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If you haven’t yet, please visit the new blog by Chrysalis. She’s not new to the online twitter community or to the blogging world, but she is new to the spanking blogging world. The posts go back only to July 17… and a good many of the newest ones document the scary things that can happen when our inner selves are shared with what turns out to be the wrong person.

As a matter of course, when someone tentatively sticks their foot into our virtual kinky community, there are a chorus of people who recommend (often rightly) that you can share those specific fantasies and desires with your partner or potential partners, and to give that person a chance to engage with you in dialogue or even experiment. What a great idea! I commented that it is right to suggest this primarily because of my own ethos; I would not wish to play with anyone who was deceiving their partner, no matter the level of intimacy. With a few exceptions and a couple of party spankings, I make an honest effort to find out before engaging in play with anyone that it is okay within the relationship. There is nothing that leads to the disintegration of a relationship more than deceit, even if  there isn’t technically any cheating. And, in healthy relationships, the fantasies of one partner should not be anathema to the other, even if there is no reciprocal interest.

But.

What happens when that person refuses to have any participation in our fantasies?

For Chrysalis the relationship ended anyway. But he knew her ‘secret’ and he knew she wanted to find out if it was everything she wanted it to be.

So now he knows.

And so does everyone else in her ‘real’ world.

For as much as we have informally established expectations and rules for each other in the spanking community, and understand that outing someone is likely to make us persona non grata, there are often very good reasons that people do not mix folks from their kinky and vanilla worlds. Some of us do with varying levels of success.  I have lied outright to my family concerning the circumstances that led me to Chris, and have since fudged things or glossed over questions about other friends who are bridging or have bridged the gap between vanilla and kinky to become some of my favorite people anywhere (Iris and Mija:  Happy Birthday this week!).

It’s not that I’m ashamed of it, but really? Who sits around the dinner table with their parents and talks about how good their hubby will be in bed? If your family successfully maneuvers that dynamic, that’s great! On the other hand, my mother was recently “shocked” and “horrified” when she went to a cousin’s bachelorette party (the bachelorette will be the in-law) and there was a stripper who stayed the entire evening. Stripped. She was confused and, I think, shocked to find that people use whipped cream in other ways than on pie, and hoped out loud that his mother never found out what he was up to in his free time. (Are you kidding? He made a fortune in tips and drives a Harley. His mom knows!)

On the other hand, when our extracurricular activities are thrown into the glare of the public, there is unmistakably an air of disapproval and, perhaps confusion. I think if I was called on the carpet, so to speak, by any number of my multiple professional overseers, I would point out that my relationship with Chris and how we express it is none of their business (and maybe ask if they’d like to share the details of their Saturday night with their respective spouses). Chances are that after that I’d be looking for a new job, too. The fact is that I do not want to be an ambassador of the kinky community to my employer, not in theory or regarding my personal explorations, and I frankly can’t imagine any of my colleagues or supervisors wanting to know any details. (On the other hand, they’d probably make incorrect assumptions about my personal preferences and behaviors that would reflect on their perception of my ethics, which would be detrimental to my work.)

[Please note that I am deliberately and consciously avoiding any discussion of 'real-life' intimate discipline/punishment with Chris, which I suspect would create a furor, and concentrating solely on the consensual fun and painful play. However, I acknowledge that any intense play does involve expectations and usually unpleasant consequences for not meeting them.]

So I do depend on those special people who have crossed from one world into another to respect the boundaries of our relationships, because violating those boundaries would have real emotional and (perhaps) financial implications.

And if those relationships broke? What would happen then?

It’s been a very grown-up few days, in more ways than the one addressed in the previous post. By Sunday, Chris will be gone for a (work-related) week away and I will be wholly responsible for home, car, drive home from the airport and child, and very much alone here in the wilderness of strangers.

I’m not feeling much like a little girl.

Still, last night Chris walked in the front door, hugged me immediately, kissed me as he and only he has ever done, and asked, “How was your day, little girl?”

It felt … not as bad as it might have, and yet out of sync. I don’t feel like a little girl. I feel grown-up. Female. Sexual. Flirtatious … at least with him. With everyone else, I just feel a bit defensive,  sober and grown-up, and oddly alone.

I think, all in all, that if I am to be in a wilderness of strangers*, that I’d much rather be the little girl holding Daddy’s hand to keep me safe, as opposed to a grown-up woman fully capable of handling herself and a child and any crises that arise. And yet I am both, at times.

Still, I asked him late last night not to call me a little girl for awhile. Girl should be all right, I think. Bad Girl and Naughty Girl ought to work. Just leave out the little, I asked.

That’s your choice, he returned, holding me close. And yet I knew in my heart that it disappointed him, and my heart ached again in a different grown-up way I do not like at all.

——

* By strangers, I mean we have no close friends nearby and no family. We have acquaintances, a few people who could be friends if we tried, colleagues… but few people I would open myself to.

