A Big Decision

Changes are coming in spades at the moment it seems. Earlier this week a rather monumental decision was made. As you all know, we have been trying for the past two years to have a baby. There has been a lot of hope attached to the process and a lot of stress, frustration and fear. Stress of will this be the month to try? If we try will it work? Frustration with the clinic wasting so much of our time as we wait for appointments that they are an hour late for and again the planets not aligning to allow us to try. And fear of what happens if it works. What will change? What will we lose? How much will we struggle financially? How will mental health be affected?

PXS was an amazing experience for us. (Don't worry I'm not actually changing the topic.) We had never been on a real holiday together and having nearly a week where the full focus was pretty much on our Power Exchange was quite an eye opener. The workshops were great, the people wonderful, the realization that we have come so far in the last year and half a high note and then the drop came with the realization it could be many, many years before we are able to go to such a thing again if in the next year we have a baby.

If we have a baby the spontaneous evening of play, pain, fuck, dinner, play, pain, fuck, cake would not be able to happen like that again. We can't ignore our child for hours on end as I make my slave scream in delicious pain and not expect Child and Family Servies to come knocking. Hell it was enough to realize right before the end of a great, kind of loud scene and about ten seconds away from elle orgasming that a police car was sitting in front of our house, lights flashing. Luckily they hadn't come to take me away for beating my slave, but it was still a mood killer. Change that to a baby screaming while elle is screaming and CFS pounding on the door. Play would be out and since a lot of our sex is pretty rough that would be limited too.

Our dynamic has become the foundation for our marriage and we both fear how the addition of a child would affect and change that. Neither of us want the strain on our relationship that would come with very limited ability to continue the rules and protocols that we have while little eyes and ears were around, very limited play, inability to attend conferences out of town, and even just a strain to continue our commitment and dedication to MAsT: Winnipeg.

Not only is the affect to our dynamic of concern because of the fun times but it really helps balance elle's mental health. I'm not just saying we don't want to sacrifice some playtime or change how elle serves me coffee, but it is the structure and release that our dynamic gives to elle that really helps her. After coming back from PXS we both had drop, elle's was quite difficult and took some time to fully come out of. It seemed to be so hard for her in part because she was scared that with daily life and responsibilities back in the picture we would lose some of what we had gained while away. Even just the thought sent her spinning.

We have learned pretty well over the years what makes her mental health worse and what helps. Lack of sleep is not good. One day is manageable but if they start stacking up we both know where that road leads, so we do our best to not let that happen. She has a doctor's note at work so they can't mandate her and really fuck up her sleep; she has a bedtime that we are fairly good at sticking with; I don't have her get up with me in the morning when I think sleep would be more important. It helps. A good sleep for her is probably one of the most effective ways to keep her in a good place. How then would a baby that doesn't sleep through the night for what could be years affect her night after night.

I know sometimes that elle just needs me to back off and give her space; I know that when she is in that place there are sometimes hurtful words and actions that she is not in control of; I know that at that time she needs to see that I'm not going to abandon her; and, I know when she comes back down she needs me more than ever to tell her how much I love her and her home is always with me. Yep, I know all of this. A baby, knows none. A toddler, knows none. A teenager, well that's when we would send them off to boarding school or sell them for medical experiments because they think they know everything.

elle needs peace, structure and to give up control to stay balanced. I need peace, structure and to have control to keep our life balanced. Having a baby would be like adding a ten pound weight to a scale that has feathers on the other side.

If you haven't figured it out yet, we have decided to stop trying to have a baby. Since this decision was made we have both said how much lighter we feel.

Don't get me wrong, before and throughout the process we have both very much wanted a child. I'm sure there will always be a bit of that want left in us. We were trying because we had the best of intentions and had it happened a year ago when we were just starting to really get our M/s feet under us then we would have been thrilled. Now that our M/s is so strong we feel we can't have both. We had to choose and M/s with all of the things that that encompasses for us, is the choice we've made. If we felt we could have both we would. I know this is the right decision for us though.

Slavery Follow-up, PXS Review, and Our New Kink

There are a few things that are swirling around in my head this morning. I haven’t written any sort of follow up to my last post about struggling with the word slave, and neither Master nor I have written about our wonderful experience at the Power eXchange Summit or the new path that we have started to explore.

So to start, the slavery struggle.

I still have a hard time once in a while but I have, for the most part, gotten past thinking that I need to find a new title. Part of it was another book on WWII, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz by David Avey.  The author was a British POW in a camp just outside of Auschwitz who traded places with a Danish Jew twice to get a first-hand account of what was really going on inside the death camp as well as helping another Jewish man. In it he said something along the lines that the Nazis treated the prisoners as less than slaves because a slave is at least valued by their owner. I think that, for the most part, that is true. The Nazis didn’t want those people to survive and did almost everything possible to ensure that they died. Master most definitely values me and want me to live so I can continue serving Her. I am well cared for and want for very little. Hell, yesterday She gave me a foot massage and cooked me dinner.

Another thing that has continued my thoughts on this subject, though not in making me feel more at ease with the title of slave is Episode 73 of the KinkyCast, and some of the writings on the Fetlife profile of the person that they interviewed. There is some very interesting and thought provoking stuff but since I didn’t ask permission to repeat anything that was said/written I will leave it at that and highly suggest that you go listen and read for yourself.

