feeling it

I was still sore from my spankings when I woke up this morning and sitting on the sofa with my coffee was a slightly delicate process. It was challenging to find a comfortable position given the differing levels and areas of soreness left from two days of spanking but I have to admit that I’m loving every minute of it. I’m especially enjoying Ma’am’s reactions to both my fidgeting and viewing her marks.

When Ma’am wordlessly took my hand and led me into the bedroom before she had to leave for work I was a little nervous - the bedroom usually means heavier pain and the fact that I was already sore didn't seem to bode well for me. I was right to be nervous...with my jeans on the floor, Ma’am had me bend over the side of the bed while she went about providing a very hard spanking. In this position, I tend to get up on my toes when the pain is intense – and Ma’am had me there several times. Fortunately, Ma’am’s intent this morning had not been to further mark me – she wanted me to remain sore today so that I would think of her as I sat in the hard desk chair while I was working.

So far it has been a wonderful weekend – I am a well-contented and well-spanked girl who is looking forward to what tomorrow brings. My task for today was to purchase some fresh ginger…which I hope we will be using tomorrow!

twice marked

As I mentioned yesterday, Ma’am was very pleased to have marked me on Thursday evening. And last night when her inspection proved that her marks were still there, I couldn’t help but laugh delightedly when I heard her triumphant chuckling coming from behind me. It has long been her frustration that my ever-resilient bottom does not retain evidence of her attentions and so it was no surprise a little later in the evening when she ordered me to drop my pants and assume the position.

Once I was settled over her lap, Ma’am spent some time admiring her handiwork with both her eyes and her hands. Her intentions were clearly evident - she was proud of her marks and she wanted to add to them. I could already see that the wooden spoon and tawes were within arms reach but there was something behind her back that she was hiding. It turned out to be a wide wooden hairbrush.

While both were enjoyable, Friday night’s spanking was a vastly different experience than Thursday’s. Still being sore in the places that Ma’am most likes to strike, it was more painful from the start. But when her attention turned toward pressing, pinching and squeezing my hot and sore bottom, the feeling was truly divine. I was so sensitive that even the softest caress resulted in shivers of pleasure down my spine. The unfortunate side effect was that the sensitivity made me less able to tolerate her harder strokes – especially from the hairbrush and spoon – and Ma’am found herself holding back.

The new marks she left were much more red and obvious than Thursday’s had been. When I showed them to her she seemed almost surprised, as if she hadn’t expected that she would be able to mark me 2 days in a row. But she was thrilled to see them...so much so that she took a few photos.

drop kick

I don’t drop often and have never dropped as badly as I did earlier this week… my mood swings were so sudden and severe that they made me feel as if I was coming unhinged. Each day the mood swings became a little more frequent and of longer duration, my mental state a little murkier in the better moments. By Wednesday, my concentration was showing signs of strain and my only comfort was that in a few short hours I would finally be able to spend some much needed time with my Ma’am. So you can imagine how I felt when I received Ma’am’s text informing me that she would have to work and that I would be spending the evening alone. It was like a sucker punch and the emotional pendulum I’d been riding tossed me off into a sea of petulance and misery.

Despite not having seen me in a couple of days, Ma’am was well aware of what I had been going through. She knew that our aborted plans would likely have a detrimental effect on me and decided an intervention was in order. So she reminded me of how much she loves me and then stepped in and took control of my evening. Brief conversations provided instructions, tasks and an assignment to be completed – all designed to ensure that I took care of myself, to redirect my focus and to give me an opportunity to be of service. They were simple things when looked at individually. But combined into a greater whole, they achieved a significance and power which somehow managed to help me to reclaim my center and emotional balance. By the time I’d completed my first task, I could already feel the hold of the drop slackening. And by the time I took myself off to bed, the erratic excess emotion that had plagued me for days seemed to be just a memory.

On Thursday, Ma’am and I spent a pleasant and somewhat unusual evening together. We talked comfortably for hours about all manner of things and connected on level we hadn’t yet reached as Ma’am and girl. As the hour turned late, I noted with a playful pout that I had hoped the evening would include a beating. It wasn’t long before I was laid out over Ma’am’s lap, jeans and panties half-mast, fairly purring from the enthusiastic attention of Ma’am’s hands and her tawse. Amazingly enough, my too resilient bottom still bears her marks today – something Ma’am was mightily pleased with as they generally fade very quickly.

drop

My professional life has gone into chaos – I’ve been working way too many hours and it’s been a demoralizing month or so where it seems almost everything that should be under control is not. The powers that be have been tinkering with the infrastructure again and just about everyone is overwhelmed by the volume of work and underwhelmed by management’s response to our plight. To say I’m a bit stressed is an understatement.

