My Father's Daughter. But MaxEarnest's Girl

I'm sort of amazed to look at where I've come in the last year.  A funny turning point is that I did a summer-camp-for-grown-ups last summer that was all about 'inner-child' stuff, and the staff member I was paired with kind of blew me off.  She didn't meet with me and didn't meet and finally made an appointment and didn't show.  (She also wasn't reading the stuff I was writing, as she was supposed to--in a list of my mother's flaws, I mentioned that my mom had had bulimia and this person responded to the list"did you mother have issues with food?")  I thought about leaving and then refused to let her treat me like that any more.  I made the summer-camp people change plans to accommodate my needs.  When they said they wouldn't I said they needed to because they'd fucked up.  When they said I was having trust issues, I said "OK, I have trust issues, so act in a trustworthy way."  In retrospect, it was probably as valuable a lesson as I could have gotten.  When I set those limits, two other staff members really stepped up for me and I got a lot of what I wanted.  I think that is the moment that I really did begin to say "you can't treat me like that" and mean it.  And I had to mean it for it to mean anything.

My dad never hit me or abused me in a physical way, but he would get critical in ways that were devastating, and so I monitored my own behaviour so much, and also everything in the general environment.  My dad once told me I had "betrayed" him because he really hated a movie I recommended.  And in this year, I've started to see my dad as really damaged.  And started to let go of having a close relationship with him.  Maybe in a few years I can have a little more, but at the moment, I don't want to be around him if he is going to be so self-centered that he refuses to try to not hurt me.

And then I left my father's house to come to my home and see Maxearnest.  My identity is shifting.  I'm not Daddy's Girl anymore.  I'm sure issues will come up at some point, but they are not as salient.  I'm Maxearnest's beloved young slave girl.  There is a freedom and a joy there.  He makes me happy.  This feels like home. 

I trust him enough that I could just relax with him and literally fall when he shifted me and let him catch me. I didn't even tense up.  I'm sure there's a metaphor there as well.

We were having a very intimate conversation about my dad and kink and that my dad's criticism is probably what led me towards kink.  And all that is probably true.  And 10 years ago, I tried to analyze the criticism away and avoid the kink.  But now, I sort of feel like the kink was the silver lining.  Yeah, it sucked.  But look at this gift I got out of it?

I wouldn't change anything in my life, or at least nothing big--I'd still change the 2000 election--because it led me here.  And I'm so very happy.

Of course, I read the Newsweek article, and it is interesting.  But a huge difference with my experience because with Maxearnest, I'm taking responsibility for my desire.  I kneel at his feet or for him often.  He almost never orders me to kneel, but I sense that he likes it when I do.  And there's something very calming about it.  And then he usually pets and cherishes me and I look up at his strong hands and handsome face and I feel so very safe and adored and all is right in the world.  There is something about kneeling for him that is so very freeing.

Today he asked me if I needed to be used harder and I said yes, even though it scares me.  But I do.  He has been so very tender and gentle with me, and I love it.  I feel like an aquifer, just absorbing his love and his cherishing.  But then, there is that wild animal that needs to be pushed, controlled, taken.  I need to suffer for Maxearnest, to make the power about something more than rhetoric.  It calms that shrew beating in my breast.  And it makes me wet.

Life has always seemed about trade-offs.  How lucky that I don't have to pick one or the other.  I am getting it all.

Borrowing Trouble

I have a few quotidian concerns about MaxEarnest and me.  Will he like Seattle?  Will we work together in everyday time?  

But my biggest concern is more existential.  My young-girl is about 12.  Very sexual, almost insatiable.  That side of me wants to be adored and used and to please.  I'm also very naive and very trusting.  And Maxearnest and I just fit together so beautiful.  He delights in that side of me and cherishes that side and takes such wonderful, wonderful care of me.

I have this fear though, which is unknowable and probably irrational.  I feel like that side of me is being seen and recognized and is living in a way I've never really lived.  What if that side of me starts to grow up?  If my young girl went from 12 to 13, Maxearnest and I would probably fall apart.  I'm not at all rebellious.  I'm trusting and delight in having someone to care for me.  I have little lapses of discipline, like where I let go of a wrist when I'm scared and I don't maintain control, but I want to please Maxearnest and they are things I'm learning to be better on.  I also have moments where I don't necessarily want to obey because something hurts, it's hard and I'll think "why do I have to do that; I wish I didn't have to."  But I do obey.

