My Journey: Virtual Deviance

Although I avoided typical sexual exploration during my teen years, I explored another avenue: online. Of course, at the time I did not connect my spanking interest with my sexuality, so this exploration was perhaps not what you might expect.

When I was fifteen, my parents bought me a laptop and ran a phone line into my bedroom to provide an internet connection. I'm old enough that this was both highly unusual and well before the public was aware of the danger minors could find online. My older siblings had sold my parents on the wonders of email communication, so we had an internet connection at home before my school had a connection.

I started with all the searches I had been unable to complete on the family computer. This quickly led me to A.S.S. and later S.S.S - boards full of spanking stories. From there, I found several sites that collected or published stories. And, of course, I found Shadowlane and began to dream about attending a spanking party.

But I also spend hours playing on a MUSH (multi-user shared hallucination), a text-based roleplaying game similar to a MUD (multi-user dungeon). I was active on several different vanilla MUSHes, based on my favorite fantasy books at the time. Of course, in these flexible environments, I found a few people interested in roleplaying other types of interactions.

I developed a "relationship" with one of those people. He described himself as a boy near my age, perhaps a bit older. He would roleplay spanking me. In exchange, we would also roleplay scenes in which he would nurse from me. I couldn't imagine why he wanted to do this, but I also hadn't met anyone who had my reaction to spanking, so I went along with it. I still didn't think of this as sexual. The spanking roleplays we enacted were just fun, exciting stories I told with another person.

I wanted to meet him, eventually. But to do that, I had to explain to my mother where I had met this person. She put the kabosh on that idea right quick. She may not have had a clue about internet safety, but my mother had a healthy dose of common sense. This discussion was also the second step in outing myself to my mother - I allowed her to read some of the exchanges. She was disturbed by the spanking scenes we had written, but not the nursing scenes. This was memorable, but I refuse to think any further about it.

During my senior year, I found Adult Friend Finder. There, I found someone interested primarily in spanking. We talked for a long time. During the summer after my senior year, I decided I would meet him in person. I asked my oldest sister to act as my safe call. Unfortunately, she changed her mind and I decided not to meet him at that time.

Three months later, I met him without the safety of a safe call. While I certainly wouldn't recommend that method to anyone, it worked out fine for me. I had my first spanking. We've gotten together several times over the years. He's still one of my dearest friends.

My Journey: Delayed Sexuality

As my classmates navigated the rough waters of puberty, my journey was delayed. Through junior high and even high school, my interest in sex remained somewhere between a child's "ew gross, they are kissing" and a spectator's detached disinterest. I attribute this primarily to two things. First, my physical maturity lagged behind the norm. I was the last girl in my class to start her period, by over a year, and I was among the older kids in my class. My hormones were markedly delayed. And I believe my sexual interest was delayed as a result. But equally important, I have three significantly older siblings. I had watched their teenage drama, up close and frequently theatrical, through a child's bemused eyes. I watched my classmates date and wrestle with sex the same way, as a disinterested observer. By the time my classmates were dating, my siblings had settled into their adult lives. When I became interested, I wanted to skip the angst for a mature relationship. That isn't to say I was particularly happy in my detachment; I wasn't. I wanted very much to be "normal." But I didn't see my interest in spanking as a sexual interest, so I began to wonder if I even had an interest in sex. I certainly was not interested in the cautious fumblings of my first post-puberty boyfriend. When that relationship imploded (there is simply no other description when your high school boyfriend impregnates the girl who had been offering your little brother blow-jobs on the school bus), I found myself more interested in another girl. Our sexual exploration was far more satisfying, but that relationship was equally doomed. Her interest in me, unfortunately, went only so far as the boys were willing to pay for our affectionate displays with alcohol and other mind-altering substances. I graduated high school a virgin.

My Journey: Early Explorations in Poly

I'm a little late posting this week. I had a wonderful, but exhausting, experience at BOLD this weekend. Craig and I will be writing about the conference on our joint blog, and I'm sure BOLD will feature in my later entries about my journey into the lifestyle. But now, I'm back to the beginning.

