ask, and you shall receive
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So, we’re talking about moving in together in a few months. We’ve been talking about it in vague terms for the past several months already: “maybe next summer, if we’re still together, we’ll want to live together, and then I’d NEVER have to be mad about dishes piling up in the sink because you’re good at doing dishes!” and “if we’re living together, we’ll be paying less rent, so maybe I can afford to leave my job a few months early.” That sort of thing. And neither of us had really dared to bring it up in a serious way, until this past week, because, well, it’s kind of big and scary. And also vaguely far away. Someday. (Doesn’t summer always seem far away in the middle of winter?)
But the truth is, it’s not all that far away. I’ll know about grad school within a month, and I will probably leave my job by two months later, and will be starting graduate school (hopefully) within three months after that. And my calendar is filling up already for things happening in May, June. And it was when I realized that I’ll be in New York and Massachusetts for 2-3 weeks at the end of May/beginning of June for my college reunion and some family and friend visiting that I realized, um, yikes, maybe we’d better actually have that serious conversation about moving in together. Because I’m not going to be around for a large chunk of May, rendering a June move-in difficult, and she’ll be gone for part of July, and then we’re both travelling to her sister’s wedding in August, and then my classes start… which leaves May 1 and July 1 as our options, really, and for several reasons I won’t bore you with here, May 1 seems a better fit for me.
And, well, May 1 is kind of soon. Not omg-we-need-to-start-apartment-hunting soon. But soon. Omg-we-need-to-really-consider-what-we’re-getting-ourselves-into-and-are-we-ready-to-take-this-step-and-what-does-this-mean soon. I think we’re both simultaneously really fucking excited and really fucking scared. I feel a bit like how I feel about maybe leaving my job if I don’t get into grad school (and thus face immense uncertainty). It feels so right, and thinking about it makes me so happy and so excited, and when I really think about it I want to do it, like, tomorrow, but then I freeze up, like, but what if it doesn’t work? Things are fine the way they are, aren’t they? You’re not unhappy or anything, why tempt fate? It could be disastrous, what if you’re really not as ready as you think you are…
I don’t know, you know? I worry about some of my tendencies, and wonder whether really I need more time to work them out living separately before I’m surrounded by her and us all the time. I worry about my control-freak micro-managing ways; I worry about her messiness. I worry that those two things are a horrible combination, and wonder if the reason they work alright now is that we each have our own space and so I can be the boss of mine and she can be the boss of hers. I worry about my tendency towards co-dependency, and if I don’t have a space to call my own, will I lose track of my self? Will we be able to make space for our selves and for each other? I worry about being able to strike a comfortable balance of shared responsibility for our space, given my high attention to detail in household matters and her relative leniency. And, I don’t know, what if we lose the spark? What if we get boring, stop being interesting to each other? I’m afraid of taking each other and our time together for granted. I want it all to still be special.
And as I was writing all that there was the other little voice in my head saying “but! but! but!”, countering everything there with other (happier) thoughts. Like that if we can deal well with our current situation (and we do), then of course we’ll be able to handle living together, and in fact much of what’s hard now might (even probably will) be easier. Right now, though we each have our own individual space, we don’t have our own couple space. We can’t just come home from work and cook dinner and chill, read together, watch a movie while cuddling, then get distracted and start hooking up in the middle. We can’t do that because there are always roommates around. So in a way, our sexuality is quashed. Then, also, living out of two separate apartments is a drag, to say the least. I always have to be thinking a day or two ahead when I know I’ll be over there, and even though I generally have clothes over there, there are still shoes and makeup and computer and whatever my plans are the day after (burlesque? dinner with friends? show?) to be thinking of. And toting around. Cooking is harder to plan ahead for, and is more expensive, because we’re dealing with two pantries and two refrigerators.
Mostly, and maybe this is boring, but I don’t care if it is, mostly I just want to be able to spend time together not doing anything. I want to be able to come home late after an evening of being busy and have her there, working on her music, and I want to kiss her hello, throw some leftovers on the stove, and plop down on the sofa with a good book or some writing ideas and each do our own shit together, and then eventually get distracted by each other’s presence and fuck on the living room floor before crashing into bed and briefly sharing the highlights (or lowlights) of our days with each other as we drift off into snuggly slumber.
