Tonight

Tonight, she gave me exactly what I needed, and it took hardly any time at all.

Honestly, I didn’t think I needed much of a spanking. If she hadn’t been in the mood, or if she had been tired, it really would have been all right. And, a little bit, I was more interested in a bit of down-time, a bit of alone-time than I was in a spanking. But at a quarter to nine, she came into my study to make sure I knew it would soon be time. Fifteen minutes later, she told me firmly to come into the bedroom, because it was time.

We’ve processed a lot, in the last month or so, about what it is I need from a spanking, how they can actually meet my needs. And we’ve had trouble with communicating; I hadn’t been doing a very good job of describing what I needed, and W. was spending a whole lot of energy doing things that weren’t actually meeting my needs. I am sure she was quite frustrated, after giving me hour-long spankings, to find me feeling exactly as needy and cranky as I was before she started. Not a good use of our limited energy.

But tonight, it was exactly what I needed. I came into the bedroom, and she told me to get the loopy toy. I dug it out of the cupboard, and began to climb onto the bed. Instead, she told me to walk around to her side of the bed. Then she told me to turn around.

It had been a casual sort of day, and I pretty much assumed (note the vanity) that she just wanted to admire my backside before beginning. Instead, she guided me, gently but firmly, until I was directly in front of the wall. She lifted my shirt and fastened it up, and then pulled down my underwear, so I was standing with my bottom bare, facing the wall.

Immediately, I slipped into the submissive state I hadn’t realized I was needing. I felt safe, I felt controlled. I felt the tension of anticipation combined with the relaxation of not being in control. She stroked my back, stood against me, made it clear that she was there, held me very much in the present.

After a few minutes (or seconds) of waiting, CRACK! Something smacked against my bottom. Facing the wall and standing on my feet, I found that I couldn’t twist away. She smacked my bottom again, and then again. The pain was intense, and my hands went back to cover my bottom. She removed them, put them back on the wall by my head.

After several more smacks with what turned out to be the bath brush, she picked up the loopy toy instead. That slashed against my bottom several times, and then I thought it was over. But she reminded me that not quite enough spanking is as ineffective as no spanking at all.

She said she was going to give me five more strokes. Unless I tried to squirm away. Each time I squirmed, I would get two more. I got at least a dozen strokes before I managed to take five in a row without stamping and twisting.

Afterwards, we checked in. In part, I needed to express that she had given me exactly the right thing.

But W. really needed to check in, to make sure that I really do need this, that she isn’t doing something wrong by spanking me. And we talked for two hours about that, and about what it means that there is another person in this equation.

I still have a hard time reckoning with that—that these spankings that meet my needs come from an actual person, who has her own responses to what is happening.

I don’t claim to understand all of how she thinks and feels about this.

I know she is uneasy with the notion that she is taking the bath brush or a loopy toy or whatever to her wife in a non-playful, non-sexual way.

I know there’s at least a part of her that wonders whether what she is doing, what we are doing, is wrong, bad, unhealthy. And I suspect that she would not be disappointed if this need went away, or if I found different ways of meeting it.

And boy oh boy is that hard for me to grapple with. Because, of course, I feel hurt, angry, rejected when she says something that makes it seem like my need for disciplinary spankings is unhealthy, is something that would just go away with sufficient therapy.

For me, for the most part, when I can get past all of the built-in aversion to admitting that I need someone else to take over part of my life, when I can acknowledge that part of me, it’s more like acknowledging that I’m a dyke, or that I’m left-handed. Which is to say, it feels like a natural, normal part of myself. And telling me that therapy would “cure” me of this is like saying that therapy would “cure” me of my perverse need to identify as biracial, so that I would fit into boxes that other people were more comfortable with.

However, I can acknowledge that, unlike in my pre-relationship imaginings about what a spanking relationship would be like, there is an actual person doing the spanking, and that she’s going to have feelings about what it means to hold that power, to be in control in those ways. The problem is, I really don’t know what to say to her, and I don’t (quite) believe that the most healthy response is for me to just marshal all of my evidence that will convince her that this is exactly the right thing to do.

Not that my feelings of justice go so far as to stop me from doing this at least a little bit, but it doesn’t seem like the best approach. Because, obviously, I’m going to tell her that it’s right, whether it “really” or “objectively” is or not. Because, you know, it works for me. But probably if I were deeply committed to, say, being an alcoholic, I would also be marshalling all of my arguments for why that was the right thing to be doing. And given my own difficulties with insight, I’m not really sure what to tell her.

Except, of course, what I did tell her tonight. Which was that I appreciated the effort to think about the scenario; that the emotional effect for me was kind of like if she had brought me flowers—unexpected, lovely, and quite appreciated.