New Year Old Us

I’m writing again. I’m writing again. If I say it and do it enough I hope it will be an “I think I can! I think I can!” and then an “I knew I could! I knew I could!” kind of thing.

Anyway, like I said before, hello. It feels good to typing again.

Let me tell you a little about the me of 2016. I’m still here and I would love to say that we are going great gangbusters in our Dominance and submission but you know this is about being true and frankly our dynamic is a bit lacking lately. For reasons mostly having to do with privacy and time we have been pretty vanilla of late.

I wish I didn’t need his Dominance so much. I wish I could give him submission all the time and at the same level as I want to even when we are vanilla and busy and I’m not getting Dominance from him. I have thought so much about this. I want to do things for other people. I want to make other’s lives easier especially for my family and most especially for my husband. When I am open and giving and focused on doing everything I can to smooth the way for him it makes me truly happy.

I don’t know why I am wired this way but I am. It took me a long time to recognize it and a long time to put a name to it but I am a submissive. Not out in the world and not as my public persona at all but in my home and with my husband I want to be his help. He does so much for me and for our family. I hope I have said this before, but I will say it now. He truly is the best man I know. He deserves my devotion. He deserves my best.

I wish I were strong enough to always give it but I do need his help to allow that submissive side to come out, and more importantly, to stay out.

I need him. I need to feel his presence. I need to feel structure and walls and limits. I so like the safety I feel in rules. I like knowing where the line is and that he is watching. I like the visibility of rules. And while I don’t like punishments themselves I do need punishment.

I have thought so much about this and I think that is really what it boils down to for me. In order to punish someone you must care. It is a very active thing. You have to set the boundaries, pay attention to the behavior and then actively get involved by taking action when punishing.

You cannot be passive and punish.

For me it is not so much about the spanking itself but about the time, attention, effort, resolve, and commitment that he must demonstrate in order to punish. And it doesn’t have to be spanking. It can be time out, corner time, lines, really anything he comes up with. The point is for me, that he took the time to notice and then had the fortitude to impose himself on me.

As I write this I feel my grown woman modern self cringing. In many ways I don’t know that I will ever loose that struggle of wanting this kind of discipline and attention even in our modern world. I know it is not PC, but that doesn’t diminish this want and need in me.

So I will say it again. I want and need his rules and more importantly his punishments. I want and need his rules and MOST IMPORTANTLY his punishments. I don’t think I have a spanking kink as much as I have a punishment kink.

The problem for me and for us comes in that implementation. Even after 4 years of this we are at different levels. I want and need this so much more than him. I just do. So there’s the struggle. There are so many times that I would punish me if I were in charge. I would not put up with some of the things I do and definitely some of the things I say and how I say them. When I start to feel like that my submission and my doing things for him with a happy and humble heart really diminish. I wish I could say I was stronger than that but I can’t. I need to feel him actively participating. It is a constant struggle.

Anyway, I think that might be a good start for writing again. Admitting your issues is always a big start I hope.

I need his attention and for me that means punishments. I will show him this latter. It is nothing he hasn’t heard before but maybe it will stick this time.

 

Is Anybody Out There?

I really can’t believe it has been 14 months since I wrote anything here. It’s funny. When I first started blogging and were new it was really pretty all consuming, that feeling of wanting to put all that I was thinking and feeling down in a post. I’m a very verbal person but this is not something you can talk about with anyone you know. (At least for me.) And so I wrote. I wrote here and I wrote on my private blog just for Alex.

But after awhile it began to feel like I was saying all the same things, and feeling all the same things. We are up. We are down. We are good. We are struggling. The kids are home so we have pretty much put the dynamic away for a bit. The kids are gone so I think things will improve. I really want this. Does he really want this? We talked. We are trying again. On. And on. And on. Broken record.

Who wants to read that? Who wants to see the same thing over and over? But probably more significantly for me, why would I want to write that. It became a graphic representation of our stagnation. And so I quit writing.

But lately I have been feeling like even if that is the case I should write again. I need to process things now just as much as before and this is still an excellent way to do that. So I am going to do that.