That’s what I want. I guess I’d like to take the leap of faith; we’ve done well so far with circumstances that aren’t always easy. Living together certainly won’t be easy either, I’m sure of it. We’re two people. There will always be conflict. It will be different conflict from what we have now, to be sure, but won’t that also be fun? Figuring out how to navigate a whole new set of situations? An adventure. In love.
Scary as fuck. But honestly, I think the thing I’m scared of most is that I’m less scared than she is. I want her to want this and believe in this as much as I do. What if she doesn’t? What would that mean?
I guess it’s probably time to have that conversation, yeah?
As I mentioned a few posts ago, I really love Valentine’s Day. I love it when I’m in a couple, I love it when I’m single. I’m not one of those people who gets bitter and resentful if I’m single for Valentine’s Day—I know that’s common, and this isn’t meant to be preachy, it’s just true: it just makes me happy to see happy people together, celebrating their love for each other. Also, when I’ve been single, I’ve always had someone else in my life who was single at the time too, generally several, and it can be really fun to celebrate the holiday with loved ones who aren’t romantic partners. Just sayin’.
BUT, this year I’m not single, so I will be celebrating the holiday with mi’lady. Last year, we had a lovely day that involved a trip to Guitar Center to buy me a digital stage piano, a 5-mile walk along the San Francisco western coastline and up to the Legion of Honor, where it was one of their free admission days PLUS there was a free organ concert in the atrium, and then an impromptu tapas dinner in the Mission followed by lots of sex. Last year, we were still just entering, cautiously, the phase of “relationship” after a few months of dating, and so neither one of us really wanted to plan anything huge and romantic.
This year’s different, obviously: we’ve been together now a year and a few months, and we’re continually growing in our love in ways that challenge me, comfort me, hold me, and strengthen me. But we had such a delightful day last year that we were reluctant to plan anything huge and romantic again this year. Not to mention we don’t have tons of cash to blow. And anyway, the point is to spend quality time together, not quality money.
So, here’s our plan:
I’ll cook brunch at my house; I’ll keep it simple: cream biscuits that I’ll make the night before, fried eggs in heart-shaped toast, veggie sausage, some sort of fruit concoction. Then, we’ll go to the Apple store to get her new computer (keeping in the tradition of making big purchases on Valentine’s Day… but not on each other!), maybe walk around a bit downtown or in our neighborhood, I’m thinking maybe go to Buena Vista park or something, get our blood pumping. Then come home and fuck the afternoon away (it’s so much better before dinner than after! when you have an appetite in more ways than one, the sex is better–livelier, hungrier (literally), and you’re not in that stupor you’re in when you’re full) before an 8:15 dinner reservation at Blue Plate on Valencia. And finally, we’ll come home, put on Gilda (what’s better than Rita Hayworth on Valentine’s Day? or any day?), and sip wine with chocolate and strawberries. And then snuggle into bed and fall asleep, of course.
How about you?
I have tried to write this post so many times, and each time I’ve scrapped it and started over. I can’t seem to find my voice in it. Or maybe, I can’t seem to find its point. Or maybe it’s just not a topic I’m very good at writing about. But whatever it is, it’s frustrating me, because I want to write about other things, but I’m stuck on this. So I’m just going to write as if no one were paying any attention. Inspired by Mary Daly’s death (see what I think is the best handling of that over at Feministe) and all the talk of her transphobia and racism, and in honor of Martin Luther King Day, here are my thoughts on allyship.
I don’t like the concept of “ally” because I think so much of what people think being an ally involves is proving to someone else that you’re a good person, whatever that means. And that is so loaded with self-consciousness, with competition and one-up-man-ship, even vanity. I would much, much rather be met by a humble “um, sorry if this sounds stupid, but can you tell me what queer means? I thought it was a bad word” than by someone, upon hearing I’m queer, going on about how they have gay friends and how much the prop 8 stuff sucks and they really think everyone ought to be able to get married and other such drivel. This happens a lot, and those people are just … trying too hard. It’s like if I started spouting my opinions on affirmative action every time I met a person of color. Awkward, right? And de-humanizing. It reduces whomever the person is to whatever identity you’re trying to prove yourself an ally to.
I’m not just queer, you’re not just Chinese American, she’s not just Jewish, ze’s not just genderqueer. [Fuck spell check for not knowing the word genderqueer.] The let-me-prove-to-you-that-I’m-your-ally shtick is really just a way of allowing yourself to allay your own guilt and prioritize your own need to be recognized as good. It’s not really listening to what the needs, wants, and preferences are of the person at hand.