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So I ran away from a first-grade birthday party mid-stream and sat here staring at the computer screen wondering where to start. For the sake of explanations, my usually part-time job becomes super-timed beginning in April every year and concluding at approximately the end of June. Partially this is because of a big convention and partially this is because the end of the fiscal year is June 30. Either way, it’s a lot of work and besides my own duties I actually recruited Chris and my mom to help at times so that I could ration myself 3 hours of sleep a night, go to swimming lessons, help the princess with her homework the last two weeks of school and be conscious enough of the world around me to be grateful that Chris did so much of the shopping and cooking. Otherwise we might have subsisted on fast food. In May I worked 220 hours and in June I worked 340 hours.

After that it takes a bit to recover. There’s sleep, of course, and the 30+ thank you cards, groceries, housekeeping (getting ready for the cleaner to come, we have one now after months of successive illnesses this spring – yay!), laundry, little girl time, etc. I’m also having a bit of a crisis of faith again, I think – not in Chris, but in me and in myself and in how I see the world. I really believe that’s precipitated in part by my job but also by our homeless souls here. For all that I needed a break from the politics of the church where Chris and I were in southern California, I’m now almost equally desperate to be one of God’s worshipers – a member of a community of believers. We haven’t found the right church home here and the longer it goes on, the more I see it as one of the most serious downsides of our move away from southern California. That’s a topic for the Daily Examen, I know, but it’s starting to weigh on my mind every time I stop and think now.

I’m not wanting to stop doing things long enough to think about anything.

More importantly, though, I really don’t have anything about me to write about. I have stories to tell, acerbic comments to make about certain politicians and the value systems of our media. But as far as kink and love go, well, it’s going. Chris spanks me. We have sex. Sometimes I like the spanking, almost always I wish I wasn’t so tired or it wasn’t late at night after the princess’s especially late summer bedtime.

Usually I want to sit around aimlessly and ponder some random point on the ceiling for no discernible reason.

So yes, I think my head is out of the sand. And I’m drifting…. whether aimless drifting is a problem or not, I have yet to find out. I’m rarely without a goal or a purpose and right now my purpose seems to be to enjoy time with the sparkling girl who wants to be friends with everyone, especially me.

I’m not sure that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It just is.

Speaking of code, I’m jumping a bandwagon. Please read all read about a company I do not do any business with (and hope never to do business with) as customer, vendor or writer. There has been some suggestion that the original author may be served with a Cease & Desist order by the adult retailer in question. I leave you to make your own best judgment.

Read the comments if you have time, too. They’re interesting.

Incidentally, I made a decision many moons ago to have as little to do with this particular adult mega-business as possible. The current brouhaha is just another nail in their coffin, as far as I’m concerned. But I do realize that many people really like them and that they have many, many loyal customers. Still, I prefer Babeland any day.

I just don’t have much left after all that.

I opened up my blog reader today and read for about 10 minutes. I was horrified by some things, really, but didn’t have time to try and comment. I do try and follow the twitter feed most days, usually while waiting at the bus stop or at school for the princess’s teacher to arrive – or at bedtime while she’s going to sleep. But I can’t write in those minutes of distraction.

I’ll be around when I can…

My response? There hasn’t been much to blog about.

Boo, I hear. There’s Chris. The princess. The dog. Parties. Spanking. Cooking. Politics. C’mon, you must have something to say about healthcare ‘reform’.

Well, actually, I did and do have things to say about politics. But I said it on Facebook to my colleagues and family and was nicely straight to the point in 20 words or less.

As for spanking, I just have to say… No fucking way. I mean, I’ve barely been able to hold my head more than 3 inches off the pillow for the last 2+ days and you want to tip me upside down and whack on me?

No fucking way. If there was ever a reason for a safeword, that would be it, trust me.

Dear Chris helpfully and hopefully suggested that a hot, steamy shower might loosen up some of the stuff stuck inside my head. So today I had the most painful shower of the last 6 years, as the hot steamy shower did not loosen ANYTHING but did helpfully move it all around in my head during said shower, causing more unwanted pain.

That’s right. I have a serious sinus infection. My lymph nodes are swollen and painful to the slightest movement (but better than yesterday). I’m coughing, and every cough makes pain tingle up the back of my neck and creates additional pressure under my eyes. Seriously, yesterday was as bad as – or worse – than surgical childbirth. I had pain medication in the hospital for that.

Never fear. I have been to the doctor and have now had 2 full days of antibiotics. I mostly could move today, as long as it wasn’t too fast and didn’t involve steam. I am not, however, looking forward to the altitude changing experience of driving to my in-laws for Easter weekend. Quite simply, the barometric change in air pressure this evening was enough to send me to bed for more than an hour and pop as much Advil as allowed.

Cripes, don’t even think of suggesting I need a spanking. Really.

Seriously, I was sure I wasn’t going to survive. I pictured staying in bed at the hotel while Chris went off to have fun with friends, watching whatever terrible programme is shown on a Saturday night in a city where everyone is out celebrating.

