Cindi's cage

There many ideas dat appeal 2 cindi dat maybe do not appeal 2 all da gurls out there and one of doz ideas; 2 have a cage all 2 herself, just liki da wun in dis pikki. (It hanging from da wall towards da back of da pikki.)

Some gurls, cindi has heard, dey sent to the corner, 2 thinki bout der behavyor. Dat idea nut really dat appealing 2 cindi. Luckily 4 her, dat idea not appealing 2 her owner either.

But 4 sum time now, cindi has reeeeli, reeeeeeli wanted a cage. You c, 1 day she read da blog of a slave hoo spends lots of tym in her "cage" and since den, cindi tinki bout dis often.

She happened 2 spy wun day, out n about in da werld, a wicker hanging chair, suspended from da ceiling, rather enclosed in design and she tinki 2 herself, "Wow! Mebbe one day cindi could have a cage just liki dis 1."

Now, y wood cindi want a 'cage'? Well, da thought of her actually attached 2 a little space beri enticing 2 her. Let's say, she bit dramatic. Well, her owner could taki her to that little space, her own cage, liki a dolli box, and there she could settle herself down.

Or, maybe he could see that cindi weary and he might say, "Cindi, time 4 a nap for da doll. Off to da cage!". Oh dat thought is soooooo appealing 2 cindi.

So, imagine when cindi saw dis pikki!!!! Her heart fluttered and she thought, "Dats where cindi wants 2 stay - in a room jus liki dis, wif a cage all 2 herself".

Such a loveli thought 4 cindi! E n e wun else liki dis thought 2?

Travelling companions

At times, she would be so comfortable on the journey she would scarcely notice how far she had travelled. At other times, even a few yards would seem onerous to her. She always put one foot ahead of the other and this made him proud.

He told her that she did not need to worry because he knew what she needed and when she needed it and eventually she took this instruction to heart. Even when she struggled to comply, she never lost sight of the trust she had put in his hands and she proceeded along the path he had cut for her, confident that he was leading the way and knew his way.

As time went by, she took into her heart the tune he hummed along the way and made it her own song. She knew the tune was good. But, more than that, what mattered to her was that it was his tune that she sang. She was happy but the more happy that she had made him so as well.

He had seen what she needed and he wanted that for her, and for himself. She had wanted to take the journey and saw that he could lead her there safely. Yet, along the way, her pleasure had been magnified by the fact that he was pleased with her and understood her. He had done this for her and she had done this for him, his way; aware of their own indivudal needs and desires. They were both on their way to where they wanted to go.

He continued to walk ahead of her, as was right and good. He kept her safe and directed her so that she would not fall. He ensured that she progressed along the path and rested as required. He knew more of the terrain. She knew less. This was well understood.

They stopped for a moment to look ahead and saw that there was still a great way to go. They turned and looked back from where they had been. The starting point was so far away now that they could scarcely remember how long the journey had been. It did not matter at all. They travelled together; he one step ahead of her. They were exactly where they needed to be; putting one foot ahead of the other; together.

First Love

I don’t remember how I met him but he became a very good friend. Long black hair, beard, moustache, thin as a bean pole: my Matt. He would pick me up in one of the family’s cars without notice: day or night. And, he’d drive and drive. And, finally he’d stop and tell me what was on his mind.

He took me to places I would not have gone without him: down back lanes and up old staircases to restaurants where they picked up the money and put down the cards when the door opened. Red or white? Steak or fish? There was no need for menus there.

He’d drive me to the beach and make me tackle the big waves. He gave me the pleasure of introducing me to his amazingly intriguing mother and his mad as a hatter father and his girlfriend. My wonderful Matt and his wonderfully offbeat family!

One day I called to see him at the big, rambling house and only his little brother was home, then seventeen. He warmly welcomed me inside. We were in his room listening to music when a girl arrived but he did not invite her in. Rather, she was back on her bicycle immediately after a few words from him in the garden.

“Where did she go?” I asked.