If you want to really be an ally, then you need to really listen. And beyond listening, you need to really hear. You need to turn off the voices in your head that are responding to every little thing you’re listening to, and just hear it with your soul, without judgment, without defensiveness, without shame or guilt or anger. Yes, you’re opening yourself up to being hurt this way, because it can hurt to have your beliefs and your actions crumbled. It can hurt, too, to hear other people, because oftentimes, people don’t speak as if you’re really hearing them. They speak as if you’re not hearing them. So you might hear anger, and hurt, and resentment, and suspicion. But if you’re really going to be an ally, you need to hear all that, and you need to also remember later to take care of yourself and consider what your needs are, and whether and how other people can be better allies to you. And that might mean asking them to listen and hear you. But you have to be open about this, because anything that isn’t shared candidly is just a brick in the prison of self-defensiveness and isolation that you’re building up around yourself, and once that prison is built it is so, so hard to escape.
But I don’t think “ally” is the appropriate word for this — because this, to me, is what it should mean to be human. Forget about proving anything. Forget about trying to live up to what you think it means to be a perfect ally. Forget about trying so hard not to make mistakes that you cry in frustration and from feeling misunderstood. Just listen, and hear. Then, when you mess up, you’ll know because other people will trust you to hear them when they tell you what your mistake was. And you, in turn, will be able to learn from them. And maybe then you’ll be able to tell them when they mess up, and they’ll listen, and hear you too. And then, maybe, gradually, we’ll all be able to stop greeting each other from behind thick curtains that we suspiciously peek out from behind, and maybe we’ll stop having to yell in order to make sure our voices are heard, and maybe we won’t have to resort to communicating to people different from us with anger, because we’ll trust them to hear us when we feel betrayed. Or maybe we will get angry, but then our anger will be met with support and validation, rather than defensiveness and dismissal.
What do you do if you hear someone and they don’t hear you? My friend Ruhi once asked a mentor, “how many people can you love before you love too much?” and her mentor said, “you can never love too many people, as long as you don’t expect them to love you back.” You have an infinite supply of love, as long as it has no agenda. See, the thing is, if you are listening to someone under the condition that they listen to you too, then you’re not really hearing them. In order to hear, you have to give of yourself. It has to be utterly selfless, in a way, because hearing is not an exchange. It’s a one-way action. If you then don’t feel heard in return, you may certainly lose some respect for the person, and you might decide that in order to take care of yourself you shouldn’t pursue a relationship (of any kind) with the person, but that doesn’t mean the person didn’t deserve to be heard. And maybe, just maybe, you planted a seed in the person’s heart. A hearing seed. (And at the same time, I think hearing can be utterly selfish, because you’re acting out of your full humanity, and allowing it to blossom.)
I am not an ally. I’m not an ally to anyone, and I’m not really an ally to myself. I’m constantly fucking up and getting stuck and doing things that aren’t good for me and living out all my various internalized oppressions. And if I keep fucking up with regards to myself, how on earth can I possibly live up to being an ally to others? I try, dammit, I try. But that’s all I can do, and when I do fuck up, the best thing I can do is say, “I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time.” And then try again, and maybe fuck up again, and say I’m sorry again.
I am not an ally, but I promise from the depths of my being that I will do my best to hear you. And when you hurt me, I will try my hardest to tell you, so that you have the chance to hear me too.
Just brought her to the airport; she’s on a red-eye back to Vermont for Christmas with her family. (I’m here another few days until I fly to New York.)
Parting was hard, even though I’ll see her again on New Year’s Eve when we both fly back. I had tears in my eyes as she walked away from me to go check in.
I texted her from the train back to the city.
Me: ”Miss you already and love you so much”
Her: “I miss you too i love you too. It was so hard to walk away from you. I was sad”
Me: “But you’re walking TOWARDS your family :) it was hard to see you walk away too though…”
Her: “Yeah yr right but they’re not my girl”
I love her so goddamn much.
Tomorrow brings some house-cleaning and preliminary packing of my own, a trip to Chinatown to get tea for my brother’s Christmas present, and maybe even some baking (no more sweets though, but maybe some Parker rolls?).
Happy weekend y’all.
Our little Thanksgiving vacation was perfect, in every way.
I neglected to mention before that it doubled as a celebration of one year of being together. One year! And I only love her more. I look at her sometimes in sudden shock, like how did I get here? What did I do to deserve this? What on earth, in my life, put me right here, in this moment, looking at this person next to me and feeling so overwhelmingly in love? It doesn’t cease to amaze me. The fleeting moments of “is this real?” immediately followed by the surge of warmth when I know that yes, it is. I love her. She loves me.
