Acknowledging needs

It was a pleasant day yesterday, a walk and brunch with friends to celebrate one of the girl's birthdays, followed by a walk to one of the girl's houses, since she insisted I borrow a particular book. From there, I had intended to jump on the train, but the sun had come out, finally, and I was no longer cold. I decided to walk home.

It was quite a long walk. I thoroughly enjoyed it and one of the few thoughts I had whilst walking, that I can remember, is the question, 'Why hadn't I thought to take more long walks like this?'

By the time I got home, acknowledgement of my weariness began to sink in. After cleaning the kitchen I got into bed and I must have slept solidly for about two hours. Got up, got dressed, made dinner, fed one son and myself and out the door again to do a little shopping with him for his oncoming birthday.

On return home, I took in that my husband, home late and in his study, hadn't helped himself to the food I had left for him, and for another son who would return home very late.

So very weary, I just didn't have the energy to be that perfect little hostess tonight. I washed the dishes and informed my husband that there was food for him ready to eat, just to warm it up.

I had a bath. I went to sleep. I slept solidly for over 8 hours.

This morning, whilst I was still asleep, my husband made overtones out of the blue, something he does sometimes, for reasons I can't quite identify. It is as if something about his world, how he feels, isn't quite right, and this attention that he seeks, to give or to receive, is an attempt to quiet a feeling he has. He was giving me attention, and yet, I felt, instinctively, that this was him quietening his own uncomfortable feelings. It is as if, by giving me attention I'll give him attention back and things will be put back to right; whatever he is feeling will be relieved.

We do, of course, all need attention. We all need to be comforted. But, let's be truthful here, he gets the lion's share of attention. I listen to him. I feed him. I do the things he wants to do, in the way he wants them done, when he wants them done. I make it possible for him to do what he believes he needs to do, in the way he believes he needs to do them by being the support person in his life - attending to the children, the house, the food, the washing and ironing, the changing of the sheets, the cleaning of the bathroom, the one who organizes vacations and social occasions. I acknowledge his world view of everything, whether I believe it or nor, because that is what he wants.

And if he is so busy that I need to be wholly independent, I become that person. I make zero demands at the same time as I continue to be that support person - the listener, the cook, the cleaner, the organizer. I don't ever leave my family to their own devices. They know they can depend on me to have things organized and sorted, even when I am away.

As time has gone by, and most particularly this year as I have been asked to be an independent person nearly the entire time, I have noticed something. I have come to question the reasons behind someone who has distanced themselves from me quite suddenly becoming close again for a time. Are they trying to quieten some sort of discomfort within themselves?

There's the push and the pull, and either when it is too close or too far, there needs to be force in the opposite direction. It is as if they cannot be too close, or too far, before they need to turn away or towards me. It is as if I am necessary, but when they sense the necessary nature of me in their lives, they take fright and pull away, only to repeat the cycle.

When I had a night off last night, effectively choosing not to begrudgingly motor on through exhaustion, but rather choosing to do something for myself, to rest, this wasn't about anyone else but me. I was nurturing myself. But, somehow, I think, this was interpreted to be about the other, about how this made him feel.

We become used to things. We can become used to watching out for the other - their moods, their emotions, their ups and downs and the ever-present possibility that their negative feelings will be emoted in a toxic manner. We sort of 'pooper scoop' to ensure that the other is comfortable enough with the world, and with us, that this doesn't happen.  It becomes all about them and how they feel. In other words, we stop even being aware of our own needs. Everything becomes about the other, until the other notices some sort of little difference in the service and feels the need to make that right, but for us, or for them?

This is the instinctive feeling I got this morning; that I wasn't being given a little attention because I felt low. I hadn't done or said anything to suggest that I felt low. My behavior in going to sleep, not serving dinner at well past 9 pm, identified that I was tired, nothing more than that. So, if this was happening  under the banner of him wanting to feel better, or to coral me into being that person he relied on, willing and wanting to give service,  I wasn't ready to be that person. I was sleeping. I was looking after my own needs, as I had been asked to do for the lion's share of the most recent past.

I quite naturally take to the role of looking after people. Whether this is my authentic self or an adaption to my circumstances, I don't know. I know that a few night's ago my son who doesn't have a washing machine right now came around with his laundry before an overseas trip and I wanted very much to do this for him, because it's just part of the love I feel for  him. I want to help him, especially when he is so frantically busy, especially when he cares for me with such tenderness.

I want to be in a relationship, to have relationships, that truly meet my needs as well as the other. This is a fact that I have a tendency to ignore.

Being oneself

In the early period of writing in this web journal I noted the fact that I masturbated at a very early age. It seemed to be part and parcel of being a kinky girl, since so many other kinky girls had written about this as well.

I don't reject the thought that kinky girls masturbate early but what I also now know is that if a child's emotional needs are not met in childhood they use two tools to soothe themselves: masturbation and food. It stands to reason that this was the primary reason for my nightly activity between the sheets.

It's really very hard to say for sure what were the first images in my head. I was so young; maybe four or five when I started to self stimulate every night, once the lights were off and the covers enclosed me. So, I can't with confidence say that I imagined this or that image as I masturbated at that young age. However, I do know that I have many memories of images where I was being disciplined and humiliated. It was about a school environment, masters and mistresses. Considerably later, it moved into domestic environments, and even later, it became debauched; multiple use; orgies, the whole gamut of the sexual experience on the big screen in my head.

