A Voyage of Discovery

Well there is so much to say about our visit to the Heron's that I do not know where to start, it is all so complicated and emotional so please stay with me as I struggle to put this all into words.

Firstly, it was most of all, a wonderful journey of discovery and I have learned some very valuable lessons about myself, difficult and sometimes painful ones, but all extremely valuable. In all of this I have had the most wonderful mentors in Raheretic, Swan and T and I really do not know how to express my gratitude for all they have taught me, shared with me and endured with me.

So before I go any further, from the bottom of my heart I wish to say a public huge THANK YOU for everything to them all.

Well, how can I explain it, well perhaps I should start right from the beginning, you can read in some of my previous posts about how we initially made contact with the Clan and following this, we had a number of IM and Skype chats which resulted in Andrew finally persuading me to agree to take the guys up on their generous offer of visiting them in the US of A. It has to be said that he was becoming much more interested in the BDSM and polyamory side of life rather than the more vanilla-like DD which we were living. I was more reluctant at first being mostly happy with our DD life, but in the end chatting with all three Herons was so much fun that I decided, 'what the hell' and that I would actually like to meet them in person. So I booked the tickets and a few months later we were "leaving on a jet plane" to visit.

We did a lot of stuff, we shopped, went swimming, visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, saw a great baseball game (and Raheretic explained all the rules to me) watched the Olympics on the goggle box, ate wonderful meals made by Swan and T (they are GREAT cooks) and talked, talked, talked.

I also got to experience, from the sharp end, a significant selection from the vast arsenal of "weaponry" which the Clan posses. The first evening it was paddles of every description, the second night it was the fantastically designed flogging frame with a vast selection of floggers, whips and canes, I know not quite what was being used as I obviously could not see! The session seemed to go on for ever, but I did not want it to end, even though it was the most intensely painful experience I have ever had it was also totally and utterly mind blowing. In fact I did not come down from the high for several days. I finally visited that place the "masochists' sub-space" described so well by Swan in several of her posts. Experiencing the attentions of a true Dominant such as Raheretic was incredible, I tell you that I would not have dared to do anything but obey his every command, calling him "Sir" throughout was somehow so natural, nothing like the 'play acting' feeling I have always had when calling Andrew the same.

OMG, I was so elated but at the same time scared, if I could feel like that from such a painful 'beating' then I was finally going to really acknowledged something which I have been hiding from for some time. I am a masochist with a capital 'M', a screaming masochist was how Raheretic described it! The genie was finally out of the bottle, what on earth was I going to do, there was no way I could put him back, so all I could do was ask Raheretic to do it all again the next night of course!

So where was Andrew in all this, well he was watching it all with a view to learning the techniques of how to "successfully flog your woman". The problem was that he is not very dexterous and so was not too successful in his early attempts, becoming disheartened very quickly. All the Clan tried to jolly him along with Raheretic telling of his own early practice attempts involving exploding light-bulbs and much cleaning of dirty whip marks off walls by T. But it was becoming clear that something more fundamental than his two "left hands" was bothering him and that he was confused about the whole situation.

Given that it is now after 1 am, I'll stop here and try to finish the story tomorrow.

Hil

Still here

Just on holiday in the wonderful US of A with the Herons and having a fantastic time. If you can believe it there are all even more lovely in person. Will post more when we get back and I get over the jet lag.

Love to all

Hil

Sadness

There is no other word to express what I am feeling, I am sad, sad to my bones, sad to every atom of my being. After a conversation between Andrew and my ex in which my ex slagged me off for more than a couple of hours with the core of the conversation being that I am "allowing" the authorities to persecute him and take him away from our children because I am not supporting him because basically I am jealous of him because he knows how to "play" with the children and I do not not.

This man could not tell me the names of his childrens' best friends, my son's favourite transformer character, my youngest daughter's favourite song, what my older two daughter's got in their latest tests at school or how many goals they scored in their latest sports match, yet none of this matters because I am jealous as he is "fun" and I am not. He says this is why his children need him, because I do not know how to play with them and am thus depriving them of this fun life which they need.

