Tag Archives: play

I should be talking to me more.

I have a whole bunch of broken Wellie boots and broken luggage; I want put them up on the border wall between me and the road with plants inside. (Yes I know I will need to bolt them down if I don’t want them to wander.) Things I want to paint on them:

  • Not all who wander are lost; some are seeds floating on the wind searching for the right spot to sprout.
  • These boots were made for walking but then they got tired and put down roots.
  • With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding. With good compost, comes happy plants.
  • I would walk far more than 500 miles to get to Inverness, this lovely place where I get to build my nest.
  • I have seen 1,000 cities and this I must confess: the only one I want to call my home is Inverness.
  • When you have more than you need you should build a longer table, not a taller fence. Feel free to take clippings from any plants and if you see a fruit tree/bush heavy with fruit, come knock on the door. I’ll probably give you a bag.

I also want to make signs for all the plants in my garden explaining what they give and add to the soil and why I picked them for this spot. I would really like for people to be able to walk around my garden and get a mini-course on permaculture. By “people” I mean me because I am totally going to forget this shit if I don’t write it down and reread it a bunch of times. This is not a project that is going to get done this year, but eventually. In the meantime I am taking way better notes than I did in California.

It is really nice feeling like the time I spent in California in my garden was an absolutely fantastic beginner course in gardening. I had the time/money/sunshine/city water to make quite an oasis. Gardening here is very different in dramatic ways. I mean… for many months of the year I shouldn’t dig in the ground because the wee beasties are hibernating. I would take December off from gardening (and sometimes January) but really I was outside in the garden 10-11 months a year. There were different seasonal jobs; I didn’t have the same routine week to week. Here I really shouldn’t disturb the earth any more than absolutely necessary from November through May. Well, I’ll be honest and say there is some amount of tidying up I can do in November and December but it’s more clearing off the slippery leaves off the driveway and doing a compost turn. I also begin starting seeds in February.

Ok so maybe it is about the same.

Only it really isn’t! This is gardening on hard mode. I can start seeds in my bedroom and bathroom, which have to be kept shut from the rest of the house the whole time. I don’t have a single other place that could be warm/away from the cats. It’s pretty funny. If I got a thermometer in the polytunnel I could chance leaving some of the seedlings out there for the weeks of Fool’s Spring just to give them a little excitement with extra air movement but mostly I wouldn’t bother because it is too much work.

Mostly here in February and March I can read and research and plan. Planning is a Big McFlippin deal here. In California I could throw tomatoes on the ground and a plant would start growing in any month of the year as long as I watered it. Sometimes there would be a cold snap that would keep a specific plant runty, but I’d get a big tomato haul. Here I have barely been able to get tomatoes to ripen at all because I haven’t figured out how to keep them warm enough. This year I’m going to grow them in the polytunnel and see if that works better.

I can’t help but feel that I am keeping all these records because I have this horrible Cassandra-like feeling that my children are going to need to be able to look through my trials and failures so they can make sure they eat someday. Yes, reading blogs and books are an ideal way to start an education in the general sense but knowing your unique microclimate isn’t available unless you learn from someone who has stood in your garden.

I am sure my weird prepper shit is just a continuation of my same old, same old and yet this feeling is different in a way that is hard to define. I love my children, don’t get me wrong, but at this point I don’t see any sign that any of them are going to be a shooting star. They are bright people who will arrive at adulthood with a better than average emotional education and a lot of ability to learn new things and do jobs that interest them. I have a lot of worry around the ways they want to work earning them much money and in this late-stage-Capitalist-hellscape I have deep fear around them suffering in the future because I entirely failed to instill that motivator.

Somewhere along the way I discovered that my goal was to give them time. Time to figure out what brings them joy. Time to explore things and fail and try again. Time to become their own best friend. Time to do what they want during the day instead of what can earn them money. I recognise deeply that Noah pays for this time. He earns and we invest and maybe someday his children can have an easier burden. In many ways he has sacrificed his life on the altar of me and our children. He has taken the provider role very seriously and combined with all the advantages he started with like picking the right hobby at seven and a family that could pay for a very nice school.