I am going to write. I am going to make myself write. I would love to tell you that everything is going strong but as always we are a work in progress and I continue to be in a position of pushing or pulling him along with me. But maybe this introspection will help that process along.

Anyway, hello again. Is there anybody out there? I hope there is someone still there but even if you have all gone away I’m still here and beginning again.

My next post will be a full update and some thoughts on where I am but I wanted to start with hello.

And Now For The Update

First I want to thank all of you who commented on my last LOL post. It means more than I can say that there is anyone still reading after all the time I have spent away from the blog. Thank you all!

I never planned to stay away for any length of time. You know how it goes. First it was summer with all the challenges that brings. Extra kids. Extra eyes and ears means less privacy and a lesser dynamic. Then school started again and we were more active but I feel like I have written the “We are starting again” post more than once and so didn’t feel there was much new to say. It felt like we were doing well, kind of chugging along.

And then it just stopped. Well that’s not exactly right. He just kind of stopped. We were doing submission exercises and he was checking in on me and doing maintenance pretty regularly and then it just stopped.

I was confused and concerned. He had experienced a pretty significant disappointment at work and I know it bothered him and shook his confidence and I now know that was the trigger. I tried to be patient and wait it out but after almost three weeks I couldn’t any longer and confronted him.

All the specifics are not that important but ultimately he said he wanted us to take a break. I was completely devastated. How could he want a break? What did that even look or feel like? You have to go back many, many years to find a point that we were relating well on a vanilla basis. It was spanking and that exchange of power which put us on a path of healing what was broken and I truly didn’t and frankly don’t have a good picture in my head of how we would relate without it.

After three years in this lifestyle I am a firm believer in a leader for the family, someone who has the ultimate power to decide things for the good of the family. But it goes beyond that for me. There are SO many times I consciously ask for his approval or make a decision myself based on what I think he would prefer. I’m not sure he even really appreciates the depths of this from me. But it is conscious for me. If we are not going to live in this dynamic then I think I could get a lot more selfish in my decisions. Does that make sense? If he doesn’t want my focus then I will need a new focus.

I don’t work outside the home. I have been fortunate enough to stay home to raise our children. The youngest goes to college next year and we will be alone together. One of the main reasons I even started this at all was my fear of getting to this point and not having any relationship with him. I can’t live like that. I won’t live like that. I could get a job but really after all this time I’m not sure what that would even be. I like the freedom and have really been looking forward to the time that I can travel with him and spend more time together. If we are not relating then that may need to change. I don’t know.

At about the same time as all this he had some pretty extensive travel planned and so we took some time. Time for each of us to think, really think about what we wanted. Let me tell you I was all over the place. Some days I just wanted to call the whole thing off. Some days I wanted to go full steam ahead. Some days I didn’t really know what I wanted.

A few girlfriends helped me talk through some things and really helped. Ultimately I did what I always do and wrote my thoughts down. What I came up with was this.

I want this and I want this completely. I am tired of going slow. I am tired of having training wheels on. I am tired of waiting and thinking and considering. I want deciding and I want direction and I want control. I want his rules and I want his punishments. The problem is that, even before our break, there was not nearly enough doing and far too much thinking.

When things are going well here we are acting in a dynamic that is very heavy on Dominance and submission. I have for quite some time, told him of my desire for him to be my Dominant. He knows this. He knows that when he provides standards for me to follow, I feel safe. What would appear to those outside this lifestyle as controlling and overbearing, appear to me as love and attention. The problem is that even before all this the doing was not always there

And so I gave him what amounts to an ultimatum. We need to do this or not. He either needs to step up and be the Dominant that I am asking him to be all the time or be man enough to admit that this lifestyle isn’t for him. I’m tired of the wishy washy. That doesn’t mean we would split up or anything but it does mean we would have to find a new way to relate with all that entails.

Toward the end of our time apart I went back to doing the things that he asks me to do that make me feel him and my submissiveness. I made sure that the tasks that are important to him were done and done well so his homecoming was good. He noticed. Even though I was giving him an ultimatum of sorts I did not want our discussion to be confrontational. It was important that we talk about everything in a level headed manner and so providing a calm, organized space was an outward way of doing this for him.

