a mother-child Christmas musing

I trust others had a good Christmas with family and friends. Amanda and I had a quiet day with Mother; Lucille stopped by later for a second round of gifting, and we all had tea and scones. It was laid back and quite lovely.

This house is filled with childhood memories. My earliest years were in a different house — we moved here in my pre-teen years — but our move was just across town and the Christmases from both houses blend together in memory. They offer opportunities to prompt Mom: “Do you recall when…?” She does pretty well retrieving older times; remembering yesterday is the bigger challenge.

I’ve written before about how my relationship with my mother has flipped “roles” in this current season of our lives. These days, I am no longer her child, but am parent to her child. But if there were ever a time when I might slip back into my childhood for a spell, it would be Christmas morning.

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Aspects of D/s might naturally incline one to slip into a child persona: dominants are often older than submissives; a dom assumes a kind of parental authority over his sub; slave training can be about conditioning certain behaviors, like rearing a child; discipline can be in the form of physical punishment, even spanking. One can easily imagine the words being issued: “We’ll have no more of that, young lady.”

But in my D/s experiences, this hasn’t happened. It is true that my dominants have been a half-generation older than me and that their authority over me has been full and extensive, if not absolute. Yet they have not “parented” me. And I do not slip into my inner child as a response to those who rule me. (Now, in D/s I sometimes feel things that recall my girlhood experiences, and I might write such things to express my fullest and deepest experience, but I generally don’t respond to my dominants in a childlike demeanor.)

That I am in my thirties is perhaps part of it. If I had started in D/s earlier in my twenties, perhaps I would be seen and experienced differently. I can imagine myself at the age of eighteen with a dominant who is fifty or so, who might naturally drift into more of the parent-child dynamic. It’s been said I have a “girlish face,” perhaps the result of my freckles, and accentuated when I pull my red hair into a ponytail — and sometimes my owners like that “Irish lass look.” But as Amanda has said, “Shae, you don’t have the body of a teenager, and you’re certainly not a virgin.” (Thank you, Mistress, for making such a point of that last part.) Her point being that I have a developed figure, as they used to say, and it would be hard for me to assume the teen-girl persona convincingly even if someone wanted me to.

Master McKenna once said to me that he prefers “adult women who know what the cost [of submission] is.” And I think that’s the common understanding behind true lifestyle D/s. It can be playful at times, but it’s not about a parent playing with his child. Rather, the pleasure comes from a dom owning a woman and the submissive desiring to be owned and kept as a adult.

I think another point is that all of my D/s relationships have shunned the idea of role-playing. We don’t play the part of dom and sub — that is what we are, full-time. I don’t play the role of “child” to my dom’s “parent.” It’s just not true or real to who we are. (I realize that “child play” is part of some D/s and BDSM, but that’s just not our thing.)

I have no particular conclusion to this. These are just my musings.

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On Christmas morning, I sat on the living room floor opening presents, much as I did when I was a young girl in the same house, daughter to the woman who raised me, the one who sits on a chair across from me.

But I am, by a set of circumstances and aging, now also a mother to my mother.

I’m also aware that, just weeks before, I was with a young man in his twenties named Blake who likely sees me as a particular mother “type” to him — in fact, a MILF, as he might likely identify me.

And on this Christmas morn I sit at the feet of Amanda, who is much like an older sister I never had.

I am at the same time owned by Amanda and another, Master McKenna, who see me as an adult submissive woman who chooses to sacrifice herself — her autonomy and dignity — unto their dominance.

I suppose this is the point — that we are all of the above — girl, lass, daughter, sister, mother — all wrapped into the Women we are.