House Tearmainn

Here it is, a post 4 years in the making. No, make that 35 years. I have a feeling that everything I’ve seen, done, and become in my life will inform this post in some way. I admit that the idea of committing this to written form is terrifying. Not because people may think I’m wrong or foolish, but because I know that as much as anything that I have done in the past 4 years this will become a part of the identity I am building in pais.

My views and definitions of what makes a slave are constantly evolving, and I know that isn’t about to stop. However I was rightfully and dutifully called out today on dodging this question for a long time now, and so I will give it my best shot. I hope that this will be the first of many such posts so that I can go back and see how the changes evolve.

So what is a slave? We are all at least a little conversant with the traditional definition of slavery. I like Wikipedia’s take on it:

Slavery is a form of forced labor in which people are considered to be, or treated as, the property of others. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to receive compensation (such as wages)

I’m a bit less thrilled with their definition of sexual slavery:

Sexual slavery is the organized coercion of unwilling people into different sexual practices. Sexual slavery may include single-owner sexual slavery, ritual slavery sometimes associated with traditional religious practices, slavery for primarily non-sexual purposes where sex is common, or forced prostitution.

I don’t believe that it need be organized to be sexual slavery, but I digress. The key component of traditional slavery is that it involves the coercion of unwilling people. These slaves at no time consented to this.

Naturally when pais asks me what a slave is she is not referring to traditional/historical slavery. I believe that what she’s really asking is some combination of “What do you expect from me?”, “How do you perceive the my role in our relationship?”, and “As Your slave, what should my identity be?”. I suppose to answer that I must first decide in what ways she is a slave.

I did not purchase, inherit, or in any legal way come into possession of her. She chose to become mine after getting to know me and deciding that granting authority to me was a safe and reasonable thing to do. So, easily enough we have eliminated the possibility that she is a traditional/historical slave. In all other ways, however, she does meet that definition.

So, we have narrowed down the scope of the question to consensual slavery. It seems to me that the definition of consensual slavery must match that of traditional slavery- she can be forced to work, coerced when necessary, and could potentially be held against her will. All of these things she agreed to, and some she had to be absolutely assured of before she would consent to be collared. Still, those are only things that can happen to a slave. What of the slaves themselves? The definition rightly leaves out any concept of what a “good” slave is, as such a value judgment is solely the province of their owner.

Hm. I’m wandering again, which undoubtedly means I’m still avoiding the question. Luckily we’re almost to the meat of the issue. What do I think of when I imagine a “good” consensual slave, and how does that play in to what pais means when she asks what a slave is?

For me a consensual slave is an objectified servant. The extent of objectification can vary widely, but I think the objectification is the essential difference between slave and servant. I also think that the concept of this objectification is what causes people, at a gut level, to reject the terms “master” and “slave” as descriptive of their relationships. I’ve recently struggled with this myself as pais is more than a consensual slave to me, I am in love with her. As such I identify her as a pet as well as a slave and have recently taken to calling her a “pup slave”. This has been invaluable to me in keeping the roles clear and maintaining that level of objectification.

I suppose the next logical question is what is the different between a “pup slave” and a “consensual slave”? Well, for me a pup slave is a consensual slave. Just one whose identity is a pet instead of inanimate chattel (by most definitions pets are chattel, so I suppose this is really a sub-set). Pets tend to get more affection, tenderness, and love than household or personal objects, and that is just how I like it. As to how this ties into what pais is really asking, I suppose it breaks down like this:

“What do you expect from me?”

I expect service, loyalty, obedience, affection, flexibility, and the kind of worship a pup gives their owner.

“How do you perceive the my role in our relationship?”
“As Your slave, what should my identity be?”

I see you as a treasured, beloved, useful working animal. Often times I still see a lot more than that, but I think that is the ideal, primary role. Of course I need more than that right now, and your ability to fulfill all of the roles I need is not only critical to us being able to live together right now, but also a very necessary part of our path toward a deeper M/s dynamic.

Of course this has all gotten very specific to my relationship with pais. I feel another post brewing about how I feel about non-pais slaves. A long time from now I may even feel qualified to speak to slavery in general, who knows?

Life continues to be full of ups and downs and weird little turns. There are lots of interesting things going on, but nothing that seems appropriate to put up here. I intend to have violet start posting here since she enjoys writing and I enjoy reading her writing. I would also like to read what pais has to say, but her writing tends to be deeply personal and less appropriate for this venue.