I still don’t know if slave is quite the right word to use. I don’t fit the “true” definition; none of us in the lifestyle do because none of us can truly be owned by another person. We are not forced to obey, we can legally leave at any time and there is not a thing our Owners can legally do to stop us. We choose to obey. We in the BDSM community, and general society at large, to some extent, tend to adapt words to suit our own needs. And words evolve, I get that. But I can’t just pick any word and use it however I so choose. Like I said to Lee the other day I can’t call a road a river and expect others to have a clue what I’m talking about without clarifying and/or explaining what I mean every time I do. We label everything in our world so we can all be on the same page, imagine a world where we all made up our own names for things, it would be chaos! But within the BDSM community I don’t know if there is a better widely known title for what my position is than slave. So slave it is, for now?!?

I’m just starting to repeat what I said in my last post so I will stop here on this topic except to say that there are a few other titles that I have been tossing around (indentured servant and vassal are two) but Master said that She wants me as Her slave so the struggle continues.  More to come on this topic in the future I’m sure.

On to the Power eXchange Summit (PXS) recap.

I know I can speak for both myself and Master when I say we had a great time. We met some wonderful people, participated in many inspiring workshops and roundtables and overall came away with a better, stronger power exchange. We even won a prize for travelling so far to attend (we were the only ones who came from Canada, or anywhere other than the USA , for that matter I'm pretty sure). We arrived in Columbus the day before the Summit started so we had a bit of time to go exploring, which was nice. Once PXS actually started it was a very busy weekend. I started off Saturday by going to a workshop on chronic pain and kink while Lee went to one on needs wants and desires. Then we went to the cuckqueaning one. After lunch it was the Executive PE workshop then one on empowerment. We ended the workshop day by going to a roundtable on sexual orientation and gender in PE which was interesting. Saturday evening was the roaring ‘20s casino night where we had our photo taken (which, I realized just the other day was the first professional photo taken of us in the five and a half years of being together!) and played a game and hung out with some of the people that we had met. We also won a very yummy smelling bison leather flogger in the silent auction.

Sunday we went to a workshop on polyamory and PE and ended the Summit with a workshop a workshop that had been wrongly titled on the website and in the run book as honor, service and devotion but was actually about the architypes/models of M/s relationships by Raven Kaldera and Joshua Tenpenny. After the closing ceremonies we had a pizza lunch and headed back to our hotel room. We had planned to go out a bit but we were both spent and decided to just lay low for the evening and spend time decompressing and packing for our early flight the next morning. The two workshops that stood out for me the most were Executive Power Exchange by Kevin and katie and Cuckqueaning by Doug and slave lori. The Executive Power Exchange one gave us some new information to use but more so gave us words that help us describe our style of PE. The cuckqueaning workshop on the other hand has helped us start down a new path in our relationship, more on that in a bit.

Overall, I would say that going to PS was one of best things (if not the best thing) we have done for our relationship. The event drop, which didn’t really start until we got home on the Tuesday evening and lasted through the weekend, was so worth it. I would go again in a heartbeat. I have actually already looked at the calendar for next year trying to figure out which weekend it will be!

Lee and I have agreed that we need to make going to these kinds of events more of a priority and therefore plan our vacation time around them as much as possible and be more prepared financially for them. For a brief moment we were looking at going to the M/s con in DC in September but we just cannot afford to go without putting a strain on ourselves.

Next up is our new kink, cuckqueaning.

I guess in the strictest fashion of the word we aren’t quite looking at cuckqueaning since Lee is a woman and cuckqueaning is typically with a dominant man and a submissive woman but I don’t know if there is a term for cucking with only female participants.

Since we haven’t yet started to look for a third woman to join we are more in the fantasizing stages of exploring this kink. Master has been mostly denying me sexual release/orgasm. She has been using me to get Herself off, which She had done many times before PXS but before She would usually allow me to masturbate afterwards, now I can’t. She has taken away permission to ask for sex and orgasm. I can still tell Her that I'm horny though. She has also been edging me, getting me very close to cumming then backing off so that I will learn that sexual stimulation doesn’t always lead to me orgasming. There have been a few sexual encounters where She has humiliated me by telling me how much better it will be once we/She finds another woman to fuck while I am made to just watch and possibly use my mouth to clean them after they are finished fucking. I get so turned on just thinking about all of this. Why do I get so horny thinking about my wife fucking other women? Why do I get so turned on by the idea of being used and not allowed to orgasm? Master has told me that She isn’t going to stop allowing me to orgasm entirely but in the three weeks since we have started this, there have only been two or three times we have had sex that I’ve been given permission to cum. Before this, it wouldn’t have been uncommon for me to orgasm (and usually multiple) about four times a week, including the times I would masturbate for Master. I just texted Master to tell Her that I’m so horny. She told me to go fill my ass with the plug so I will be even more wet and horny for when She gets home so I can put on a show for Her. Now I am aching I am so horny, which in turn makes me feel very submissive, which is why we are doing this. Being sexually aroused makes me want to serve Her so much more. I love it! I want to feel like this all the time. I hope that we start our search for a cuckcake soon.

I was going to write about coming out kinky, a topic that has been on my mind a lot lately as that is what we are going to talk about at MAsT this weekend but I’ve run out of time so I will leave it for another day.