We really didn’t talk a whole lot during those trips, saving up the conversation for when he returned. We talked, he read my journal and we talked. A lot. Happily, even before I said anything to him about how I felt he essentially said the same things to me. I was so relieved. He knows that I want and need a heightened level of attention from him and he intends to do that.

So far so good. After being so far apart for over a month coming back together with one direction felt amazing. So connected.

It really hasn’t been very long so I can’t say for sure that it will work long term but so far so good. I’ll keep you posted.

What I think we both learned in a very concrete way was that we are better together and on the same team. It was really lonely without him. And I know he was lost as well. Maybe it was what we needed. I think he saw how much easier he has things when I am centered on him. I like my focus there and now he appreciates it more than ever.

If it helped us to learn and grow then it will have been worth it. I’ll keep you informed.

 

Interesting

 

Hello all. Sorry I haven’t answered your questions yet. That post is coming, I promise.

In the mean time I thought I would relate a quick story from the other night which I thought you all might enjoy.

We belong to a really nice country club in our town and spent a beautiful evening recently at a dinner at our club. There were only 30 participants which gives everyone a chance to talk and get to know one another.

We had assigned seating and our name tags were tied to the napkins with thin rope. The men seated on either side of me found that very funny and joked that they were going to keep the rope for later and bemoaning the fact that it was so short. “Yeah you could probably only tie one ankle with that” one said. We all laughed and I stayed quiet wondering just how widespread TTWD really is.

Then later in the night I joined a conversation where the couples were joking about the wives wearing no underwear. What?

Twice in one very civilized, very vanilla evening.

If these little snippets of conversation are any indication I think our lifestyle may be more prominent than we realize. Interesting.

Have You Met Me?

Last weekend we spent a lovely weekend practicing being empty nesters. Privacy, solitude, spanking, playtime, dinner out, Dominance and submission. Toward the end of the weekend I asked him that. 

Have you met me?

It was Sunday night. He told me that he wanted coffee and banana muffins made by 7:15 the next morning. It was President’s Day the next day and we were kid free so it was a day I could sleep in a bit.

He knows how much I like to sleep in the morning and so I think he was not surprised when I complained.

But then I didn’t just complain. I told him no. And I asked if he had met me implying that he knew I would hate that. He gave in. He let me tell him no and let me sleep.

Here’s the thing. I have thought a lot about it since. Part of me is really happy and thankful for his giving in but a bigger part of me is disappointed.

Have you met me?

Not such an easy question as I might have thought?

The me before we started all of this, and still a big part of me, hates mornings and does everything she can to avoid them. But then there is the me that truly wants, needs and desperately desires to feel his Dominance and my own submission.

The me that is and wants to do her own thing really wrestles sometimes with the me that wants his leadership and control.

There is the me that struggles with herself to accept this need to submit. There is the me that wants to take his direction and yet worries that I shouldn’t feel this way.

And honestly there is a me that pushes and tests to see where the walls are, what the boundaries are and if he cares and will enforce them. What will he do if I tell him no? What will his reaction be? Will he call me out for my disobedience or will he give in?

Such a struggle sometimes. So yes not such an easy question.

He has met me but I have changed. We have changed.

I guess what I am telling him is don’t be afraid to trust that this is real and to push his authority and demand my compliance.  What I am saying is that if he asks something of me, if he decide he wants something that he expect my compliance, expect my obedience.  He should expect my submission. I don’t feel like I did a very good job of it Sunday night or Monday morning.

I’m not going to promise that I am not going to grumble or complain when he asks me to do things I don’t want to do. The internal struggle will continue. But I am working so the me that wants to submit is more prevalent than the me that wants her own way.

Have you met me?

I am a mess sometimes and confuse even myself so I understand that this can and often is confusing for him. But just as I test his willingness to enforce things I understand that sometimes he will test me by asking me to do things I don’t really want to do like getting up early when I don’t otherwise have to or alternately setting a bedtime so that getting up is easier. I won’t always understand or agree with what he tells me to do. Submission is hard.