My first relationship was a long one - nearly eight years with my elementary school sweetheart. But looking back, it was a very non-traditional relationship. My mother, an elementary school teacher by training and a very perceptive and amazing woman, informed my teacher at kindergarden roundup that I "got along better with boys than with girls." At the time, I only knew this was noteworthy because my mother made a point of preparing my teacher. Now, I understand that I was of an age where one typically enjoys the company of one's own gender. For now, I won't look into that any further than to say that I was a tom-boy.

My class had desks that seated two students, with a shared section between. My teacher seated me with a boy I will call Cody. In our small class of 16 students, we were the only gender mixed pair sharing a desk. My mother's instruction, it seemed, had been taken seriously by my teacher. We were fast friends. And sooner than I would like to admit, we were kissing in the coatroom.

But the remarkable thing about this relationship was not our matching, flame-red hair, or the speed of our friendship, or even the length of our childhood bond. No, the interesting thing about this pairing was the fact that we developed a poly relationship without any knowledge that such a thing existed.

You see, I grew up in a very small town with ultra conservative values. Even such ordinary things like divorce and remarriage were things that "other people did" (maybe, in extreme circumstances). But Cody and I faced a situation uncommon in childhood relationships and we addressed it with the openminded flexibility of problem-solvers.

Neither Cody nor I would ever get an award for perfect school attendance. We were both sickly children, in our own ways. I was plagued by ear infections and respiratory issues. Cody had several open-heart surgeries while we were in elementary school. All told, we probably missed more days of school than we attended. Faced with the untenable possibility of a school day without our significant other, we arranged to have "backup boyfriend/girlfriend(s)".

I overcame my inability to make friends with other girls, establishing two best girlfriends in elementary school. One of those girls was dating Cody's good friend. Looking back on the five of us, I see a fledgling leather family. With three girls and two boys, I always had someone to hold hands with, to hug, to play with, and to kiss - and yes, we explored the limits of our childhood relationships fairly openly among the group.

At the time, I thought of this as a convenience among good friends. Even when Cody and I "broke up" so that he could focus on a single relationship, I believed this was because he wished to go beyond my limits. (I was a late-bloomer, in terms of sexual/physical maturity, but more on that later.) It's only looking back that I see it was probably my unconventional definition of dating that caused his discomfort.

I left that relationship to try, unsuccessfully, to date a pair of fraternal twins. Yes, at the same time, openly. That didn't last, but it was fun.

The only thing I wonder, looking back at these early stories, is why it took me so long to realize I was poly!

Friday Fiction: Little Miss Matched

"Your socks don't match," he said when he walked into the bedroom.

She looked up from her iPhone at him, tapping something to pause her game before she responded: "No, they don't."

"Come here," he ordered.

She stood up, looking bemused. He simply glared at her socks as she made her way across the room.

"You bought them for me," she offered, "At that store at Disney, remember? Little Miss Matched?"

"Certainly not! Why would I buy socks that don't match?"

"But," she shook her head, stomping one stockinged foot on the ground, "You did buy them!"

"Young lady," he growled. Without further discussion, he grabbed her arm and pulled her over to the bed. He bent her over the side and flipped her skirt up over her back. He gave her bottom several hard smacks.

She stood still, more confused by this assault than concerned. Finally, she said, "You're spanking me because my socks don't match?"

"No," he said, continuing to smack her bottom, "I'm spanking you because I want to spank you. Your socks are a convenient excuse."

My Journey: BOLD 2014

This jumps ahead a bit in the story of my journey in the lifestyle, but I'm going to share something I wrote about the upcoming event, BOLD 2014. This is cross-posted (with a few edits) from FetLife.

I’ve run the gamut in my exploration of lifestyle and kink – I’ve attended local and national spanking parties, I’ve explored swinging parties and visited swinger’s resorts, I enjoy my local dungeon and I’ve tried leather events like Thunder in the Mountains.

But if I had to limit myself to only one conference this year, that one would be BOLD.