“Oh, she was my girlfriend,” he said, but I just broke up with her.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Because, you are my girlfriend now,” he said.

You know me well enough by now. That was enough to win me over. And, Mike was my friend; not my lover. I had not had a lover.

We had a wonderful summer together; up in that loft in his mother’s house by the sea; lots of playing around the edges. Band on the Run: I can't listen to songs from that album without memories coming back of that summer: delicious meals, wonderful company, beautiful beach; spectacular sunsets; unbeatable memories.

I went onto university; he to his second try for Medical School as per his Father’s wishes.

Easter. He came to collect me from my little college room and the four of us, my first love and I, his wonderfully kinky Dad and the beautiful Luciana took off to travel on a lovely boat down the Hawkesbury River.

“Vesta?” he called from below one starry night.

“Yes? What do you want?” I called from on deck.

“He wants you ,” his Father told me gently.

And, on that boat with the stars overhead I lost my virginity to the boy with the curly hair and the crooked smile.

One day, he came to my home to tell me that he was moving on; time to explore pastures further afield. Of course, I cried and my Father assured me there was no need.

“Plenty of fish in the sea, darling.”

He was with his girl the next year when he saw me at University, but I was not yet mature enough to let bygones be bygones and I didn’t want to talk. But, at the last moment, with everyone moved away, he came up to me and hugged me tight; whispered in my ear,

“You’re still the best girl I have ever known.”

I watched him walk away, never to see him again.

Over the years, I’ve thought I’ve seen that mop of hair several times, but it was not him. I hope he is happy. He deserves to be happy. Darling boy; first love; tender; sweet.

I would not have missed it for the world.

Emotions

I am not an especially constant person. Reading the blogs of other submissive women, that makes me not especially unique, but perhaps more inclined to inconstancy than most. On the whole, I gravitate to optimism and the sunny side of the street because I have found no value in being morose or negative. I can go for considerable time with it appearing on the outside that all is entirely well with me. Ask my friends or the gals down at the club and they would say that I am always happy.

My family know differently. I really do appreciate a great deal having things my way. (You are smiling, right?!) I deplore walking into the kitchen first thing on a weekend morning and listening to Homer Simpson blither on. I detest his voice and I am only content within myself when whoever has turned the darned television on, turns it off.

I can take an awful lot of bossing. I'll alter the way I have stacked the cups in the dishwasher and not say a word about it. I'll adjust the way I have tied the boat to the pier to satisfy my husband's desire for perfection without a whimper. I'll listen to the lecture one more time about not drying myself on the bathmat and leaving water on the floor without a solitary complaint. My settled and calm nature allows me to go on in this way for weeks or months at a time. Until, I crack it.

Yes folks, every now and again, I lose my temper. Whilst this is not unknown to the family it is always a shock. They have received very little, if any, notice as to the storm brewing and when the storm breaks over them it is a complete mystery to them. My husband, being true to his nature tries to bring a halt to the storm immediately. Just what is this ruckus all about??

However, those slow to anger are not necessarily those fastest to settle down, either. This situation can find me needing to walk and that's what I did last night. Completely unaware, it seems, that he was pushing me too far with his comments, I got out of the car (we'd gone to town for supplies) and started walking. Of course, he tried to settle me but it was much too soon for that and in the end he asked did I want a lift back home or did I want to walk? I wanted to walk.

Now, I was all steamed up; no doubt about it, but at the same time, I could see the funny side of this. It was rather dark. I was in the country and technically I should have been frightened. But, I was not at all frightened. I considered what I might do if someone approached me. And, then I thought, well who the hell would dare approach me right now? I must be giving off so many angry signals. Who would have the tenacity to confront me right now? And, it did make me smile; the thought of me being able to send them scrambling with just my negative emotions. Of course, once I had spent some energy walking, I was able to see clearly and that it was a storm in a teacup, and the night was ended happily. I apologized first. This is mandatory. And, then he said he was sorry, too.