That’s ok. I trust him and his leadership and where he will take us. He pushes. I pull and hopefully sooner or later we find we are working together smoothly.

Evolution

We started Dd over two years ago to fix our marriage. I had done quite a bit of reading and thought that it might help us and it has.

I thought that we would become closer and communicate more. We both have become more respectful and watchful of each other. Many people look at this lifestyle and think it is one sided but I have never really found that. We both have worked hard on ourselves and both work hard to give each other our best. For us that means that he leads us both and I accept his decisions and correction when needed.

I don’t know if others feel this way but the correction or punishment piece is key to all of this for me. I feel safe when he is in control. For me at least having him exercise his right to take me in hand and punish if he feels the need gives me a sense of safety that really nothing else does.

He punished for something over the weekend. I had disobeyed him on something and he made sure that I knew his displeasure with his words and our hairbrush. I hate that thing!

What I didn’t hate was that he did it though. When he sets an expectation and then follows through with a punishment he reaffirms his commitment to this life we have both chosen to live.

It is such a change for our men. Even after two years of living like this I marvel at his willingness to actually give me a real spanking when it is deserved. He has been conditioned his whole life to act the complete opposite and yet he has taken up the responsibility of leadership with all that goes with it.

In my last post I talked a bit about our exploration of D/s. In a way it feels a bit like how we came to Dd. We had done some erotic spanking and I had found some blogs which led us to start behaving as a Dd couple. At the time I had never really thought about Dominance and submission and while I agreed to follow his lead neither of us would have used those terms to describe ourselves, and I certainly would never have characterized either of us as a Dominant or a submissive. But reading and research, and frankly living this and then wanting more, have led us to where we are. Not new really but an extension and evolution of what we are doing anyway.

What I have come to recognize more and more is that being his submissive is exactly what I want to be and that following his lead, his rules, his example makes me feel safer than any other way of being in my life. The more control and Domination he gives me the more I want to be not just submissive, but his submissive.

And it makes me feel feminine. Somehow giving myself over to him completely makes me feel important and safe and loved in a way that nothing else has. When I am able to satisfy him it makes me feel powerful. By letting him lead and by giving him the power I feel my own.

All of this takes an enormous amount of trust. I could not do this with anyone I did not trust completely and I have said before that he is the best and most honorable man I know. He gives all of himself to what he does and now I truly feel like that includes me. Not just our family but me in particular and that makes me feel so special. It is so easy to loose sight of that priority in a marriage and I feel like we are at a place where we are number one for each other.

I am trying not to jinx any of this by overthinking which can be a problem for me. It feels like a beginning of sorts and beginnings are exciting. After two years it still feels like there is so much we haven’t done and so much more still to learn and I look forward to the where this will take us.

More Mindful

The new year has come and gone and even though I am very late the first thing I want to do is wish you all a fabulous 2014. While we can never see the future I feel very positive going into this year and hope that it is our best yet.

The holidays here were nice. Mostly slow and relaxing which is the best kind to me. My kids were home which is always wonderful  but man does it put a crimp in our Dd style. Don’t get me wrong. The basics remain but just like the summer pretty much all spanking, for fun or more serious reasons goes away.

I think one of the reasons I know I want this lifestyle so much is how much I miss it when it is curtailed. It is funny really. Because we have these prolonged periods of time where we have to interact without the full resources of Dd we are generally pretty good at maintaining our roles without them. It just isn’t as much fun. And it isn’t easy.

Toward the end of our kid imposed hiatus I could feel myself pulling away and generally not being as open to him as usual both physically and emotionally. Just when I thought maybe I didn’t need the connection that spanking gives as much as I used to I found myself  starting to spiral.

Even after two years I still find it amazing sometimes how much I both want and need that connection.

Anyway last weekend my youngest and I took my oldest back to school and spent a fantastic few days seeing shows and eating good food and generally I just enjoyed my girls.