I am, obviously, having some trouble staying on top of my various responsibilities. Priority shuffling hasn’t resolved the issue completely, but has made everyone feel neglected. It’s good to be consistent. I didn’t have a lot to cut back on to begin with, posting here has certainly suffered for it. Things are moving back towards a level of normalcy as everyone learns what they can expect, and I learn how to distribute my time and energy better. Everyone expected a period of adjustment bringing violet in, but that doesn’t quite make the transition itself pleasant.

The transitional period with violet is going to dovetail with more changes in the coming month as pais goes back to work, violet has various life changes around work and living situations, and I change jobs. Nothing is ever simple, though, and I suppose this will be good practice for us all in dealing with stress as a family.

Overall things are better, and back to “good”. One more good night’s sleep and I’m hoping things can creep back over the line to “awesome”. There is currently some discussion of how things will work when violet comes out to visit next month. I suspect this will be the topic of several upcoming posts, hopefully it will stay as positive and upbeat as it has been.

Yeah, that was today. I have kept an even temper through a world of shit, tackled several difficult discussions / meetings / happenings better than I would have guessed, and managed to maintain a mostly positive attitude on things. Even so there are still things I would like to do better.

My chief regret for the day is how I handled this morning. My job allows a fair amount of working from home, at least in theory. In reality I often need to make meetings or be in my much more efficient work space there to get things done.

I had planned earlier in the week to take today off, and told pais so. Things changed significantly enough yesterday that it was still in debate whether I could work from home as of this morning. This is never a good thing. Neither of us handles abrupt changes in plans particularly well at the best of times, and a plan change that causes us to be apart can be very upsetting for her. Above and beyond that, last night’s ritual went amazingly well, and with an extremely high level of connection between us. Not exactly the best way to go into a morning where I was going to be away unexpectedly, especially since in my dithering I had failed to even mention the possibility to pais.

Knowing how this goes, she asked if I was staying home a bit into this morning’s routine. I didn’t have an answer for her, strike 1. I tried to justify why I felt I that I needed to to in, strike 2. Then I dithered some more and had a minor freakout about her (really quite minor) negative reaction. Poor form, all around, and not exactly the kind of thing you can remedy in 5 minutes while rushing out the door.

I like to be needed, and get an absurd amount of joy from how much she needs to be with me. While I could certainly change her behavior to be more positive about my being away, I don’t want to. No, the fault here is mine and it’s a problem only I can fix. In truth my major issues dealing with this predate pais, but that is a story for another time.

I think that in the future I will not talk to her about any plans I may have to work from home ahead of time. Let it be a pleasant surprise instead of an expectation that can be bucked. Additionally I will try once again to keep my feelings of responsibility to work in balance with my personal life. I’m not always so good at that. In fact if I don’t work at it I take all of my responsibilities equally seriously, and manage to somehow short them all.

In closing I would like to state for the record that I an very glad this day is over.

Another short post night, due to ritual. There is a lot going on in my brain, as usual. I think a pensieve would be useful about now. Many of my thoughts are consumed by other peoples’ business, things that only affect me peripherally. Aside from that, I’ve also got plans which may or may not turn into Plans sometime soon.

Today was the first day of pais’ new life regimen and it went very well. Future days should involve less locking her out of the house. A couple of folks have asked what the new schedule is like. For the most part it is a formalized version of what was going on before, but with more focus on planning her time when I’m not around. I’ve found that pais generallyl works best when left to her weird way of doing things, which is incomprehensible to me but gets things where I need them so I don’t worry about it. So I plan in detail the things that I care about, or that have hard time limits, then block off a couple of hours here and there for doing cleaning chores, or working on projects for me.

The biggest change in things is probably even more communication. In this case that means communication of exactly which things from my approved lists will be done each day, as well as any special exceptions / impediments / etc that she foresees. Then there is one in the evening detailing what got done when, how long it took, which (if any) things that from the morning list didn’t get done, and why. With a sample size of one I can only say that it feels great having that level of visibility into the day right at my fingertips, and being able to see what she has been up to so that I can be specifically pleased by it. Sometimes I just don’t notice that the bathroom got cleaned or what-have-you.

She’s in a much better mood, as one might expect. I’m pleased, and there is coffee at 10pm. This should be a good night.