My point is this: women do get angry; emotional, steamed up; crazy! I do anyway. And, what does my husband do when it is actually me who loses her temper? He becomes very calm, quiet, controlled, sensible, conciliatory; while I act like a goose who just lost its head.

And, who feels vulnerable in those moments? I do. It is one of his dirty deeds and clever tricks to agitate me to breaking point and then when I break, look like butter would not melt in his mouth.

We've done this before. We'll do it again. My eldest son who witnessed one of these events a month or so ago, came to me and hugged me and said, "It's because you love one another so much. People who love one another do crazy shit. That's why I am not in a relationship right now. I needed a break."

Of course, I laughed. He was so right. Neither my husband nor I is perfect, but we remain in love; loving, intensely involved in one another's lives; forever joined; passionate, about one another and about life.

You might have noticed that I tend to give the appearance that he is the passionate, emotional one. Well... maybe, I have my days, too!

Choosing to struggle

I think I have earned my stripes (little joke there!) as a submissive woman by now. After all of these thousands of words of my thought processes, wants, needs and desires, I think that is a given. Yet, after all this time and all those words I can also say with authority that ceding control is rarely easy for me.

Is this a contradiction in terms? I say it is not. I know that some women take to their submission like a duck to water and all power to them. I am not one of those ducks. I feel internal struggle in about the same quantities as I feel a sense of coming home in being submissive. In other words, I am regularly in internal struggle with the giving up of control. Relinquish it I do, but not without a struggle.

I really do not wish for control, necessarily. I don’t care to be controlling or to boss or to have great responsibilities on my shoulders. I’m not the sort of mother that wants to have her chickens live in the same location as her all their lives, for example. If one chooses Paris, the other London and another New York, so be it. I only want their happiness and satisfaction and I can adapt to their needs. I know how to buy a plane ticket.

Nor am I a fool. I married a man who demands to be in control; not just in terms of our path through life but of the most minor of details. No woman who demanded control of him would last three hours let alone 30 years. Yet, when he instructs me how to do something that I have done thousands of times before perfectly satisfactorily, I can feel my ire rise. Almost always, I bite down on the irritation and allow it to pass without expressing it. I’ve learnt over time that it is not worthwhile to express my frustration. It is a far better outcome for me in the long run to bite down on the irritation and let it pass away. There is nothing I hate more than getting a telling off for being rude at such moments. It only exacerbates the whole getting irritated thing by a country mile.

My husband has learned that when I am agitated or out of sorts it doesn’t do to leave me to fester. These are moments when I need to feel his control to get back my equilibrium and he’ll demand of me something that I don’t want to do. Inch by inch he brings me back to that little space of mine where I find the most comfort – my place, on the bottom. But, I don’t go there, quite often, without a bit of a struggle. I don’t necessarily go there willingly at all. I’ve wondered at times, if there was a photographer there at those moments, could he or she manage to capture that internal struggle?

Of course, I know that I might never get to that happy place of mine without a committed man in my life. Any man who thought, “Oh well, I guess she just doesn’t feel like submitting today...” would not work for me. I need to feel that resolve. There is little that I cannot do now in the hands of a committed and caring dominant.

But, I do have a sticking point and I rather hope that all submissive women do, too. A submissive woman deserves respect and she needs to feel that respect at all moments; no matter what it is she is being asked to do; no matter what is happening to her; and no matter how debased she has become for him in any given moment. I think there is a real risk in this dynamic that a man might forget how essential respect is to a submissive woman. She gives of herself to him, for him and for the betterment of the power exchange they share. If she smells the slightest sniff of disrespect in the air; if she needs to wonder for half a second if he is exhibiting a lack of respect for her, then she will back away for fear that the trust she has put in his hands has been corrupted.

She needs to know with certainty that whilst he will do things that hurt her, he would never want to hurt her feelings. She needs to know with certainty that whilst he will do things that suggest he does not care about her, he will always care for her and want the best for her. She needs to know with certainty that whilst he has sadistic leanings, he would hate to think he has damaged her sense of him as her protector.