Well this week has been all about the two of us reconnecting and I am happy to say that it has gone pretty well. We started on Tuesday with a long hard reconnection spanking that we both really needed. He then left for a few days but checked in quite a few times so we kept feeling close. We talked this weekend about taking our dynamic in even more of a D/s direction. I’m not sure I really can define how I see the difference between Dd and D/s except for us I think it is and will be more mindful and more deliberate.  In many ways it will be exactly the same because  what we do has always extended beyond the bedroom and into our everyday lives. But in addition to being my husband and HoH, he has agreed to be my Dominant. I have agreed to be his wife, tih, and his submissive. I’m not saying anything new but his Dominance feeds my submission. The more dominance he shows the more I want to give him my submission.

It feels a bit like a new beginning. Here’s hoping!

So on a lighter note… I hope this makes you smile. It did me. It’s supposed to be from a hotel in Amsterdam.

Oh, You’re a Rule Follower

I live in a really nice neighborhood and we have an amazing tradition. Once a month for over ten years the ladies get together for dinner at someone’s house or at a restaurant. I was the one to host the gathering for October.  The meal was lovely and the weather perfect. I love to cook and bake and have attained quite a reputation in the neighborhood for both. I have also worked in a bakery in the past and sometimes make cakes and sell them to my friends and acquaintances. It is a very informal and very small operation.

That evening we were talking about the food and the desserts and one of my friends asked me about selling cakes. I explained that I do not have a commercial kitchen and that I would need to modify my home kitchen if I wanted to turn it into a real business.

“No”, she said. “You can do it at home.”

“No I can’t,” I explained. “Well I could but there would have to be changes in lighting, countertops etc. if I were  to really do this in my home on a scale any larger than I do now. There are regulations on food preparation businesses.”

“Oh you’re a rule follower.”

I just laughed and said yes but inside I wanted to say – You have no idea! I mean I am in a Dd marriage!

I have to say her comment brought me up a little short and has made me think.

I am a rule follower.

I like their structure. I like their security. I like their stability.

Maybe that is one of the reasons that ttwd works so well for me. I like rules. Having a list of rules that Alex finds important gives me the structure I need and want. It gives me security and stability. It makes me feel safe. They establish a framework for how our household runs.

Beyond our home we have rules and laws, regulations and standards of behavior that help us live in a civilized society. Rules help us to do that.

It greatly bothers me when I see these standards eroding. When I see others who can’t or won’t follow the rules and it worries me that so many just don’t seem to care or notice these days.

I picked up my daughter from an activity last evening. She is driving now and in the time it took for me to switch from the divers seat to the passenger seat so she could drive I heard a group of young guys loudly throw the f bomb three times as they walked past. When did that become ok? When did it become ok to subject everyone around you to your crass language? When did we loose our sense of decorum?

Its not ok with me. I think we loose something when we loose manners and acceptable ways to behave in public. When guys walk around with their pants around their knees and girls walk around in public in their pajamas we all loose something. When we don’t have standards we loose something. We need them.

So yes. In answer to her question…

In both my personal and public life I am a rule follower and proud of it.

Always Learning

 

We had a kind of rocky weekend last week but like so many times before I think we both learned from it. We are getting back to ttwd after a kid imposed break and there were bound to be a few growing pains as we settled into our new routine.

It boiled down to that biggest of biggies… Communication. Things were expected and schedules changed but not communicated and feelings were hurt.

Then came the argument after. We often used to argue before by saying a few angry words and then retreating to separate corners. It was often never mentioned again even if there were hurt feelings. Eventually things returned to a status quo. Not real healthy I know but that’s what we did.

I refuse to do that anymore. This time we discussed things more and honestly I didn’t let him retreat like he used to. Changing how you have communicated (or not) your whole life is a process and reverting back to old patterns and behaviors is often the easiest. I forced the issue and made sure we talked it out pretty quickly and we moved past it and enjoyed the rest of the weekend.

We want and need our men to lead and they do most of the time but none of us is perfect and sometimes I think we have to be willing and able to do that leading ourselves if the old ways are too ingrained and too comfortable to break away from.