Aiming for a short post tonight, it’s late already and there are Wednesday Beatings to dish out. I had a lovely, long walk with pais tonight and we talked about many things, as usual. Often there is one big topic that either dominates the discussion or my impression thereof, and the one for tonight was adding more structure and control to her life while she’s job searching.

This has come up before, and I’ve been loathe to unleash my demons on the topic because I know the situation is temporary. What’s the use in getting us both on a yummy structured routine just in time to tear it down in favor of a random work schedule? Well, as it turns out there are a few. Work has not been forthcoming for her, and in the current economy may not be for a bit. This is ok, I can afford to wait for the right job… for now.

For the last few weeks I have been increasingly tossing around ideas as to how I would add more structure to her life, and how I could increase my visibility into what she gets up to when I’m not home. So tonight when it came up it seemed like a good time to engage some of those plans. A couple of hours later and there it is, a much more finely scheduled and transparent day, along with some new tasks, and the flexibility we need at this point.

In hindsight I really should have done this long ago, but in truth I didn’t think finding work would be so difficult. I suspect that if work is too long coming this will be hard to break out of, but at least in the meantime we both get to feel like she is being used closer to her potential.

I had written a fair amount about anger earlier. I suppose I’ll get back to it, but I’m not in the morose place I was earlier in the day. I watched Tron with the eldest and pais, which has greatly improved my mood. It also made pais wet. My kinda pervert.

Hmm. I haven’t talked much about the kids here, I really like to keep those spaces as separate as possible, but if anyone ever stumbles upon this I suppose they should have a little context. I have 3 kids, all between 4 and 12. I have both girls and boys. I have custody of them 1/2 of the time, which is in the process of being formalized in divorce.

I love them very much and want to give them every advantage in life. Part of that, to me, is both an open mind and as much modeling of healthy behavior as possible. At current that means keeping all M/s aspects of my life as far from them as I keep s/m (that being “very”). I am not ashamed of my lifestyle, far from it, but it is my firm belief that they should have as much freedom of choice in their lives as possible. I feel that modeling a lifestyle so obviously different has a very good chance of generating in them an increased feeling of separation from “normal” life. There is no lack of “weird” in their lives, but I think this would be so overwhelmingly different that it would have a significant chance of damaging their ability to choose their own lifestyle.

Their lives aren’t risk-free, and I would not make them so if I could. If they come to this lifestyle on their own, on either side of the dynamic, I can’t honestly say I’d be more or less proud of them. I would still love them, though, and accept their choice. As long as I know it was their choice and not some artifact of my own choices.

Of course there will come a time when the cat will be out of the bag, on my timeline or not. I can’t rightly say when that will be at this point. It’s years out, at least, but I often think about what I will say when the time comes. Should be an interesting day.

In the meantime, pais and I act quite overtly vanilla in their presence. She argues, contradicts, teases, and in all other ways behaves in an egalitarian manner. It’s humbling, and I’m grateful for that. She is never anything but a slave, however… just one that is pleasing me in a most bizarre and difficult way. I have no doubt that I could order her to do anything in front of the kids and she would comply after ascertaining that she understood what I was saying. She trusts me to refrain, and I do… just as I do on the train, at restaurants, around our families, at work, etc.

Some will undoubtedly say that this makes us something other than what we are. I understand the desire to draw boundaries around the things that define us. To say this is (M/s|TPE|24/7|etc), and that is not. I encourage others to question their views and definitions of those terms, I certainly do. In the end, for me, what constitutes a 24/7 TPE M/s relationship is the following:

A D/s relationship where there are no limits to the dominant’s authority over the submissive aside from those the dominant chooses, and those may change at any time the dominant chooses, for any reason the dominant sees fit.

That describes my relationship perfectly, and so I feel comfortable claiming that particular alphabet soup for us. That said, I’m always open to other opinions and I would rather have an accurate description than one that suits my identity/self-image/vanity.

Tonight’s post is a request from the peanut gallery. While we were lounging about in bed last night, pais brought up something I had said last week. I am having some difficulty remembering the details of the original conversation, but the gist was that I am feeling more comfortable in my sadism these days because I am feeling more connected with her during play than I have allowed myself to feel in the past. She thought it was Important, and for all I know it could be. One thing it will not be is short.