She slipped into my hand, one day. “I’m a hand bottom,” she said. Her hand sneaks into mine from behind, so my arm leads. “Well, I’m a hand top,” I said, “so we’re perfect.” “I also prefer holding hands with my left hand,” she said. And I like to hold hands with my right. Like a puzzle our hands fit together, the pieces are different but they match up.
What is this miracle that puts two people together and makes them love each other?
I finally had time this weekend to have extended conversations with my parents, which hadn’t happened in several weeks. My dad moved out about a month ago, and when I last talked to him he was feeling optimistic, hopeful that he would be okay. And my mom was just relieved, albeit lonely, in the house they own together and raised three kids in, now all by herself.
A few weeks later and things are different. They’re both in the thick of processing. Tears, hurt, anger, disappointment, loneliness. I don’t relish the role of confidante that I seem to have fallen into for both of them. Not in the middle, exactly, since they’re not exactly tugging me in different directions. They aren’t talking about each other so much; rather, they’re each talking about themselves. And I’m glad they trust me, and in a way I’m even thirsty for details. It’s like this: maybe if I can know exactly what it was that, after 27 years, made their marriage collapse, then I can know how to avoid it myself.
It’s fear on my part, is what it is. 27 fucking years. And that’s just the years they were married — they were together for 3 years before that. 30 years. And I’m afraid.
“Honestly,” my mom says, “there wasn’t a moment during our marriage that I wasn’t thinking of leaving him.” Then why did you marry him in the first place? “I thought the things that nagged at me, the doubts, would go away. I thought he would change.”
Lesson One: people don’t change.
But why did you settle for him, then, despite the doubts? “I guess I just loved him so much that I was blinded by it. He was very romantic, you know. I thought that his love for me would inspire him to make the changes I needed him to make. But I think I didn’t really know how to ask him for what I needed.”
Lesson Two: unattended to, unmet needs grow roots and take hold, and at a certain point, the roots are too big and too deep to be dug up.
Why didn’t you try? “Try what?” To ask for what you needed? “I guess I thought I was supposed to leave them unsaid. I guess I thought it was my job to meet his.”
Lesson Three: your children will learn from you how to treat you. If you allow your own needs to be superceded by your spouse’s, then your children will learn that their own needs should be superceded by your spouse’s too. And it will take them a long, long time to unlearn that. Just like it’s taken you.
And Dad. My spirit-parent, my quasi-child. Still doing alright in your little attic apartment by yourself? “It’s hard. I feel resentful. Dismissed.”
Lesson Four: Break-ups, no matter how old you are, no matter how long the relationship was, no matter how dead it was before it finally died its final death, are, in essence, all the same.
That’s understandable, Dad. “But actually, when I really think about it, I realize that I don’t want her back. Even if she decided she wanted to try again, I don’t think I’d want to. Unless things could go back to the way they were ten years ago. Things were different then. She was different then. She’s gotten too independent.”
Lesson Five: Those bad patterns, the destructive ones, if they don’t get fixed will become such a fixture of the relationship that they are the very air it breathes, the water it drinks. And if that water dries up, the relationship dies, because it needs that water to survive.
“But you know what? I’ll be okay.”
They both said the exact same words.
Lesson Six: I’ll be okay too.
I have about eight thousand drafts of posts waiting for my attention. There’s been so much going on, so much I want to write about. Sometimes having too much to write about gives me greater writer’s block than having too little.
I started writing about my thoughts on the Maine election, and the repeat of last fall. I started writing a post in response to G’s post on femme invisibility. I started writing about the changes that are going on in my life, the big things I’ve been doing and thinking about. I started writing about illicit sex, the sex I have when I’m not supposed to be having it, and why that’s so hot. And now I’ve started writing so much that I’m overwhelmed and can’t finish any of it! Ahhhh!
So, instead, I’m just going to spew verbosity all over this post, and maybe that will help clear out the “clutter” in my head. If I were a self-conscious writer, I would spew the clutter, and then trash it, but I’m not, so I’m going to post it anyway. Hehehehe.