I think a submissive woman has a most healthy dose of self-respect. She may crave to submit to a man but when she does so it is with the sure knowledge that she is a confident woman who has given of herself because it is her choice. Should he take her for granted, she may choose again.

In gratitude

How can it be that she sits so still and feels so moved?
How can it be that she looks much the same but feels so different?
How can it be that she was once so agitated and now feels at peace?
How can it be that her mind worried the future and now dwells contentedly in the present?
How can it be that she feels comfortable in her skin when she recently felt disoriented?

How can it be that despite his absence she feels more connected to him?

She has transformed into the objekt of his desires: desiring, desirable; at peace; seeking more; wanting to be more.

She is less and she is in awe of that.
She is serene.
She is full of gratitude.

She is truly blessed.

The Golden Rule

The Ten Commandments offer us a code of conduct by which we may live our lives, but it is the ‘Golden Rule’, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ that I have always taken to heart. As a mother one finds oneself saying quite often over the years statements such as, “Well, how would you like it if you didn’t receive a call thanking you for the gift you gave her?” and so on. It just always seemed to me that whatever our faith it was a maxim by which to live life.

In the past few days, I have been doing some reading about the Golden Rule and discovered that in all times and in virtually all religions there has been and still is one form of the Golden Rule or another. Forever, it has been written down that we should treat others in a manner than we would want to be treated.

Yet, there are critics of the Golden Rule because they take it further than an ethical or a moral stand. When put it into practice, the Golden Rule can fail. It is said that economically we cannot always live by this notion, for we are competitors and the rule of survival insists that we do not always treat others as we would wish to be treated. And, of course, in war, the theory falls down, although most nations have, at least in theory, honoured the code that prisoners of war are not tortured.

As it applies on these pages about domination and submission, the Golden Rule can be troubling. It was in fact George Bernard Shaw who once said that "The golden rule is that there are no golden rules". Shaw said, "Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you because their tastes may not be the same." Hence, a masochist and a sadist would not want to be treated in the same way since their tastes are not aligned.

Of course, as practitioners and observers of the power exchange dynamic we know that this is a bit trite. In fact, we do all want to be treated in much the same way; dominant or submissive. We all want the other to be honest, to be caring and/or loving, to trust and to be trustworthy. Yes, one leads and the other follows but that does not mean that the same ethical standards do not apply to both persons.

A lovely woman wrote to me a while ago of her hurt when her mentor suddenly disappeared from her life. He had been kind and good and helped her a great deal and suddenly he was gone. She thought I might understand how she felt. And, I did. I did understand. We all have certain expectations, I think, and one of those expectations is that people say their ‘goodbyes’, if they must. We find our host at the end of the evening to offer our thanks for a lovely party. We say goodbye to a parent or child before we leave the house, even if there has been a quarrel. We say goodnight to our spouse, regardless of what has gone on that day. We do these things because it is the right thing to do and we know that, deep in our souls, if no other place.

I knew he should have said goodbye to her and she knew that I knew that he should have said goodbye to her. Still, the merciful side of me felt obliged to suggest that perhaps he could not say goodbye. Perhaps he felt a sense of guilt or some other negative emotion that did not allow him to do what he knew, no doubt, he should do. Or, perhaps he just didn't think how he would have felt if she had done that to him. I try hard to find the good in people, to recognize their limitations and to work with that, to the extent possible. None of us is perfect and there is most surely a place for forgiveness; to give forgiveness and to ask for it.

Whatever our religion or our upbringing or the country or community in which we were raised, there is a sense of decency that applies to us all. We really do know the right thing to do. We just slip in our standards. We get sloppy.

At this time of the year, many of us will be reflecting on our faith and considering ways in which we may be a better person; cleansing our souls, perhaps. I hold to the long held notion that if we treat others as we would like to be treated; if civility and manners and a code of conduct were uppermost in our minds, we would all be the benefactors of a better world. I am proud to be in a power exchange dynamic that holds both participants to the highest standards.