School, at first, my real school that is, was a frightening place for me. For two years it all felt foggy, wobbly. I think what happened, though I have no proof to offer, is that the teachers were making me write with my right hand when I am most certainly a left handed person. I remember having to write on the board and looking back on what I had written. It seemed indecipherable. My reports for the first two years of school, which I still have, make clear that I was unsettled and unfocused. I needed to "try harder". If you then read the report for Second Grade you'd swear this was the report of a different child. It is glowing; a high achiever, focused, motivated and self disciplined.

Of course, when I was a child there was no ADHD diagnosis, no panic attack or anxiety diagnosis; no assistance for a child that entered school life feeling foggy and wobbly. The only other difference between the first few years and Second Grade that I can ascertain, apart from the possible demand that I use my right hand, is the Second Grade Teacher. She was a tough Irish woman who brooked no nonsense and, as I recall, demanded performance from me. I was her mission and I think it is fair to say that one way or the other she got me going at school, even though I feared her and thought her a mean person. I think I just responded to the attention she gave me, even if it was not always pleasant.

At about the same time as I became this model student my ballet years were settling into place. I started ballet early at age 4, I think it was, and the first few years there were wobbly too. My ballet master was extremely strict and not afraid to criticize. I somehow found myself thriving in a strictly controlled environment where excellence was demanded of me. If you didn't get it right the first time you just kept doing it until you got it right. This was all fodder for my nights, when I masturbated myself to sleep to images of this sort of containment, including corporal discipline; something which I never received at home at any age. It wasn't the real life people in my imaginations but rather faceless sorts of people who performed roles; disciplinary roles.

For those who did in fact get a paddling or a spanking when little I don't have any doubt that most of them find this a most galling memory. If it happened to me I suppose I'd feel the same way. But, left to my own devices to more or less bring myself up, it strikes me as caring, assuming it was about care and not about abuse. In my fantasies someone cared enough to monitor, to create expectations, to discipline when there was wrong doing. These images of being disciplined were soothing to me, you see. There was a fear factor, definitely, but it was under the auspices of it being for my own good too.

I do have a couple of memories of the Third and Fourth Grades. By third grade I'd developed a fear of making a mistake such that my anxiety made it difficult for me to focus on the meaning of words at times. I imagine that, using today's understanding of what can happen to children I was having a panic attack, not unlike the way my youngest child had panic attacks in the classroom in Grade 7 when we got him some therapy for this debilitating situation. But, I got the results somehow or other and navigated my way through to the end of school frustrating most teachers because my exam results were rarely up to the expectations they had of me given my standard of work through the year in class. I lived a certain kind of hell during exams since my brain would freeze and I'd only remember snippets here and there.

If you fast forward to when I was having my first child, I undertook a Diploma of Education wherein there was a subject 'Educational Psychology'. Between the baby's naps I prepared for the final exam. I still have a vivid image of sitting in the Philosophy Room of my University and seeing the paper for the first time. It was complete gobbledy gook. I knew nothing. I managed to settle myself down with this thought: that I must know something.

Bit by bit, I began to see that I did know something here and there on the paper and over the course of the two hours, more and more knowledge returned to me. I thought perhaps that I might just pass. With trepidation two weeks later I went to the Notice Board and looked up my academic number to discover that I had got 17/20. I was really pleased. I looked down the notice then to see what sort of other marks were recorded and discovered that 17 was indeed the highest mark.

What I have suffered from all my life is not an ability issue and that's not to have tickets on myself. I was just born with some strengths in that department. Where I am very weak is in self esteem and self confidence. I can struggle to have confidence as to my ability to complete a task well, a perfectionism that can hold me back. And, I can have very weak self-esteem, an inability to believe that I am good enough as I am; that I have inherent worth as I came into the world.

It is an undeniable fact that my issues are greatly improved when I accept that I am a woman who needs a dominant man in her life. I really would hate to be that person. Honestly. I'm not easy to keep in line. My head can reject that need. Other women around me don't need that sort of supervision and containment. But, I do. I do. I do. I do. That's just a simple fact.

I've spoken to a number of dominant men in my life, mostly via this blog, but via other routes as well, and I know that each man has his own approach. These approaches rarely resonate with me. I am not sure why this is. Sometimes I think, well, I can't actually be 'submissive' since simply being obedient or serving doesn't do it for me.

What happened to me is that one day I began to correspond and then chat with this one person, and something therein clicked for me. It was something about an element of care that I felt. He was definitely getting something out of it for himself to have these chats. Why else would he or anyone else keep chatting? But in his case it felt that he had somehow got to the core of my needs; needs that I didn't understand myself. But, he did.

He talks about me needing to be "anchored" and interestingly I think my ground chakra is by far the weakest. I am much too often in my head. I live up there when I need to feel the ground under my feet.

Pia Mellody talks and writes about self esteem being made up of values, power and abundance notions in our heads. Self esteem is in tact when we say to ourselves that we matter as we are, when we have self control and self containment, and good self care.

There's a part of me that feels that I should be able to get to this place of healthy self esteem all on my own. I don't feel that I should be leaning on someone else to get me through this. Yet, it is hard to dispute the facts as I know them to be. I've a certain 'bimbo' sort of disposition. I do best when certain methods are used; methods for which I have a love/hate relationship. I feel, on certain days, that I am weak to need this, and yet, I rise up when those methods are in place. I am indeed anchored.

There is no one 'right' way for all of us. We do all have certain human emotional needs, of course. There are wonderful tools available for the recovery process useful for all who have need of them. I am glad to have them at my disposal. I am also relieved to have kinkiness at my disposal. It's when I accept all of me that I really thrive.