1) One of my best friends from college was here last week, arriving Wednesday and leaving yesterday. We had so much fun, and I felt more San Franciscan than I have in a long time. Having visitors who’ve never been here before always does that to me. We went to the Academy of Sciences on Thursday for their weekly NightLife — so amazing, seeing the aquarium and the planetarium and the live roof at night, with music and drinks, without little kids running around. (Love little kids, but I can also certainly appreciate their absence!) We went to the Japanese Tea Garden and then walked all the way out to Ocean Beach — her first time seeing the Pacific. We went to the Lexington (duh), but then realized we shoul’ve gone to the Rickshaw because it was Rebel Girl. Oh well, we had fun anyway! We walked all through Chinatown and North Beahc and then took a cable car (MY first time on a cable car since my childhood!) back, and as it was passing by Union Square, with the ice-skating rink in the process of being set up and holiday lights starting to go up, I just felt so happy. The holiday season tends to do that to me anyway, but this time it just felt so magical. I don’t know. I felt like I was in a movie. I find myself looking forward to winter this year, to cups of cocoa and baking cookies and cuddling in the evenings when it’s dark so early, to going ice-skating and making mulled wine and escaping to the Russian River for Thanksgiving…
2) Friday evening, my friend and I went down to Palo Alto with mi’lady to meet up with another friend from college who lives in San Jose. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time, I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard since I left college. I have friends here, and I have a lot of fun here, and I’m happy here in San Francisco, but it was such a reminder to me that I have friends who know me inside and out, friends who make me feel at home no matter where I am, and friends where being around them isn’t socializing, it’s being, and it’s being in the fullest sense imaginable. And of course having mi’lady there made it even fuller, because I had it all in the same place. I can’t wait for my college reunion in May. Cannot WAIT. I also can’t wait until I have those kinds of friends here. It’ll happen, and it’s actually already happening now, slowly but surely.
3) Things with mi’lady feel so good and are so right right now. We’ve had some conversations about things like my relative introversion compared to her relative extroversion, and how we can balance that and make sure each other’s needs are met. We’ve had conversations about my relative planning compared to her relative spontaneity, and how to balance that as well. And I’ve had some internal conversations about learning how to let little things go. For example: She is working on recording with one of her bandmates, and tells me she’ll be over at my place around 9pm. 9pm comes and goes, no sign of her. She calls at 9:30, still in Oakland, happily making her way over to my place. I get frustrated. She gets defensive. We’ve had conversation after conversation about this. And I think my wanting her to be punctual is a control thing. It’s about sticking with plans and being meticulous, everything needing to be just so. But we didn’t actually have plans for 9. She’d just said that’s when she would be there. So… I let it go. Because really, it’s not that important. And because we’ve talked about it, I know she’s not disrespecting me. She’s just not so great at managing time. So is it worth arguing about? Again? No. It’s not. I was fully occupied the whole time anyway. Maybe a different time, if it has a bigger effect on me, if it feels like a breach of plans or a lack of respect or standing me up, then I’ll bring it up again. But this time, it just wasn’t important. And when she got to my place and I saw her, it was so much better that I’d let it go.
I’m such a meticulous person, I do things very particularly and have very specific ideas about things. I’m very organized and a bit of a control freak, and while a lot of that is good in my personal life because it keeps me functioning (and because I enjoy it! I love organizing!), it can be not-so-good when it spills over into trying to control her life. I don’t do that much, but sometimes in little ways I lose track. I’m learning, though, and it feels liberating to allow myself to let things go.
The point is, things are good. We haven’t had as much alone time as I’d like, but when we are alone, we make good of it.
**
So, for the moment, I’m in a good place. So much more I could write about, but at least I’ve tidied up a bit, and gotten rid of a bit of head clutter. Now there’s more room for writing about what I actually want to write about. Problem is I’m taking the GRE on Saturday and have a lot of work this week besides, so it remains a question whether I’ll have much time to write. If you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know why — but hopefully you will!
Mi’lady isn’t butch. (If she were, there’s no way in hell I would call her mi’lady.)
She’s not femme, either. Not particularly. Not the way I am. She doesn’t really fit into any sort of butch<–>femme spectrum at all. Maybe she’s androgynous, though somehow I’m uncomfortable with that word too to describe her. We talked about it a bit on Sunday, and didn’t really come up with a label that fit her precisely. But what she definitely is is a dyke.