How can I be jealous of a bankrupt, alcoholic, deluded, ex-con, I can't, well not any more. I used to be jealous of his easy life, he was sitting in his prison cell with his every moment controlled, his meals provided, his washing done, the recreation center with it's pool tables and playstations, the in-cell TV blaring all day. I was at home juggling 4 very upset children and a full time job,not to mention a nervous breakdown. Then when he came out, he had no responsibilities, never had to be Mr Nasty, never had to "challenge" the children in any way so they adored their perfect father and gave me hell. Oh, I did learn from him because of this, I decided that there was no way I was going to do just the responsible stuff with the kids I was also going to do the fun stuff, the swimming, the cycle picnics, being Optimus Prime trying to prevent Megatron from taking over the world, baking and decorating cupcakes, trying to stop the kids from thrashing me too badly on the Wii and not just nagging them to tidy their rooms or do their homework.

Now, I am not jealous, I pity the man, he will never understand what it is to be a real parent, the joy of it all, the highs and the lows. My oldest daughter told me earlier in the summer that she does want to see her Dad, but that he is only a "best friend" sort of person to do nice things with he is not really a parent. I was going to cry at that point having tried so hard to be this fun person too, but then she went on to explain that I am all that and more, because I also do the difficult parenting part too. Many of her friends are apparently jealous of her relationship with me, they cannot and do not talk to their Mums and tell them the sort of important things she tells me. Then she cried and begged me never to leave her. This was because she knows how close I came to suicide a few years ago at the start of all this story. But the truth is that now I could never do that again, how could I ever contemplate missing the rest of her life, how could I not want to stay here to parent such a fantastic girl. How could I not want to stay when my son tells me that even though he loves school " a lot" he doesn't want to go because he loves me too much to be away from me and his heart hurts when he is not with me. No, now I could never do that.

I am so, so sad that this man, their father, will never have this deep level of joy and satisfaction of being a parent. He will only ever understand the transient, short lived, temporary joy of the "fun" in the here-and-now. I am sad that I "picked" such a man as the father of my children, but hell, I also picked me as their mother. Jealous, I have nothing to be jealous of.

Flogging and Blogging

Despite the assurances of the last post that I would post more details of my current emotional turmoil, as per usual, real life got in the way as it inevitably does and my blogging was put on hold. It is with some envy that I read the blogs of Swan and Morningstar for whom the school holidays are the start of, albeit a too short, period of calm, for me it is the opposite as the various boarding schools turf out my children and send them home to Mum. Naturally they are always accompanied by a large amount of dirty washing and a list of all the uniform items that they have either lost or grown out of during the year for me to replace. In order to combat the "post school stress" I took a couple of weeks off and rented a holiday "cottage" in the UK. Thus, I have been gainfully (!?!) employed in seemingly endless cycle of washing, shopping and sewing on those annoying little name labels on the newly bought uniform.

Unfortunately being in the UK also means visits to the children by their father, my ******* ex-husband, and true to form he behaved awfully causing yet more upset and heartbreak for the children and myself. I have decided, finally, to go to court to prevent this from happening again as I just cannot take much more and remain sane.

In all of this mess although Andrew and I did manage to find a few occasions for mostly "stress relief" spankings, it has just not been enough to keep a "lid on it all" and as time has marched on I have found it hard to cope with everything, getting more and more "out of control" which always ends up with me arguing and been generally extremely bitch to Andrew, taking out this stress on him. He in turn has his own problems as he has finally been formally diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome and is needing to come to terms with this, so has not been in the best of moods himself.

So we ended up basically not talking to each other for the last few days. With me going to bed early and him coming later when I am already asleep. He has been threatening me with a "damn good beating" to deal with my unacceptable behaviour but has been unwilling to actually administer it as he was concerned he might go too far as he was so furious with me. I of course have been desperate for that beating, but have been caught up in the familiar catch 22 situation of not knowing how to ask for this without appearing to be in the driving seat, which I (mostly !) try to avoid doing.

Well, finally after a heated telephone call yesterday, where I admit I was trying to push his buttons to get what I was needing, he snapped and told me to get myself home the second my work day ended. Although this was a "Hallelujah" moment I naturally pointed out all the urgent things I had to do before the spanking could take place, like collect our visitor from the airport and get the house ready etc, etc, etc, but Andrew told me, in no uncertain terms, to shut up, get home and adopt the required position. I thought the day would never end the last couple of hours of work seemed to last forever but finally home time came. I rushed downstairs and changed into my kit for the 7 mile cycle ride home.