Noah has given me time. Time to think about who I want to be. Time to figure out what I need to learn in order to become that person. I feel awed at the magnitude of gift he has given me in this life. I think often about how my entire life as it is now mostly exists because of Noah. I mean, I have friends I made on my own but I live where I live in the house I live in with the children I wanted so very much because of Noah.

The children who make me feel crazy and hostile and overwhelmed and like I just want to hide in the bathroom for a few years. I would not walk away from this life for all the money in the world. There is literally nothing I would rather be doing, even though I complain like it is my job.

Today I walked around my garden and thought about all the ways I am going to shift things around towards being a food forest and a playground. I started out with beds in the front lawn but most of it doesn’t really get enough sun anyay so I am going to move some plants, change around where the logs are and put playground stuff running through the middle. It’ll work. You’ll see. I measured with conservative edge allowances.

By playground equipment I mean a climbing structure and a slide and a separate swing. Both the swing and the climbing structure will be very amenable to hosting climbing plants for the guilds. It’s going to be fantastic. It’s kind of funny how much of this thought process is shaping up around my birthday party. My friends are going to be old as fuck. I am going to need to have a garden full of places to sit and admire the lovely plants. It will be good to have pretty flowers right at face height because a lot of them aren’t going to see that well anymore.

And some will climb up to hang on the climbing structure because of course they will. I will have swings that my adult friends can use. And they will get to walk through a forest of food to get there.

Trees take time. Building soil takes time. I only have 18 years to go. That means it is bloody important I get as much of the bones in place as possible this year. It takes time to fill in a forest. Buddy, I am already training branches.

How am I going to lay out walking paths so people don’t step on my damn plants? How am I going to create convenient congregation places around the garden where it would be lovely to linger and have a chat? Where will people be able to pick a snack in September? Oh bloody hell. It’s a lot to plan!

After a search it looks like apples are going to be my best and most obvious choice for the whole top side of the garden as it is literally lined in apple trees. Raspberries will hold down the bottom side. There will definitely be runner beans all over the place. Maybe I will have magically figured out tomato ripening. Courgettes, potatoes, and onions are not really snacking foods but I can cook with them. Ok. This will be good.

Hm. Unfortunately my birthday falls on a Tuesday the year I turn 60. Well I suppose it will be a week long house party. Oh wow, that’s an interesting thought. I wonder who I will still know.

Longevity in relationships is extremely important to me. I put up with some serious bullshit from my oldest friends. Because if somehow they have decided to have some appalling belief it is now my job to somehow embody a different point of view without sounding like a preachy asshole. It’s a tightrope some moments. I believe that most relationships involve some degree of masking and setting special boundaries for people in ways that create a lot of extra work for yourself. I don’t know how to “just be one thing” all of the time. I can’t. I know that large parts of me are not particularly acceptable in a great many settings. It was true in California and it is far more true here. I have to be mindful of what I say and where.

It is utterly exhausting. Every conversation goes through this at-speed filter of “acceptable topics” and I am glad I have expanded my range of special interests so that I can usually find a couple if I try a few different mannerisms and approaches. I assume it is kind of trippy for the people I go through four or five approaches with. If I feel waved off after the fifth I start treating them like furniture and I will probably never make eye contact again.

I need much more stringent filters here. It’s not that everyone is closed minded it is that the process for sussing people out takes a lot longer and I’m sure I’ve “gone too fast” a couple of times. Mostly I haven’t horrified anyone but I take very calculated risks with self exposure.

I acknowledge to myself that in my mind I need a triad of close friends that I talk to at least somewhat consistently and we have very few filters with one another. There is no such thing as a relationship without filters. Not for me, anyway. It has been three women for most of my life, not always the same three women. Now there is a man, well a demi-boy as he now understands himself and I can understand what he means when he says that. I can feel myself consciously and deliberately allowing myself to be filled in my “imaginary bucket” as I talk to the kids about emotional energy. I feel like a vampire sometimes. I feel ashamed sometimes. But I don’t stop and I know that none of them would like me to stop because the way we take and give to each other is mutually satisfying and not draining.