I guess her gender energy is somewhat akin to Shane from The L Word. (Though I know Shane was commonly referred to as butch, I really don’t think she was, or at least not in the way that I understand butch.) Mi’lady isn’t quite the same sort of aloof player that Shane was portrayed as, and she’s much more outgoing and free with her emotions. Allows herself to be more vulnerable than Shane’s character. But she has a similar posture, a similar sort of slightly disheveled look, a similar style. Another stylistic reference would be Tegan & Sara — she’s got a sort of punkish female androgyny–tattoo, skinny jeans, chucks, indie t-shirts, black eyeliner.
And I wouldn’t say our relationship feels particularly butch-femme, either. It’s not that clearly defined. In some ways it does feel very butch-femme. I’m very much a nurturer, in that I’m constantly doing little domestic things. Cooking, tidying, grooming, both for me and for her. I’m a multi-tasker and I’m very attentive to detail. I like things just so. In that regard I can be a care-taker of her. Because she’s disorganized and rumpled and a bit chaotic and kind of messy. Not at all detail-oriented. She’s fantastically creative, and I help keep her grounded. In a femme way.
She is a nurturer too, in a different sense, maybe in more of a (dare I say?) butch sense. She’s always “big spoon,” and we almost always fall asleep that way, with her enfolding me in her arms. She’s very affirmative with words, telling me often how sexy or beautiful I am or how much she likes what I cook or how hot those heels look, in a way that affirms and strengthens my femininity. She was the one who pursued me from the get-go, bold and a risk-taker to my subtle flirting.
But in otherways, we’re not very butch-femme. Sexually, for example, we have great sex in which she’s more dominant and I’m submissive, and great sex in which I’m more dominant and she’s submissive, and great sex that doesn’t have bottom/top roles at all. I love strapping on and fucking her with a cock (she loves it too), and don’t particularly care for the reverse (she’s open to it if I want it but isn’t insistent on it). And aside from the ways I articulated above, there isn’t really any other way that our relationship feels gendered. We’re both women.
I wonder, in a way, whether I’m most suited to a butch, considering the extent to which I think I’m really femme. For example, mi’lady doesn’t really have (or at least hasn’t at any point articulated, to me or to herself) a matching and inverted fantasy of being a “protector” and having a “wife,” the way I’ve got this fantasy of having a protector and being a wife. But… I love her. She makes me laugh, she helps me move beyond details and be flexible, she motivates me to break out of my comfort zone a little bit and then gives me room to go back in, she challenges me. And really, I don’t think it’s necessary for our fantasies to match up. I think as long as we’re willing and able to work out the kinks and figure out our dynamics and make sure we’re both giving what we’re able to getting what we need, then we should be ok.
And, you know, she really does love it when I cook for her :)
It was the best welcome home she’s ever had, she said.
After all my thinking and processing last week about my femmeyness, I allowed myself to just revel in it. I spent all day Sunday preparing for her to come home. I booked a Zipcar to pick her up at the airport when her flight came in at 6. (Typically we would just take BART, and I had told her I would meet her to help her carry her stuff home… the car was a surprise!) I got my nails done in the morning (fingers and toes!)–short, a little bit squared, bright red polish. Paraffin wax, so my skin was silky smooth. I’d gotten a fresh legs and bikini wax on Saturday, so that I’d be ready and smooth for her. I planned out Sunday evening’s meal, bought the necessary ingredients on Saturday, and brought them over to her place on Sunday afternoon to begin prep before her flight came in. AND, on Sunday morning after the manicure and pedicure, I went to my favorite lingerie boutique in San Francisco, Dollhouse Bettie (they specialize in vintage and pinup lingerie), to make sure her welcome home would be *extra* special. (Dollhouse Bettie’s website doesn’t have a link to the piece I bought, so I found a link to it elsewhere instead. It’s got gorgeous detailing, and I got nude seamed nylons instead of black ones because I really wanted the basque to speak for itself. With these shoes and my full-sleeve black leather gloves from Doncaster, this is a stunning get-up.)
And it was such a wonderful day, from start to finish. Waking up and knowing that I was going to be getting my nails done, going lingerie shopping, cooking, and seeing/fucking mi’lady for the first time in a week was such an amazing feeling. I don’t think there’s anything I’d have rather done on a gorgeous Sunday. Seriously. And it all went off without a hitch.