Predictably, the stress has been bringing out both submissive and masochistic tendencies that I’m sorry to say haven’t been able to have much free reign during this period. I’ve been craving discipline, a harsh hand and tighter control. Unfortunately, life and work have been getting in the way of my time with Ma’am. Pair that with an unfortunate misunderstanding with Ma’am during our last session and an inadvertent rebuff a couple of nights ago and you have very fertile ground for the emotional hijacking known as sub-drop.

I’ve been fighting it since Saturday evening but it’s a persistent boomerang that keeps coming back. Some moments I’m perfectly fine but others I’m plagued by a pervasive sadness and terrible thoughts that Ma’am is either no longer interested in me or not fully committed to our D/s relationship (both which I know not to be true in more logical moments). Last night it got so bad that I had to get out of bed in fear that the tears that were trembling just under the surface would wake her… the same tears that threatened to overtake me on my lunch break as the miserable emotions inside me tried to convince me that Ma’am had actually intended to reject me on Saturday evening.

Right now all I want is to curl up next to Ma’am’s feet and feel the soothing touch of her hands in my hair. Or be pulled across her lap and feel the bite of her hands coming down upon my naked ass. But I won't see her until tomorrow night...and thinking and yearning for this only makes the sadness more acute.

Sub-drop is an insidious and terrible thing - a form of torture that not even the most hardcore masochist can enjoy. And I am definitely not a hardcore masochist.

saturday

There are 15 glass pebbles in the vase in our living room – representing the 15 swats I owe Ma’am for minor transgressions and lapses. It’s my responsibility to ask permission to trade in the pebbles and receive the punishment I’ve earned…but in the 3 months since the system went into effect I have yet to ask Ma’am for her discipline. I’ve been saving my pebbles. I go through periods where I crave more discipline and experience has shown that in those times I have a tendency to be more lax in my behavior and service. It seemed a good idea to save the pebbles for those times rather than risk acting up with Ma’am.

This past Saturday I had planned to finally kneel before Ma’am and ask her permission to redeem a number of the pebbles I’d earned. Since I hadn’t done this before, I wanted to be sure that I knew the ritual aspects of the asking and the proper protocol for accepting the punishment. I didn’t know if Ma’am would ask if I remembered the reasons I’d earned each of the pebbles and so I decided that I’d better memorize them as well. My memory is not always the best under pressure so I reviewed everything again and again. I kept coming back to it throughout the day to be sure I remembered – the result of which was that my craving for discipline and ritual had grown throughout the day. It sounds weird to say but I was looking forward to the opportunity to ask to redeem my pebbles.

I didn’t have anything special planned for dinner - I’d arranged for food to be delivered about half an hour after Eve was due home. I’d decided to wait a short while after we’d had dinner before going to Eve for 2 reasons – to allow her to rest and relax a bit and also to ensure that she didn’t have any plans for service that I didn’t yet know about.

While we waited for the delivery person to arrive, Eve came across a movie that she wanted to watch. It didn’t end very late so I decided I could wait until after the movie was over. The movie wasn’t bad but I couldn’t help being distracted as we watched. My mind continued to review process, protocol, and transgressions – and I slipped into my submissive headspace before I knew it. As the movie came to an end, I fell prey to a small bout of nerves and left the room to use the washroom. I'd thought that I would assume the proper position and make my request when I came back into the room…

This, of course, is where everything started to go wrong. Eve had found another movie to watch while I was out of the room. She seemed pretty eager to watch it – it was one she’d wanted to see for a long time. When I learned what time the movie ended I saw my hopes for the evening vanish. I wasn’t going to take Eve away from something she clearly wanted to enjoy. We have neighbors and it would be too late to make such noise after this new movie ended. The pebbles would stay in the vase tonight.

Eve turned off the TV and directed her attention to me as two things had perked her interest. I don’t usually ask her what time something ends when she sits down to watch TV and my disappointment at the ending time had been obvious. She thought I wanted to talk about something and wanted to know what it was. The TV was going to remain off until I came out with it.

