KINK & BDSM
Quiet Tantrums
Last week I did something impulsive. I felt angry and lonely. Or as my fellow submissive friend has described it, my spiteful baby mode was activated.
Photo by Phil Nguyen on Pexels
I once read in a parenting book that children both crave and fear being able to provoke a big emotional reaction in their parents. They crave it because they feel small and inferior, and if they are able to make their parents feel something big, that feeling of inferiority is temporarily soothed by feelings of power. But the price is big—because their feeling of safety in the world is so tied to their parents being stable and omnipotent. Children may feel powerful when they are able to push their parents over the edge, but it is a terrifying power—one that teaches them that ultimately stability and order are dependent on them. What children really want, according to this memory I have of this book, is to feel safe in their inferiority. They want to feel some version of, “I am safe and loved even though I am smaller and know less and feel things I can’t put into words and do bad things because I can’t help it.” They want to know that they aren’t powerful enough to destroy the things they need.
In my Daddy-little dynamic with Don, I can still find it impossible to reconcile my adult agency and power with my inner spiteful baby’s righteous entitlement to thrash and be met with overpowering, loving containment. I feel incredulous when Don gives me space when I tell him I don’t want to be around him, positive that he is latching on to any opportunity to get respite from me because he doesn’t want to deal with me. When my own daughter angrily tells me to go away and that she hates me, I know that she wants stable attention, not space. Doesn’t he see that in those moments I am trying to prove to myself that I don’t need him so that I feel less overwhelmed by my dependence on him?
Last week it was my birthday, and Don and I went to see Obsession for the second time. We love horror movies and deconstructing the symbolism of their minutiae. Since it was our second viewing, I kept having new thoughts that I’d lean over and whisper to him. At a certain point he told me that he didn’t want to talk during the movie. I hadn’t seen it coming and his words made me freeze and tense up and quietly cry next to him. And he didn’t even notice! I was doing my best to hide it…but still, how can he even be my Daddy if my ability to hide from him is more developed than his ability to notice me?
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I was so excited before the movie started.
When the movie was over he asked me if he had hurt my feelings and I said no and went to the bathroom to cry some more. If he didn’t even notice my tears in the theater, I certainly didn’t want him to know I was still crying. Except I did want him to know. I wanted him to know that he hurt me so badly that I couldn’t even cry in front of him. I wanted him to know that obviously I couldn’t just say that to him because that would be manipulative and childish and I’m a reasonable adult who is just as capable as he is and I don’t need a Daddy and he should feel really really bad for making me cry. I wanted him to know that it was TOO LATE for him to really be my Daddy and that he ruined everything ON MY BIRTHDAY NO LESS!
When he put me to bed that night I didn’t say anything about any of it. I just snuck out of the room and cried some more by myself, secretly hoping he would come find me. But he was asleep and he didn’t and after an hour the fullness of my self-imposed loneliness hit so hard I couldn’t breathe.
“He’s not coming,” I sobbed to myself, out loud but alone in my upstairs bedroom, still somehow hoping he would sense something, wake up and come witness what was happening.
A month earlier, on our three year anniversary, Don had carved a mark with a scalpel right at the center of my ribcage. I’d been asking him to mark me like this for months and yet he still managed to surprise me with it. It was supposed to be a portal—where pain I couldn’t name or verbalize could flow out from me to him when he put his mouth over the open wound. The first time he opened that portal, I felt claimed and changed. I could feel his desire for everything inside of me. I could feel the sheer force of our shared yearning to transcend earthly, creaturely markers of separateness. And the power of that forceful yearning cradled me in a way that was new.
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Posing for a selfie with the portal.
Now, alone, in the middle of the night, it all felt like hubris. Like we were just two arrogant souls in love thinking we could cheat the human experience of aloneness in our own bodies. That night, tracing the raised, scarred remnants of his mark with my finger, I couldn’t access anything.
The next day I slept until noon. All of the urgency I had felt the night before was gone. Don was at work. Somewhere in my indulgent numbness a thought sparked. I wanted to carve myself. Open my own portal. I snuck downstairs and found his scalpel. I felt knots in my stomach. I looked out the window at the sunny green pasture outside. In my chair I brought my knees up close to my eyes. I wanted to honor the one thought I felt I’d had all day so I did it. I pushed the scalpel gently into the flesh of my knee and wrote the word “me.”
Some self-judgment flickered. “I’m so dramatic.” “I shouldn’t do this without telling him.” “This isn’t me, this is PMS.” But mostly I felt a curious, aesthetic joy. The m was so delightfully curved and rounded. The way the word sat on a diagonal on my knee was so whimsical. The thin line of blood was controlled and small, not gushing or accusatory. “I’m an artist,” a part of me thought, self-consciously. I took a lot of pictures of it—the way I’d sometimes take photos of a particularly beautiful bouquet of wildflowers. I staged myself against different backgrounds and angles of light. When I caught myself worrying about what Don would think, I noticed that the anxiety was reflexive, from past lives, and it disintegrated on its own. I knew that he wouldn’t meet this act of self-authorship with anything but curiosity and compassion.
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But when I finally showed it to him I felt guilty, and the fact that I felt guilty made me angry at him. I’d spun all kinds of narratives in my head about what the mark meant—each narrative tethered not quite to reality but to a certain nervous system contortion. (I’m aware that that is itself a narrative…when I inception my own stories too much it is hard to know what is real anymore).
One story that swirled was that I’d needed to mark myself in order to belong to myself again. There was maybe some of that—but belonging only to myself wasn’t comforting. It was more like being stranded on an island where, sure, no one could bother you, but no one could talk to you or hug you either.
Another story was that I needed Don to show me that he would still claim responsibility for caring for me even when I was rejecting his dominion over my body. And that if he couldn’t I would be able to do it for myself.
Another story was that I needed to remind myself of my own free will. And that I could do “crazy” things and still be worthy of love.
All of that swirled in me—but what I said to him was simply, “I felt like I needed to do it for some reason that still maybe hasn’t been fully revealed to me.”
Don doted on me in these types of moments. “One of the uniquely beautiful things about you, lamb,” he said, “is your ability to feel things that are murky and not foreclose meaning on them before it’s arrived. It’s a skill I want you to continue developing.”
Suddenly it all felt so simple. It isn’t that a narrative to explain my actions has revealed itself to me yet. It is that I get to rest in the certainty of my Daddy’s love even if other things remain uncertain. Even if they remain murky forever. Even if I can’t render myself into something that is easily understood.
The mark I gave myself is fading. I think it will heal completely and leave no trace if I decide I want it gone.
Don has asked that I point to my face next time I’m crying so he doesn’t miss it. So now I do, and he takes his mouth and drinks up all the tears as they run down my cheeks. He really does want all my pain.
But I still feel so overwhelmed knowing that he can’t just take it if I don’t give it to him. I’m still uncomfortable with having to own that power and responsibility.
Original Post: Saga McFarland
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