Sometimes I tell my children that when there are times that they don’t love themselves then they are welcome to borrow some of my regard for them because it is endless. That is really striking because it feels like such a lie. There are ways that I judge and think harsh thoughts and feel impatient in ways that are probably ableist and deeply unfair of me. I am by no means doing my job perfectly.

I’m not getting into that self-flagelation tonight. It’s too late to go down that road.

I just need to think about the fact that sometimes when I can’t love myself I allow myself to be carried forward by the force of the regard of other people. I don’t particularly go for “likes” but I have a deep and intense respect for the people I allow to judge me. For the vast majority of human beings on this planet, I don’t give a flying fuck how you judge me because you are not actually seeing what happens. You are not a reliable narrator. If you actually know me then you can judge me based on the interactions we have had, but not that many people have spent much time with me. There are just a few.

The people I have kept close for a decade and a half, or a quarter of a century are people who have enormous wells of experience with me and my family and they have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. They get to judge me and when I fuck up they call me to the carpet.

It’s kind of funny how these power dynamics and social dynamics work because it’s not as if this judgment comes without strife. I have simply decided that for whatever reason I am willing to accept that strife as a sign of love in that relationship. They would not bother to say this to me if they did not have deep love for me.

Except when they tell me that I am Borderline during fights.

If I am at all honest I am partially leaning on my triad because it allows me to fill my bucket enough for me to go deal with all of the other places where I am in some sort of position to feel like I need to share the resources I have in ways that benefit folks. A lot of the in-person stuff is hard because my life is not shaped like most folks. My time comes in different shapes and blocks than average in many ways and it makes it hard to get the requisite hours to become a friend at this age.

I do have a few young friends in town but with all of them the level of filters is still pretty high. I have talked about myself more with them than other people around here but I’m not random California neighbour casual yet. Oh my god it’s so different. I find myself struggling to be as reserved as is appropriate here.

Dude, just go to bed.

{therapy} Shrink visit and cathartic play

Yesterday I went to see my therapist and she opened with, “I want to give you the quick and dirty answer to whether I will see your mom first: no. Now let me explain…” We talked about how she wouldn’t exactly be fair with my mom so there isn’t much point in having the session happen. That made me happy. This conversation actually took a little bit. 🙂 Then I said: “I’ve had an eventful two weeks! I found out that my step-mother died and that no one thought I would care so they didn’t tell me. I called my mom for the first time in six months and drama ensued. I had an enormously stressful trip to Chicago which included some huge triggering things and a blow up at the end and such fucked up travel that we left a day late and almost returned a day late. My car blew up. My apartment flooded.” Her response? “Wow. You’ve been busy.” Smartass.

We spent a while talking about the situation with japlady‘s dad. Whether she wants to admit it or not he has a condecending tone of voice and that is hard for me to swallow ever let alone when I haven’t slept well in days, haven’t eaten a meal that agrees with me in days, have been in majorly stressful situations over and over for days, and just generally am away from home so I feel kind of off-balance. In talking about my reaction to him we couldn’t come up with anyone he reminds me of exactly. Yes, the situation japlady lives with is similar to what my father would have been willing to do me but it never actually happened so I don’t know if that is much of it. I know that I hate how he treats her and I hold a lot of anger towards him for that reason. (Yes, japlady doesn’t believe the anger is warranted–but when has that stopped me?) It is huge and complicated and messy. We also got around to the part that the only thing I really dislike about japlady is the name dropping and her father does it more/worse than she does. So I probably resented not only that he was doing it but that he fostered this habit in someone I otherwise think is so totally terrific. I don’t have full resolution on this issue yet in my head so I am going to keep thinking on it. I feel like the conclusions I have reached so far are very superficial and I am not confident that I have hit the meat of the matter.