I was flying through the countryside at a real rate of knots, newly permed hair blowing in the wind, when bang, my rear tyre got a puncture and went instantly flat at the same time a large clap of thunder rumbled over head. There I was, in the middle of open farmland, 5 miles from home, tyre flat as a pancake, stressed as hell and about to get deluged by the imminent thunderstorm. Although I did have a repair kit my pump was kaput and thus I could not inflate the tyre enough to get home. There were also, thankfully - I think - no passing cyclists, as I sure I could not have explained why it was so urgent that I borrow their pumps so I could get home for a good spanking, what the hell is "spanking" in German anyway! I was sure that Andrew was going to be convinced that I would try anything to get out of my well deserved punishment!

In the end my kids rescued me with a replacement bike, I cycled home on this (you would have died laughing if you had seen me as it was a kids bike so I had my knees up by my ears!), shouted at Andrew as I was so stressed and naturally now I was so late I had to rush to the airport with no time for spanking.

Later, though I did try to postpone the session until after I fixed the puncture (the last time I did this was 20 years ago and I knew I'd be stressed by it), I got my come-uppance, the flogging of the subject line. Normally this is not a word I like to use as it somehow sounds too severe, thus I prefer to use spanking, but to be honest it was the most severe "spanking" I have ever had thus really deserves the term "flogging".

Of course I am still stressed but feeling a lot better than I did yesterday, mind you the cycle to work this morning was not a pleasant experience!

Hil

I'm still here, honest, you just can't see me ...

Hi All

I am sorry that I have been away for so long but there has been a lot going on in my life, both inside my head and in reality which has made blogging too difficult for several reasons.

The reality part is a combination of the end of the school term and the chaos that causes when you have 4 kids to sort out (in 2 different countries and 3 different schools) with the usual round of concerts, sports days and exams to manage and the shenanigans of my ex-husband. He has been acting in a manner which at least spectacularly stupid and at worst possibly dangerous and I have had to spend some considerable time ensuring that my children are properly protected from the worst of his actions by numerous consultations with various legal and professional authorities.

This latest incident is just one of a series which is part of an ongoing saga which stretches back more than 5 years, although I am more able to handle the situation now and do not get as upset as I did before, it is nevertheless emotionally and physically draining to have to do it and it leaves me unable to give much energy to anything else. But the next steps are in the hands of the police and the lawyers and for now I can do no more thus I have time to "enjoy" a bit of a breathing space and to deal with the "stuff" inside my head.

So with no further ado I'll move on to that !

As you will have seem from my recent posts I have been struggling to come to terms with some parts of me which have been slowly emerging as Andrew and I have been following our DD path, namely submission and masochism. I have known, since I was in my mid teens, that these parts of me existed but had not been able to acknowledge or admit to them until very recently. As a small aside I can honestly say that "choosing" a relationship where I get regularly spanked had absolutely nothing to do with these masochistic tendencies, in fact they did not enter my head at all, as chronicled earlier in this blog we started DD for completely different reasons.

However, I digress, what has been happening over the last few months is that I have found that this journey seems to be changing my life in a really radical way and this is not because DD/ BDSM is in itself a radical lifestyle, but because it has started to change something much more fundamental within me.

I have spent some considerable time discussing all this with The Heron Clan, mostly because they are wonderfully nice, non judgemental people, who have "been there done that" in the DD/BDSM world but also because they have some real understanding of my issues on a much deeper level coupled with a real gift for mentoring and excellent communication. Swan pointed out to me that I ought to be posting all my conflicts here in the blog, not because I have found answers yet, because I haven't, but because it helps to write it all down, and perhaps it might help me unravel it a bit, a tough task but here goes!

Well what is the problem, let me try to explain...

Although the changes in Andrew's and my life which we wanted to bring about by embarking on this DD path have indeed started to bear fruit the truth is that this new journey has actually started to change my life in a completely unexpected and radical way, not because DD/BDSM is a "radical" lifestyle but because it has started to make me feel that perhaps I am "finally" allowed to do something for me and this is a pretty unusual concept for me.

For most of my adult life I have lived to do things for other people (partners, husband, kids, family, colleagues), sometimes even doing things to them happy even if they did not make me happy. The truth is that I have always put my needs/wants/desires on hold and made sure that their needs/wants/desires were fulfilled. It is what I believe(d) the traditional role of wife and mother was really about, even though I clearly was/am not a typical wife and mother but perhaps even more because I was not. This traditionalist view was also carried through in my beliefs about sex, a woman is supposed to be totally submissive in the bedroom and lie back and think of England she is not supposed to ask for sex and she is definitely not supposed to like pain etc. I have found that actually I am only happy adopting a submissive role in the bedroom and that when forced into a more dominant role with my ex-husband I was really unhappy. Strangely this is one place where I am a reasonably good submissive, if I can just lick that in the rest of my life that would be great!!