But what if in nurturing that side of me, that side starts to grow up and become more like a teenager?  Maxearnest told me that he wants my erotic life to be focused around him, so I haven't opened a naughty novella since we were together in Iceland, and I am fine with that.  But then I read a review of a new naughty novel and part of me wanted to read it.  And I can't.  I'm not allowed to.  I'm actually fine with that.  I would so much rather live the life I'm living, worthy of being turned into its own naughty novel, than read about someone else's fantasies, but what if I read about another book in a few years and really want to read it?  I'm sure if it were really important to me, I mean really, Maxearnest would find a way to make it work.  But what if I become rebellious?  What if something hurts, really hurts, and I think "I wish I didn't have to do that" and then part of me says "you don't have to."

I have this deep feeling that if I ever lied to Maxearnest about anything important (I could dissemble about a present for him, or something like that), it would really hurt our relationship.  Even if he never found out, it would really hurt us. One of the things that is so magical between us is how well he can read my emotions, and how he uses that to make me happier than I'd ever imagined I could be.  Why can I even fear that someday I'd risk that for a little rebellious independence?  But I've read so much about so many women being unhappy in relationships in the 50s and 60s and earlier, and even now.  I don't understand how if they were being loved and cherished, they wouldn't obey.  But an awful lot of women found that to be an untenable situation.  I know is some ways this is different, but in some ways it isn't.  I guess I just want this moment to never end and I'm scared it could.

There's no way of stopping time.  There's no use borrowing trouble and worrying about the future.  But it is sad to think that I might grow in a way that would wreck the best thing that has happened to me.

A Traditional Housewife: Part 2

I’ve staying with Dotty this week, and it has been really, really hard!  She works 12-16 hour days, so I stay home, just like a traditional housewife, and I get some work done and it is OK, but, wow, would it have sucked to have this as a life.  I had quite a bit of work to do, but since I was on vacation, that meant 4 hours a day.  And then I’d shop for her, cook for her, clean the house for her.  She invited friends over and at one point wasn’t there to great them and I had to play hostess to her friends when I didn’t know where she was.  One night, she didn’t get home until midnight, when she said she’d be home “in a couple of hours” at 6.  I had a plate of food waiting in the fridge but she’d snacked at work. 

I felt a lot of the resentments that I read from women in the early 1960s.  When I took care of my dad when he was ill, I felt really fulfilled.  I made a difference for him and I loved taking care of him.  But with Dotty, I felt lonely and neglected and taken for granted because I have no social life here (my cell phone doesn't work where she lives--only Verizon works) and at the end of the day, I want her to notice what I did to make her house nicer and ask about my day and she is too tired.

And here’s the thing: Dotty is one of the most lovely, thoughtful people I know.  But work is eating her alive.  She is ‘only’ scheduled to work 9 hours a day, but that’s my equivalent of billable hours.  And, of course, I make a third of what I could so that I don't have that stress. It seems possible that in 6 months, she’ll be down to working maybe 60 hours a week, but right now, I’d say she’s working closer to 100.  She needs a ‘housewife,’ but it would be a pretty grim, isolated and lonely existence for anyone depending on her for a partnership. 

Dotty is stretched to the breaking point.  I can feel the stress.  She feels 10 years older than when I saw her in January.   I’m scared for her--I don’t know how she can keep up the life she is living. But she only gets 10 vacation days this year, and they have already been scheduled for a cousin’s wedding and to visit her parents.  (I cannot even imagine a life where I only got 10 vacation days a year.) But it made me realize that much of the traditional male/female issues can be accredited to the shitty working conditions in this country.  There are no gender issues with Dotty and myself.  There’s just the fact that she is horribly overworked and I’m staying in a community I don’t know, in a home where I’m a guest, trying to take a little of the stress off her shoulders.

But clearly, we need better conditions for the people who work full time as well.