But, be it endorphins, the sudden lack of natural allergens or sheer stubbornness, I started feeling better about the time we boarded BART to head into downtown. I’d packed party clothes and new Mary Janes I’d just gotten, of course, and my original plans had included shopping in the afternoon before the party. But, just then, I thought I’d be happy to get to the hotel and visit with Mija and Paul and anyone else before sleeping for two hours.

Maybe I just do better breathing polluted air, instead of that beautifully clean stuff that blows through our mountaintop home.

Anyway, by the time we got off the train, I was feeling much better. Chris and I had our usual smattering of disagreement when we emerged from the Powell St BART station and trudged up the street, luggage in hand. Thinking better of taking luggage into Nordstrom’s, we headed for the hotel.

Our room wasn’t ready but I was. We checked the bags, headed back down Powell St and went right into Nordstrom’s. I was looking for a pair of Dr. Marten’s (here in the U.S. more commonly known as Doc Martens) peanut grizzly sport shoes or, if nothing else would do, fetishy but publicly acceptable Mary Janes. The store didn’t carry those styles. I did try these black smooths, which unfortunately they did not have my UK size.

Nevertheless, what’s a trip to Nordstroms without new shoes? So I got new shoes. Shoes I wore to the party, and which have been featured in several pictures since. In fact, this particular photo has become Chris’s new avatar image on Fetlife. He ought to be proud – it took him a good half hour in 2 tries to lace me into them! (He had to do it.)

The other pair, oxford-inspired wingtips, were also an impulse purchase, spurred in part by the luxury of not shopping with an impatient 6-year-old. Also, I will admit my wardrobe is not that fun. But that’s no excuse for my shoes to be boring.

Anyway, by the time we enjoyed Jamba Juice and headed back up Powell St toward Union Square, I was starting to lose a little of my verve. But some playful laughter with Chris and a little rest soon revived me.

The party was great. Still, since this is more of a shoe report than a party report, I’ll leave out the details. There is a twitter record, published here on Zille’s blog (leaving out some items that were not coded with #sfcp) if you’re interested.

My favorite moment of the night? Walking toward Chris, two canes in hand. He had this to say about it on twitter a few moments later:  “Firemn_Chris: Standing at #sfcp and @asparkle2 walks up to me carrying two canes. I literally choked on my soda. What happened to my wife? ”

Thanks to Mystery Minx for entrusting me with them, although I don’t suppose she had many choices at the time. I’d never have carried around Chris’s canes. Or paddles. Or hairbrushes, come to think of it.

And, you know, we’ve been waiting for months for last weekend, so we went and enjoyed ourselves*. He didn’t do an ounce (or a paragraph) of schoolwork until Sunday evening, at which point he was utterly exhausted.

Now, on Sunday morning, as we were snuggled together in bed wishing we could go back to sleep but trying to wake up so we could pack and check out of the hotel, he promised me that I’d be hairbrushed every night this week. I was not excited. Mostly he decided this because he likes to do it. But, he did have a reason … I broke a D/s rule (as the entry is titled) on Saturday and didn’t even realize it until early Sunday morning. Actually, I didn’t realize it until about 3 AM on Sunday, when we were sitting in a diner with Mija and Paul eating a before-you-go-to-bed breakfast.

So, the consequence was that I’d be hairbrushed every night for a week. And on Sunday, I was. “Gently”, he said, because I hadn’t experienced the ebony hairbrush for awhile (actually, I ran away from it at the party). While we may debate the meaning of gentle, he declared that on Monday night I’d be blistered. And when he says it will be hard, there’s no debate about that!

On Monday, I was ready to fly the white flag and beg for mercy. I was so sick, and so tired, that I’d pretty much decided to be compliant for the hairbrush and the, er, additional anal punishment as long as I didn’t have to stand in the corner. I didn’t think I could stand up that long. I’d already spent a good four or five hours during the day sleeping, and kept telling myself I could survive anything if I didn’t have to stand up for it.

So I stumbled into his office, still dressed, and prepared to say that I’d return after a short diversion to the bathroom. Instead, he took one look at me and told me to go to bed.

I did. I have no idea when he came to bed, but I remember him kissing me on the forehead a few hours later.

I knew that Tuesday would be a school night. It always is, to be honest. That’s when his work is mostly due. And, true to form, he had a number of things to finish that night – including a very long paper. Knowing he needed to finish it, I stayed up while he worked, but at 2 AM I was exhausted. I proofread the last section about 3. I think he came to bed about 4.

It came as no surprise to either of us that I fell asleep on the princess’s bed Wednesday night even before she did. When I emerged later, I looked at him. His eyes were bloodshot and the Guinness he’d had with corned beef, turnips, carrots and potatoes was wearing off. “Let’s snuggle,” he said.

By 9 we were both asleep in bed.

Maybe tonight is another school night? What are the chances life will interfere a consecutive fourth night? Any bets?

——

* More on that later – we were at the San Francisco Corporal Punishment party on Saturday night with friends.