I started therapy 5 years ago after a nervous breakdown induced by a very stressful situation caused by my ex-husband, what I thought would be a short term thing to get me through these issues and involve much cursing and swearing about my stupid ex has turned out to be a long term thing where I mostly talked about me and started to finally deal with the very significant issues that I had, irrespective of the stress related to my ex. Most of my problems centered on my extremely negative self image which was deeply ingrained from years and years of bullying at school. Although I am very lucky in that I had and indeed still have a very supportive and loving family, my school environment was extremely abusive, in short a living hell. In short I had believed everything that the bullies had told me about myself and despite outwardly being a confident and happy person, inside I was deeply unhappy and self-loathing.

It was this self-loathing had always meant that I refused to "allow" myself to do anything that was good for me or would make me happy. I hated the fact that I was overweight but could/would not control my eating, indeed I would often deliberately eat the wrong things to "punish" myself and reinforce the view that I was fat, ugly and useless as I had been told for years. Yet I would proclaim to the world that I was happy with my size and it was the rest of society who were wrong and narrow minded, they should love me for who I was on the inside and not what I looked like on the outside, despite the fact that I despised myself.

This "double bluff" worked well for so long that I had managed to convince myself that it was not my problem it was just the world's problem and it was only through the many, many sessions with my patient therapist that I was finally able to first identify this negative record, that was constantly playing in my head, and then counter it's damaging effects. Thus about 18 months ago I finally started to exercise and lose some weight and become much more happy with my body. I even started to really enjoy the exercising, something that I had always considered as a necessary evil before. I get so much satisfaction when I run 5km or have a good session in the gym, things I never thought I could do in a million years, things that the bullies had said I could never do because I was so fat. I will be honest and say that the record is still there, I know it and recognise it for what it is, but sometimes I still have problems not reacting to it. It sometimes tells me for instance that, because I not only enjoy running and the gym but they are also good for me, I am not "allowed" to do them.

I have been battling this mindset for a while and have been working with my therapist on getting used to the idea that I should be "allowed" to do things that make me happy. As I said before I have spent a lot of my life doing things to make other people happy even though, in some cases it did not make me happy or indeed made me very miserable, but I do get great satisfaction, or you could call it "indirect happiness" out of making others happy. However, "direct" happiness, doing things just for me, because I want to, has not been possible, or if possible has been associated with great feelings of guilt, e.g. I cannot go shopping to spend the money (that I alone work hard to earn) on myself unless I really "need" the item, but I can buy totally frivolous things for other people who clearly do not need, nor often in the case of my kids deserve them. I suppose in a warped way doing things to make others happy and at the same time me unhappy has continued to "feed" my need to punish myself because I "know" I am a bad person, I suspect this is why this behaviour has continued for so long.

And so to now, coming to terms with my self image issues when dealing with "normal" things like diet, exercise and body image was one thing but now, starting to deal with much more "not normal", but even deeper and stronger issues like submission and masochism is a whole new ball game. I am already "bad" as I am overweight and cannot control my eating, for example, what must I be because I have a deep desire to be submissive and an enjoyment of pain - crazy, evil, certifiable?

Perversely it is purely because these needs are so strong that I have been forced to address them, now I have taken "it" out of the box, I cannot put "it" back. I have finally to admit that there is something that I want AND need so strongly that I cannot any longer suppress it. I am going to have to "allow" myself to have something that I actually want, because I cannot face the alternative, living without it, this now seems impossible. It is too late to turn back, I am out of control now, even though I am terrified of what the future may hold as Andrew and I continue down this path, I know I cannot go back to life as it was.

So the battle between what I want (the good stuff) and what I am "allowed" to have (the bad stuff) has been raging for a few weeks now. It seems the more I move down the path to what I want towards submission the harder the other good stuff (diet and exercise) becomes to do. I have been eating badly and missing the gym in order to somehow "compensate" for exploring and enjoying the "wanted" submissive and masochistic side of me. It is like I have to do these negative things to balance out the positive ones.

So, this is part one of my current turmoil, I'll try and post the rest in a couple of days, just need to put the washing on and start packing for my holiday which starts on Friday - yippee.

Hil