shame.

And I'm ashamed all the time. Or at least very often. For a very long time in my youth I didn't have any memories. Every time something would pop up in my mind, there would be something shameful associated with it, and I would immediately shut it down. That feeling, that dread coursing through the body, the wish to disappear, to cease existing, it's awful. At times, it has controlled my life.

I have two major things I'm ashamed of, and one is not being liked. I grew up knowing I wasn't loved (as an adult, I've started to think that I probably was, but that can't change my experience as a kid), and I was bullied in school on top of that. I had two best friends, both of whom betrayed me horribly, first one at twelve and the next one at fourteen, and contributed to the bullying. So that's one. The other one is not being good enough.

I have ADHD, but no one knew that. I grew up trying harder than everyone around me, and still coming up short. I was always late, didn't do the things I was supposed to, forgot stuff, didn't clean up after myself, made a mess, broke stuff, and so on. I was constantly not living up to the expectations from people around me - people like my parents and teachers, who saw a smart, talented, charming kid who for some reason just didn't seem to care or try very hard. While, at the same time, I was working like crazy to get through each day, and not letting anyone see that I was struggling. Because of shame.

If I hadn't been ashamed, maybe someone would have known what my life was really like. Maybe I could have told an adult about the bullying. Maybe I could have explained that I did my very best and still couldn't manage to do homework - that I did care, a lot, but just couldn't make it work. If I hadn't been ashamed. But I was ashamed, and I much preferred being labelled lazy and unambitious than having people know I couldn't do it.

And that haunts me still.

I've been sick lately, on top of my ongoing issues with mental fatigue and burn out. I'm getting better, but it's a bumpy road, as always. Mistress has taken two day off of work and we've gone to her parents for a mini vacation. Today I took little S on a shopping trip so that Mistress could get some time for herself and work, and after lunch I accompanied my mother in law to the vet with one of the dogs, a big rottweiler that doesn't particularly like other dogs and last time had made a big fuss while waiting for the vet. I'm pretty proud of how I handled it, there was no wrestling matches or incessant barking this time, but after that and picking up som groceries, I was pretty much wiped. I spent the afternoon in bed, and at dinner time I was all kinds of woozy, feeling sick and dizzy and thinking I wouldn't survive the evening.

On top of that, Mistress had asked me earlier to take care of little S after dinner so that she could work some more, and it made me rather panicky, because I really didn't think I would be up for it. And again, that made me overwhelmed with shame.

Every time I'm asked, especially by Mistress, to do something that is beyond what I can do without feeling seriously ill or paying a heavy price afterwards I get terribly ashamed. I'm awashed in it.

In the end I did take care of little S while Mistress worked, we had a nice time playing a game on the iPad together, and it wasn't so difficult. It helped that little S was in a good mood and stayed focused on the game.

And then eventually the day was over with little S going to bed downstairs with grandma, and I started to relax and feel like maybe, maybe I was okay, maybe I had made it. And the first thing Mistress says to me is along the lines of "oh, we said we should work tonight, we need to do that thing with the survey job".

And at that point my head exploded. The shame got to me, the camel's back was broken by the last straw, the last drop made the glass of water overflow in a cascade of liquid anguish all over the kitchen floor, and I could feel my brain changing gears in to crazy mood.

Because in my mind her even suggesting that I would be up for anything more strenous at that point ment I must be a total failure. A let down. Not good enough. That nothing I had done, nothing I had achieved or managed or made myself do had been worth anything. No matter how hard I strain and press myself, it's not even close to being enough. I'll never be enough. I'll never do enough. I can't be good enough, I can't be loved or worthy of love, I can't achieve anything that makes me fit to even live and breath, I haven't earned my keep, neither as her wife, her property nor even as a human being. I need to work 'til I drop and die and be done with it, because nothing else will cut it.

So yeah. It wasn't a great conversation starter, as such. To my credit, all I said was that I wasn't up for it, that I was hurt and upset that she suggested it, and that I wanted to go lay down in the bedroom, alone. That might not sound like a very tempered or reasonable response but compared to what my brain was screaming at me, I was positively cheerful.

And then I did just that, went and laid down, and instead of rehashing every slight and every shameful moment and debating with myself whether I was right to be hurt or not, I did a mindfulness-exercise, a simple but thorough body scan. I can do that now, that's pretty cool actually, even with my mind on fire with anguish and panic and shame I can redirect my consious focus on something of my own choosing.

The feelings are still there, the discomfort and panic and adrenalin surge through the body, but I can still focus my attention on my left toe, my left foot, the leg, the knee and so on. It takes about twenty minutes to go through the whole body, and by then the panic has subsided, the raging fires of despair has died from lack of things to devour, and everythings a little more settled. It's a neat trick.

We talked about it, of course, afterwards, and we'll figure something out. But shame. I hate it. It's the least constructive thing ever. I'm working on it.

"I like your collar"

We went to a party yesterday, a rather unusual event. Even more unusual, it was Mistress that declared she wanted to go, and even RSVPd and everything. My dad came and babysat, and we actually had a great night. It was a friends birthday party, and for me it had an eery feeling of deja vù - this is our old friends. The friends from ten, fifteen years ago, the once I've been afraid of losing since I got pregnant, and busy and tired and sick.