Then we move on to last night. I played with a good friend on Wednesday knowing that I was going to be playing with her again last night. She has recently gone through a really bad breakup and I have been aware that she is really hurting emotionally. I also know that she is a very heavy masochist. I don’t know how or why I decided to be arrogant enough to try and help her process through some of her stuff, but I did. On Wednesday I tried to take her down hard and fast and get her to cry in a gut wrenching sort of way and it worked. I tested the waters to see how much anger would come up when I started hurting her like that. Oh, I did it by punching her. Punching is a very primal and overwhelming sort of way to be hurt, and I hit rather hard. When she started getting to a really angry place on Wednesday I kept up my litany of telling her that she is a good girl, but other than that I didn’t really get into a dialogue about what was coming up for her. Last night I did. Before we started playing I told her that I was going to be asking her why I was beating her and the answer I wanted her to give is: “Because I’m a good girl.” I gave her a little bit of a warm up with spanking and light punching before switching to canes. Not very far into the scene I asked her why I was doing it and she couldn’t tell me that she was a good girl. She started getting into negative self-talk repeating things that were said to her during her horrible break up. Things about her being bad. I stopped hitting her. I turned her around and held her face up close to mine and told her that I would not hit her again if she believed that I was doing it because she was bad. I told her I would never ever reinforce that idea in her brain. It took a little more talking but eventually she started to be able to say that she was good and I resumed the scene. We went back and forth talking as I beat the living crap out of her about how the negative things he told her were wrong. That she is good and deserving. She was very upset and screamed out a lot of her rage and pain generating from how she was treated. After a while I started ramping up harder and harder. I am not a weak girl and I was hitting her just about as hard as I am capable. Towards the end she was Not Having Fun anymore and that was my goal. I told her that I wanted her to tell me to stop. That I want her to have the power to say that when she isn’t enjoying it anymore that it needs to end. At first she resisted and said she couldn’t but after a few more minutes she finally could ask me to stop.

I spent almost as much time crying during this scene as she did. It was tremendously difficult to do, but I feel very good about having done it. After I stopped beating her I pulled her to the ground and started telling her again how much I love her. I asked some of her women friends to join me in telling her so and how strong she is.

I think that a good way to understand just how far I pushed her was encapsulated when Spot said later, “Everything I have read has said you don’t do that.” Yeah. SM play is a very scary beast. When you are experiencing as much physical pain as she was in you are opening up your mind and spirit to be receptive to things that normally just aren’t available to you. It is very rare that I play that heavily and I would only attempt a scene where I knew I was working towards such catharsis with someone I have known as long and as well as I have known this person. If I had not spent so many years seeing how her relationship worked and knowing the kind of self-talk she does I wouldn’t have done this. But I do feel ok with the fact that I did this with her. I actually feel really good about it.

Honey–I love you. Thank you for opening yourself to me this way. I hope I get to continue to know you for a very long time.

And thank you to the girl who stretched herself sooooo much by being there and participating to the level you did. I know how hard it was for you and I have only love and admiration for your courage and strength and giving heart. Thank you.

Very amusing.

Google boy just asked me for a copy of my Users Guide. I think he feels all sassy after his first time ever of tying a girl up.

It’s so cute. I no longer believe I am going to break him easily, but I’m still being gentle with him. 🙂 That might change next Friday. We are going to have our first weekend night date where we get to spend a lot of time together. Yikes! He is really into the idea of me seriously dressing up. This is going to be a lot of fun. Yay!!

Sluttery

I seem to be feeling better lately about play and sex cause I am sure as hell jumping back on the horse. Within the past 8 days I have:

Had sex with two people for a total of ~6 go rounds. (One night it is kind of fuzzy just how many times…)
Bottomed once.
Topped twice.
The median length of time I have known these people has been 2.175 years. 🙂

My ass is many many colors. I have a bruise bigger than my fist. That has got to be the best spanking I have ever received. He spanked me for over an hour. It was fucking awesome. Just spanking! Hard, rhythmic, yummy…

I’m pretty happy about the fact that I am playing with people that I have known for a long time and that I feel comfortable with. I think if I were jumping into playing with new-to-me people it would be harder and scarier.

And why the fuck am I not going to NY now. God damnit!