The only thing I think could have gone smoother was cutting the pumpkin. Pumpkin soup was one of my menu items (and as SOON as she saw it she was really, really excited… she loves pureed vegetable soups), but I’d forgotten how ridiculously hard it is to cube and peel a raw pumpkin. SO HARD. I wrestled with it for a good hour. But it was so ridiculously worth it. It was really, really good, if I do say so myself. And the recipe is really simple — really all that’s in it is pumpkin, onion, a tiny bit of garlic, bay leaves, a bit of orange rind, butter, vegetable stock, and a tiny bit of milk. I garnished it with fresh chives. And that’s it. The best part though? Was mi’lady telling me that the pumpkin soup she’d had earlier that week at an upscale restaurant in Boston with a client “wasn’t even half as good as yours. Well okay, maybe half. But seriously, only half!”
The other menu item was risotto with leeks, spinach, white wine, and a little bit of plain yoghurt. I love cooking.
The best part of everything was that she just felt adored. I love that. Love it. It turns me on and makes me stand up straight. I’m doing what I do best, what I love to do. Fuck yeah. From getting picked up by me at the airport in a car, to having dinner planned and prepared to the AMAZING fucking hot sex we had, it was the best welcome home she’d ever had. And I’m responsible for it :)
Reading the comments to my previous post helped me clarify my thoughts about this femme fantasy. So I thought I’d do it “out loud” here, too.
I don’t think the fantasy I described of being perfectly domestic, perfectly sexy, perfectly exactly for my lover is the only way I conceive of myself as a femme. I certainly have my own goals and ambitions and social life and tastes and enjoyments, and I certainly want to keep nurturing those and developing myself as a person. (As greg said in the comments, I absolutely need those days of knotting the hair back, donning the cracked boots and jumping in the jeep. Well, I don’t have long hair or a jeep, but that’s the general idea!) Writing here is one of the ways I do that; doing the rape counseling work is another; keeping in touch with my friends, applying for graduate school, playing piano, doing yoga… all of that is stuff I do to continually round myself out and build myself up. And it’s absolutely necessary for me to keep doing that, always. Always.
But the fantasy is there, and I want to explore it. Until now, I’ve been angrily pushing it away, thinking “no! that’s co-dependency! get out!” For example: I feel like baking. What do I bake? Into my head pops the thought: “mi’lady’s favorite is strawberry rhubarb pie…” and I get all warm and tingly and excited at the thought of surprising her with a warm homemade pie when I see her in the evening. But before I get too excited, I cut myself off. “Why do you always want to do what she likes? You don’t even like pie! Bake something you like!” And so I’ll probably end up compromising, I’ll bake something I know she’ll like but that I like too, and I make sure to bake it not with her specifically in mind. So when I see her, it’s “look! I baked cookies today! Have one, they’re yummy!” rather than “look! I baked your favorite pie today, just for you!”
It sounds so selfish. But I guess I’ve thought it to be necessary, as a way of coaching myself to pay attention to my own wants and needs, rather than always catering to other people’s. I think it has a lot to do with vulnerability for me, too. I get angry with myself for giving too much of myself away to someone else. I get afraid that the more I give away, the more I’m allowing her to hurt me. I’m giving her power. And maybe I’ve thought of it too as a zero-sum game — that if I give her the power to hurt me, I’m somehow lessening my own power to heal from hurt.
So, to continue with the previous example, when I bake mi’lady’s favorite pie, just because I know she likes it, I’m making myself vulnerable to her by doing something for her. It’s saying, “you matter so much to me that I’m going to bake you your favorite pie, just because.” And what if it’s not reciprocated? What if she doesn’t like it? Or doesn’t really notice? Or just says, “oh thanks baby, that’s so sweet” absent-mindedly. Clearly if I spend my afternoon baking her favorite kind of pie, then my afternoon was about her. But what if her afternoon wasn’t even remotely about me? What if I think about her more often than she thinks about me? What if what if what if. So stopping myself from baking that pie is a way of holding back, keeping things level.
And that’s what it is, it’s holding back. Because really? I want to bake that pie. I guess I have to throw those what-ifs to the wind. Because she does matter to me that much. And I want her to know it. I want her to feel it. That’s not co-dependent. That’s so far from c0-dependent. What it is is trust.
Love is not a zero-sum game. I need to practice believing that in how I go about loving. There’s plenty to go around. There’s enough for us both. And the main thing I am now slowly coming to realize is, if I do something for her, I’m not necessarily losing myself, or giving myself away. I could be, for sure, depending on the context. But I could also actually just be reaffirming myself. So the next step I guess? Working all of this into my relationship with mi’lady in a way that feels right. Stay tuned, this could be a wild ride.
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