I suppose some context is necessary here, but where to begin? Childhood again, I suppose. How original! True, nevertheless. There were anger issues in my house growing up. When I began to show my own propensity for violence when angry back in elementary school, things escalated to the point of some fairly serious abuse by 8th grade.

The end result of all of this craziness, for me, was an inability to express emotion, especially negative emotion. So fast forward a dozen years or so, and I had dealt with much of that. Expressing feelings wasn’t so hard, but anger was still largely out of the question except in very extreme circumstances… which at that time were becoming increasingly common.

At this point, a few years ago now, I had been playing inconsistently with different aspects of BDSM for a decade or so with limited success and a couple of spectacular failures. A recurring problem was that while I enjoyed sadistic activities, it was a very dodgy subject for me. Too close to an angry space, too close to violence I’d gone so far to prevent from ever happening again.

Often I would find that if I enjoyed a scene a lot the bottom was overwhelmed if not outright miserable. I was told that there was not enough ramp-up, not enough after care, and almost no feedback during the scene that I was enjoying myself. I learned to do those things, but got little from those experiences except a vague feeling of being a service top. Obviously there was something missing.

Fast forward a few more years and I am engaged in my first relationship that is purely D/s based… pais. Things on the s/m front started off well enough, but before long the old issues pop up. She’s not enjoying the play as much, I am less inclined to ramp-up and more inclined to fall asleep than to provide after care. Bollocks.

The old voices pop up in my head saying I’m just no good at this, that really I secretly want to hurt someone that doesn’t like it to get my non-consensual jollys, etc. As time goes by it gets harder for pais to cope, and slowly it becomes a big issue. I could have continued on that path, it was within my rights, but I like her functional and happy. Play trailed off and finally dwindled to almost nothing.

Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t work for either of us. I had conceded long ago that some level of s/m was, in fact, a need for her, and I had a strong feeling that it was a need for me in a way that I had never been quite able to put my finger on. So we talked about it, tried things, failed, talked, stopped trying, failed, talked some more… you get the idea. There didn’t seem to be a way for both of us to get what we needed.

At the same time as all of this, our Master/slave relationship has continued to evolve. There have been the typical ups and downs, and probably some atypical ones, but overall things have gone splendidly. As I have grown more comfortable in mastery the further I’ve gone from my preconceived idea of what “a Master should be”, and the closer I’ve come to “what kind of Master do I want to be?”. As I’ve come further down that path the easier I’ve found it to be emotionally close to her.

Some weeks ago we were having another series of discussions about s/m. By this point, of course, it’s something of a touchy subject. The new openness with her had opened some doors, though, and I was able to see something I had somehow missed previously… the walls I put up when we engaged in s/m. They were tall and thick, and There For Her Protection, and so necessary that they weren’t even worth noticing. Given the things I’ve done to her, things we’ve both loved so much, given how much of me she’s seen including the very worst that I’ve got to offer, the idea of trying to protect her from me while playing seemed to be worth looking at.

When I looked I found what you would expect. Fear of myself, of course, a long-time companion. Also fear of her, I hadn’t really realized how much I had invested in the idea of being a “good top” and how those mounting (and well earned) criticisms had left me insecure and vulnerable to her feelings on the matter.

Well, I am a lot of awful things but rarely a coward. Fear is a motivator for me, and once I’d wrapped my head around it I had a notion that I could do without those walls. Perhaps being more in tune with her would break down some of those mysteries surrounding this stuff.

Sure enough, we played and it was amazing. I started off slow because that is what one “should” do, but this time I could feel the energy building in her… and in myself. The same energy I used to feel doing ritual spiritual work or in meditation. I worked it up harder, growing the energy and feeling it echo back and forth between us, finally understanding what all of the fuss was about, and what that need of mine was.

I stopped sooner than I would have before, because it wasn’t just about hurting her as much as I could or taking her deep, it was about the connection. The connection was good and strong, and that meant it was time for other activities. One of them was aftercare. Not because I felt guilted into it, but because I felt close to her and wanted to feel that energy echo until it was grounded out… because I needed it. It was intense enough of an experience that I’ve been slow to repeat it for fear of falling back into bad habits, but I think that portion of things might just be under control.

Looking back I can think of other instances where the connection was like that, with pais and others, but those were the exceptions and I never really could understand why those experiences were different from the others. Interesting.