Just because I am in a Dd relationship does not mean that I should keep my mouth shut if things are not right. We need to work on our issues and if I don’t communicate to him how I am feeling he won’t know. We have a whole new way of relating to each other and even after two years it still feels so new. There will continue to be times where maybe I see us falling into our old habits before he does and it would not help either of us if I were quiet about that.

For us anyway it is more important to feel good at the end than to split hairs on whether I took control for awhile during an argument although respect must be maintained throughout. I am not and never will be a wall flower. That is not the woman he married and that is not what he wants. I wrote him a post on our private blog and thought you all might like to see what I came up with. It’s a list of tips on managing our disagreements. I entitled it

Arguing With Me – An Owners Manual

1. Don’t leave me during an argument. If you leave I just talk to myself and get madder and madder and I feel abandoned. If you stay you force us to confront the issue and resolve it.
2. Stay in the room/area and YOU make sure that things are resolved. I feel led that way.
3. Apologize if it was your fault. I will do the same.
4. Know that when you feel like we have talked enough or you don’t know what to say I ALMOST NEVER feel that way. I am very verbal and will always need to hash things out verbally more than you. Please be aware of that and let me work through my pain/issue with you. It is important to me that I feel heard and understood.
5. Whatever the issue, even if it was your mistake, I am to always remain respectful.
6. Don’t leave things until you feel like I am feeling better and heard. It is that point when we can heal and move forward.
7. Touch is very important at any point in this process and makes me feel loved and cherished. For too long we didn’t touch and I value it so highly now.
8. At some point you should declare the argument over. Again, I feel led that way.
9. I know you know this but a maintenance session is often needed after an argument even if you caused the argument. It clears the slate for both of us and allows you to show me you are back in command. It makes me feel like we are back together again.

We don’t argue a lot anymore so we also haven’t had much “practice.” We both learned some this weekend about how we need to relate to each other when we are angry so when this kind of thing happens again we do better next time. That is all we can ask of each other really.

Freedom

He just came in and pointed to the bedroom. I knew. I knew that I had broken his rules about his car and it was deserved. It was a quick, sharp reminder to follow the rules. He said if I do it again it will be double. I believe him.

So why do I find myself sitting here with a stingy behind and a smile on my face? It seems such contradiction but it’s true.

When I think about it though I know why.

I like our rules. I like knowing what is important to him and when he is decisive and immediate in enforcing them I know he takes this all seriously.

We spent much of the summer in what I called Dd light. Little privacy meant little ability to enforce our rules. Now that things are back to a more predictable schedule we have both agreed that things that were allowed to slide will not be anymore and that he expects a higher level of compliance. We both welcome this change.

Here’s the thing. Rather than feeling limiting, our rules, our structure give me freedom. I know many would not understand that but it is how I feel. We all have choices to make throughout our day and far too often it is the easy choice that gets made instead of the right choice.

When he makes rules I trust that he has my best interests at heart. He will not always get it right and neither will I but with love and sincere intention we will make progress. If I then disobey him and he provides consequences that builds my trust in him.

When he makes a decision he is taking the decision away from me by making it for me. For example, I don’t have to think about whether or not to exercise because he has already made that choice for me. If I make a different choice then I know he will deal with it. If he really imposes certain rules and behaviors he frees me up to not think about whether to do it or not. By following his will I am “free” to ignore the excuses in my own mind about exercise. Rather than being limiting, when done with care, and love and intention, this is incredibly liberating.

If I know that he means what he says then I am free to give in to his will and give him my submission. If I can trust his Dominance I can really explore my submission. His Dominance allows me to give that to him and grow in my submission.

Because we have this agreement I am “free”  to be always open to him even when I am tired and might not otherwise want to. Many would scoff at the idea of never being “allowed” to say no. For me though it “allows” me to truly show him how important he is to me.

I can submit to things in and out of the bedroom that I might not have been willing to try before because I know he expects it. There is such freedom for me in that.

That is a really important point I think and one the two of us at least had not discussed very much until now. I feel freedom in my submission.