Acceptance

When I was a little girl, my parents were always busy. They had the kind of lives where every moment could be filled with endeavour. I was a child who required little care from her parents. I did my school work conscientiously and when my mother enrolled me into dance classes or bought a musical instrument, I did those activities conscientiously, too. I enjoyed reading. I had a core group of good friends. I took care of myself. My aunt once said to me that I had brought myself up, but I never repeated that to my mother, because her feelings would have been hurt.

Somewhere in all of that, I developed the notion that the worst thing that could possibly happen to me would be that I would become a burden to someone. I didn’t want to be “needy” and I didn’t want to take up people’s time. I needed to be sure that people really did want to be with me or include me to feel comfortable. I would never have dreamed of inviting myself somewhere or assuming that I was welcome in a group of people. I was the opposite of ‘pushy’. In fact, I am still just like that.

My husband, who has also been extremely absorbed in his working life, has needed a lot of time to himself, and I nearly always manage to keep myself occupied in some way or other whereby I am not a burden to him. I understand the need, mostly, because I need time to myself, too. I enjoy people and doing things with them, but after that, I’m ready for home; for some time alone. There is a part of myself that I can’t always share; though certainly more here on the blog than almost any other situation.

At times, the responsibilities of my life have been too much. My husband became particularly unavailable to me through work and study pressures at the same time as I had three children in primary school and a new born baby. My mother is a wonderful woman but she just didn’t see it as her role to involve herself in my life, and there were times when I felt completely overwhelmed on my own; so tired and so overcome with a huge workload that I would walk into the laundry and have visions of climbing Mt. Everest. I sometimes felt I was being asked to do something that I couldn’t do. Still, I didn’t ask for help. I knew it was not forthcoming and I didn’t bother to upset anybody or myself for that matter, by asking for what I could not have. I just put one foot in front of the other and got on with it.

I became rather depressed for a time, although nobody knew it, except my husband. Unused to me not being cheery, he called an organisation for help once but found them to be useless, even hostile towards him, and in any case, my depression lifted of its own accord. My most natural inclination is to be happy and to enjoy life, and quite honestly, I think I just tired of the depression.

As time wore on, and with difficulties in our lives leading to much more stress than I had encountered so far, I turned my head to managing that stress by myself too, as best as I possibly could. I read and discovered thought patterns that helped me to see a path through to a place where I could cope. Those thought patterns that I read about and studied cleared my mind to allow me to express those thoughts of wanting to be controlled; to be spanked. Wanting to be controlled had been with me from the time I could verbalise thought, but it would take this long for those thoughts to be verbalized. To that end, there was great value in the hard times, I think.

As our marriage evolved into a more formal power exchange relationship, my husband became more involved in my life and that was sheer bliss for me. It softened me towards him and it softened him towards me. I had what I always really wanted but was afraid to ask. I had someone’s time and attention.

Fast forward now, to the present day...

For the past week I’ve had some thoughts occupying my mind, and I’ve been silently mulling them over. I’ve been trying to make sense of a few statements that had been made previously about me and about submissive women generally. It seemed to me, via those statements, that perhaps dominant men may think of a submissive girl as a burden. Sure, they didn’t say that out loud in so many words and they even refuted it as out of hand, but in my mind there was now a general notion that submissive women may be considered hard work. They tended to lack some self-discipline. They tended to have voracious appetites. If a dom didn’t watch out for girls (like me) they could suck up all the dom’s time. The best thing to do was to keep them very busy with tasks so that the dom could get on with his own endeavours. At the same time as the dom was saying “You are not a burden” he was, in code, saying that a submissive girl (like me) was quite the responsibility.

Can you imagine what such statements did to me? How I felt? I loathe the very possibility that I could be a burden to anyone, let alone a dominant man, whether he is my husband, my mentor or my friend. And, I was particularly bothered by the notion that I lacked some self-discipline; that I needed to be managed; that I could “suck up” time; that I didn’t always do what was prescribed.

Eventually, a girl’s thoughts and worries will surface in the right environment and I found myself asking my friend who is counselling me, whether a dominant man, an owner of a submissive girl, gets “sick and tired” of the lack of self-discipline. “Not at all,” he responded. He explained that he understands that girls like me require a certain amount of direction. It was assumed that was the case. Of course, he expected that the girl would come to see certain tasks as natural and that he would no longer need to ask about them, since the girl took care of them on her own without supervision, eventually. But, that said, certain girls like me needed to be handled in a certain way on a regular basis and that was that. “Well, what about punishment, then? Did girls like me need to be punished?” My friend explained to me that he believed girls like me needed to be corrected, certainly, but punishment was not required.

I started to feel much, much better. I was certainly under no illusion that I now had some sort of guarantee that I wasn’t going to get told off for times when I lacked self-discipline. And, there was virtual certainty that I was going to be directed to do things I should “right now” if I hadn’t done them already. ‘Correction’ was assumed and further expectations were, I always knew, part of the deal. But, I was definitely not a burden. I was not a failure. I was accepted for who I was; my virtues and my faults. I was a submissive girl with lots to learn and much improvement to make. But, I was acceptable; perhaps even applauded for who I truly am. I had never felt more comfortable in my own skin as I did at that moment. Accepted for whom we are; I think it is what we all crave.