It bears mentioning that in that moment Eve was my partner, not my Ma’am, and she was speaking to me as such. She didn’t know where my head was, didn’t realize that I was seeing both my Ma’am and my partner sitting before me wanting an answer that I didn’t know how to give. I hadn’t wanted to take her away from what she wanted to do to ask her for something that I wanted. It seemed selfish and inappropriate behavior. Besides, there is a ritual to asking for discipline - I’m not to just blurt it out. I was confused and conflicted – I couldn’t tell her what I was thinking and couldn’t not answer my Ma’am. So I kept trying to tell her that there was nothing I needed to talk about, trying to convince her to turn the TV back on…

For a while Eve’s attitude and queries seemed to indicate that she had a fair idea of what was on my mind. She seemed to be playing with me, taunting me, and a part of me was taking pleasure in it. I’d thought she was too - but then her attitude seemed to suddenly change leaving me feeling confused and rejected. I’m not sure either one of us knew what was going on at that point and things quickly began to spiral out of control.

Eve ended up angry which I couldn’t help emotionally reacting to more as her submissive than her partner. As she took the time she needed to calm down, the quiet had the opposite effect on me. My mind was in turmoil…the emotional responses fueled by my submission prodded me to a place where all I could see was rejection and responsibility for Ma’am’s anger and displeasure…

Sigh...not exactly the Saturday night I’d had in mind.

conflicted compliance

I have this rule that for the better part of a year I hated. It was among the first given to me from my former Sir and upon receiving it I had a strong immediate reaction. It's not just that I didn't like what was being asked of me...I felt that it undermined my femininity and obeying it ran contrary to my personal feelings of what is appropriate in societal terms. I understand that my Sir had his reasons for the rule and he did share them with me when I asked him about them. Learning his reasons didn't make it any easier for me to accept his will but I resolved to do my best to accept and remain obedient in light of my personal feelings. It was my first real struggle in my submission, one I still haven’t resolved completely.

Ma'am made a lot of changes after Sir S left us and it had been my hope that this rule would be amended or eliminated. It wasn't. I'm fairly sure that Ma'am's reasons for keeping it in place are not the same as Sir S's but I've never asked her about it. It is her will and that should be enough for me to find acceptance and obedience. And yet it has not been enough to erase my personal struggle or the internal rebellion that seemed to continually flare. My obedience of this rule has always been more grudging and less complaisant and, although I didn't realize it, it came with a high personal cost.

Not long ago, as I began to gain a deeper understanding of obedience, I started to realize the price I was paying. My inability to accept Ma'am's will with an appropriate attitude, to be able to lay aside my conflicting personal feelings on the matter, and the resulting internal rebellion I nurtured had undermined my confidence in service and built a portion of my self esteem into a fragile house of cards. I had made personal decisions that I would have preferred not to in order to avoid what I felt were the worst implications of my rule until one of these decisions proved a major miscalculation – the outcome was something significantly less than I’d hoped for and the self esteem I hadn’t realized was so fragile came crashing down around me.

It was only after the cards fell and I spent a terrible week trying in vain to rebuild that I realized my own culpability. Until this point, it was easy to blame the rule I hated for whittling down my sense of femininity and self esteem. But it was even easier to overlook the fact that I never once divulged my personal feelings or my struggle and rebellion to my Ma’am. I knew that in order to move forward I needed to find a way to come to terms with my rule. I needed to find the silver lining - something to hold onto that would give me some measure of peace with my obedience. Once found, I would be able to obey with a more appropriate manner and attitude and would eliminate some of my struggle. But first I needed to know why I’d never found a way to speak up about how following this rule made me feel.

The reason was easy enough to identify when I finally went looking for it – following this rule made me feel something else that I’d never quite consciously realized. It made me feel Ma’am’s control - something I’d craved and felt predominantly uncertain of. There was nowhere else in our D/s relationship, nothing else that Ma’am asked or expected of me, that made me feel her control as keenly as I did when facing this terrible rule on a daily basis. I realized that even when that control chafed, it put me in touch with and helped to deepen my sense of submission. There it was – the silver lining.

Almost a year after it was first given to me, I was able to find a much needed measure of peace with Rule 3. I still don’t like the rule but my struggle and feelings of rebellion have greatly diminished since I’ve identified a positive aspect to its existence. I’ve been able to change my attitude from grudging obedience into a more complaisant obedience that is more respectful of my Ma’am and her will - which has shown me glimmers of the contentment and joy that obedience can bring. Someday, I hope to be able to say that my struggle is gone entirely...right now, though, I am content with what I have overcome, what I have learned, and how I have improved the manner of my obedience for my Ma’am.