Because, I identify as MDHL. No – I’m not male, I’m not dominant, and I’m not, even primarily, heterosexual.

But MDHL is my primary relationship. MDHL defines my family-of-choice. (MDH describes my family of blood, in all positive ways, for whatever that’s worth.) MDHL is my lifestyle. And some version of poly / MDHL is my fantasy for the future.

And at BOLD, I found an acceptance of all of those things that is absent in the other places I’ve looked. You can read about last year here . At BOLD, I found new friends struggling with the very issues that bother me the most. I learned new strategies for problems I hadn’t recognized yet. I discovered an energy and an acceptance I hadn’t found anyplace else.

And that’s why I am looking forward to BOLD this year.

If you'd like more information about BOLD, you can find BOLD on Facebook or the BOLD website.

Flash Fiction: Happy Valentine's Day

"Happy Valentine's," he began as he walked into the bathroom. The sight of her naked in the tub stopped him cold.

Upon seeing him, she sat up so quickly that water splashed in every direction. He took two steps to the side of the tub. He further unsettled the splashing water, grabbing her by the ear and pulling her to her feet.

"You are supposed to be ready to go," he growled.

Her eyes flicked nervously to the clock, "Um, well. You've still got to change, right?"

He stared at her for a long moment without saying a word. His gaze traveled from her hair, pinned untidily to the top of her head for her bath, down her body, still dripping with water.

"Turn around. Put your hands on the wall," he ordered as he walked into his closet. He grabbed the cane that hung just inside the door, always ready for just this sort of occasion.

He struck without a word, the cane leaving a bright red welt across her bottom. He continued, the silence broken only by the quiet moans that escaped her lips and the whip of the cane through the air. When he finished, he set the cane aside and picked up the towel she had folded on the side of the tub. He wrapped the towel around her and helped her out of the tub into a hug.

"Are we gonna be late?" she asked quietly, looking up at him carefully.

He kissed her forehead and gave her bottom a squeeze, "I allowed extra time. I know you. Now get ready!"

My Journey: Elementary School Years

I've decided to start by telling, or re-telling, my journey into the world of kink. This will be a series of posts.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't fascinated by spanking. My parents didn't spank. I grew up in a very rural area, so I was never exposed to neighborhood children being spanked. By the time I was a child, the politically correct movement had removed spanking from the television shows, movies, and most books I was exposed to. But I was a insatiable reader and I managed to find references to spanking in a number of children's books.

There are two spanking scenes in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The first of these - Laura's strapping after a fight with her sister over chores - is my most vivid childhood memory of spanking. Not because of the scene, mind you. I've looked back at it; I had a vivid imagination to go with my literary appetite. No. At some point in elementary school, we had to memorize and recite a poem in class. Having done that, I wondered what else I could memorize and recite. My first attempt consisted of two pages from Little House in the Big Woods, including that scene. (I found the text of the book online. The passage I memorized is about 1,200 words long.)

Thrilled with my new-found ability, I handed the book to my mother and recited two pages word perfect. I'll never forget the look on her face. My mother was an elementary school teacher turned stay-at-home mom with five children. She supported our reading addictions and demanded our academic success. She had a Masters Degree in English. And she had absolutely no idea what to say when her youngest daughter recited a lengthy "spanking scene" from a children's book.

Having gotten the hint that something was unusual about my interest, I turned to more circumspect investigations. I remember looking up every synonym of spanking in the big dictionary on a stand in the school library. And I fell in love with historical fiction, for that possibility that a spanking might be included or even just suggested.

But there was never enough to satisfy my fascination. I would imagine spanking scenes for bratty children in the books I read. I played out those scenes with my dolls. I even bribed my little brother into spanking me (he barely tapped me) and into letting me spank him (neither of us enjoyed that). As I got older, I would write spanking stories and those missing spanking scenes. Quite often, I would write a story that included a spanking without writing the spanking, terrified someone might find out my secret. But it would be years until anyone did - in a series of unusual ways.