But they're still there, we still get the invites, we're still included and welcomed, and showing up made me feel both as if no time has passed since I was twenty and trying to move away from home and spending all my money on LARP-ing and commuting to my boyfriend out of town, living on oatmeal and spaghetti. And, on the other hand, my God how grown up we are now. A lot of the gang are married, mostly to each other as a matter of fact, those who wanted children are about to have their second go at it (and all the pregnant bellies makes me super-jealous) and most of them have a job instead of ever-on-going university-studies. I kind of like it.

I like the adults we've become. Myself included.

But as per usual, around ten PM I was getting drowsy and Mistress decided to herd me home. We did the good-bye rounds, and as I was hugging a guy I've barely had talked to during the night, I noticed he was eyeing what I thought was my blouse (a pretty blue silk one with a sequined hemline), then for a moment suspected was my cleavage until he said in a kind of low key voice "I like your collar." "Oh" I said, speechless for a moment, and then with a sheepish smile "yeah, I like it too".

Silence.

I had no idea how to continue that line of conversation. What do one say? Was he implying what I thought he was implying? Or was he just complimenting my jewelry? But no - complimenting jewelry you do in a crowd, when you meet, if it happens to be appropriate, you don't specifically wait for a quiet moment and point it out. Not if you don't know what it it is you're trying to say.

"Nice" he said.
"Yeah" I said.
More silence.
"Have you worn it for long?"
"About a year."
"Great!"
"Yeah, I think so too!".

By then the time for the usual quick "bye, nice to see you!"-hug had run out, the flow of people in the room was shifting, and also, I was embarrassed and blushing furiously and couldn't make coherent words anymore, so I just kind of backed off a little, and Mistress hugged her way around the good bye crowd while I was tying my shoe laces and waiting for my face to regain it's normal colour.

I was so outed, one might say. And I really really like it.

I don't want to be secretive, showing one face to the world and my friends and another to Mistress. I don't like this feeling of having a secret life, a secret agenda, being one on the outside and another on the inside.

When my kink-side started appearing I was five, fantasizing about spankings and masturbating without knowing what I was doing. But I always knew that I couldn't talk about it, that I was strange and odd and unnormal. Eventually, it grew in to sexuality, the adult, mature version, and I knew a little more, but it took about fifteen years from the first inklings until I got to see that I wasn't alone. Fifteen years of shame and confusion and knowing I was different.

Since then there's been another almost fifteen years, and I know very well by now that I'm certainly not alone. In fact, not all that few of the friends I tried to hide things from have turned up on the kinky side of the line during the years since then. I'm not ashamed, and I honestly don't think it's that much of a secret, anymore.

But it's still not talked about. It's not something that is reflected by people around me. It doesn't "exist", in the conversations, in the assumptions people make, in the mirrors that my friends eyes turn into when they look at me. 

So for my collar to be seen for what it really is, not just a pretty piece of chain around my neck but a significant symbol, as meaningful and telling about my life as my wedding ring, communicating something important about me and about my relationship to Mistress, that felt good. A little bit bewildering in the precise moment it happened, but good.

Also, now I'm deadly curious about my friend and his young wife and their story. Perhaps there's breadcrumbs laying around the 'net, now that I know what I'm looking for? *goes sniffing*

Darker days approaching

Autumn is in high swing, and more or less over night (more, since it has to do with the clocks being set back one hour for winter) my yearly winter depression started looming.

Last year and even more so the year before that, I had it bad, but that's no wonder since I was exhausted. Stress accounted for a lot of it, but the fact is that I've been down during the winter for most of my life, and so has my mother. It's probably hereditary in one way or another, either by learning history and conditioning or more biologically, a vulnerability to lack of sunlight. Either way, here it comes, depression train approaching station.

I made a poster yesterday, when I was contemplating what I could do to lessen this. What approach was needed, what can I do? And I came up with three words that encompasses the things I need to get through the coming four month with sanity, relationship and self respect intact:
Acceptance.
Patience.
Trust.

I need to accept that this is how it is right now, that even though I can do some things to make it better I can't make the problem go away, nor does wishing it so or being angry at it make anything better. It is as it is. My brain works this way, and I'm not to blame for that, no more than I should blame myself for my brown hair or being 5"5. The more I fight against reality, the deeper I sink in the quicksand. This is how it is.

And I need to let it take time. It's going to be like this for awhile. That too is as it is.

And I need to trust in the sun coming out eventually. It's all going to be okay in the end. Even though it might take awhile, and even though it might not be precisely as I wish it would be in the meantime.

Right now, I'm going to drink coffee with Mistress who's working from home. And I think I'll enjoy it, and there's a good chance I'll actually feel what the coffee tastes like. I'm not going onboard the depression train just yet.

A good call

Uhm... And then it turned out that well, I had jumped to conclusions and she had in fact kept her promise and not done "that thing". It was a misunderstanding, completely my fault too. So yeah... It only makes me glader I sat on my ass and wrote a semi-bitter blogpost about it instead of starting a fight.

In fact, when I had posted yesterday, I sat down and breathed and meditated a bit, and after a while I decided I'd rather sit with her than all alone in the living room, so I got out to where she was working at the kitchen table and simply sat down beside her, on my knees with my head in her lap.

And yes, when she finally stopped working and we were curled up together on the sofa, she asked me what was wrong and I said that I was upset and sad from before, and it was then I found out that my freak-out was completely unnecessary. It did make me a bit relieved still, especially about that broken-promise-thing, but it wasn't this big deal it would  have been if I hadn't already decided I could live with it.