Time Has Passed

It has been years now; years since life was so radically altered.  So many seconds have passed since...  Well, truthfully, I don't even know the moment I should point to and say, "since then."  To be able to indicate the moment when it all began to change, I would have to identify the date and time when the dream exploded and it all started to crumble into a heap.  I can't do that.  I can tell you the dates when everything seemed to fall into spiraling crisis, but I think the destruction started a very long time before that.  The foundations were never solid, and the edifice that we tried to build could not stand.  Probably, it really doesn't matter when exactly the first crack appeared.  There were cracks.  That is enough to know about the beginning of the failure.

Now, though, time has passed, and we remain.  We have learned a variety of ways of living together in the rubble of what was.  I think, in some sense, we are healthier here in our rubble pile than we ever were in the castle in the sky.

I am approaching my 61st birthday.  So much of what was part and parcel of who I am in the world is now gone.   My past is only barely remembered.  The places I once knew.  The family I once had.  The people I once knew.  I am a long term transplant in this part of Ohio.  It feels familiar.  This is where I am.  I am no longer feeling pulled west.  That is no longer home.  In fact, the notion of home seems foreign to me.  To have a place where one undeniably belongs; that is a gift that only a few lucky souls ever really receive.  Not me. I have no home.  I have a place.  It offers shelter and a way to live.  I am not endangered here.  I clearly don't really belong in the spaces available here, but I am not obviously foreign either.

Time has changed so much.  They say that time heals, but I don't think it really does.  It allows the bleeding to be staunched, the scars to form, the new patterns and realities to become habitualized...  The wounding, however, remains.  For me, the grace is that I have come to accept most of it.  Not all, but most.  Like the losses that came with the hysterectomy, now almost a decade ago, I have become accustomed to the emptiness and the distance and the toned-down politeness of my life.  It is what I expect, and those other expectations have largely expired due to lack of any sort of sustenance.
I remember, early on, when I was still on fire, trying to do IT all right.  I felt there was a bargain in place within my relationship, and that if I held up my end sufficiently, there would be some sort of reciprocity -- a payback of sorts.  I talked at some length about it all to a domme friend of ours.  She told me, quite sternly, "You say you want to be a slave.  So slave."  I did not know what to do with that then.  The wants and the needs and the expectations were all still alive and kicking.  Now, at almost 61, most of that drive/demand has passed on.  I can take care of my own wants and needs for the most part, and I have very few illusions that anyone else really cares much.  And me?  Do I care, really?  Not enough to fight for it all.

I've made the choices that brought me here.  It is all on me.  I can't go back and change the story.  What lies ahead is exactly what lies behind.  Time has passed.  What time remains will pass as well, and this story will become just a memory.  Nothing more.

The Trouble with Meetup

We have, over the last couple of years, tried several Meetup groups.  Meetup is a social networking site for groups of people who share common interests.  Leaders pay a fee, and then can set up a group to focus on just about anything that interests them.  We've spent time with an atheist group, a group of "alternative spirituality" types, a polyamory group, and most recently, a sex-positive group.  Sometimes we attend several gatherings over a period of time.  With other groups, it is one and done.  In general, our experiences with the various Meetup groups has been disappointing.  So, what is it that causes the reality of Meetups to fall so far short of the promise?

The first factor that impacts our experience of the Meetup experience is that we are OLD.  Whatever the stated purpose of the group, there is almost always an unstated purpose which is for young adults to find sexual/romantic partners.  We are clearly not there to hookup at the Meetup, and so we become significantly less interesting to the rest of the group.  I did, just last week, have a series of emails from a Meetup Troll.  His first email was pretty innocuous, asking, "what is a triad?"  I answered that we are polyamorous, and there are three of us.  So, we are not a couple, we are a triad.  Almost immediately, I got another email asking if we wanted to add a good man to the family.  Blech.  The move to treat Meetup like a meat market is strong.

Then there are the Meetup denizens themselves.  We have found that, while the goal is to provide a vehicle for social interaction, many of the individuals we've met lack basic social skills.  The events that we have attended are full of people who are painfully shy, can't hold up their end of a conversation, are frightened and terribly defensive, or, at the other end of the scale, are so full of ego that they have no use at all for other people.  The truth seems to be that people who can engage adequately with other people make friends without the intermediary function of a Meetup style vehicle.

Meetup provides the connection between individuals, but the necessary infrastructure for the actual face-to-face encounters is a tougher challenge.  Meetup groups need a place to actually meet up.  Here, at least, that happens most frequently in public venues like restaurants.  Since most restaurants charge extra for a private meeting room, and since most of the folks we have met want to keep the costs down (and we are all for that ourselves), gatherings tend to happen in big, open, noisy restaurants with the whole bunch seated around some large table configuration.  It doesn't lend itself to deep conversation, and really limits you to chatting casually with the people across the table and on either side of you.  If you really want to sit and talk, or discuss something in depth, then you need a quiet place to do that.  Tom tends to observe that most Meetup events are designed to prevent you from actually Meeting Up.

Meetup groups that survive very long; that develop a following or a core group, tend to grow inner circle cliques.  Once there are a few people who know one another in the center of the group, newcomers and occasional attendees can, quite naturally, find themselves on the outside of the circle.
We attended an event last night; a burlesque show at a local "concert" venue. The tickets were not inexpensive, and the parking in the area was very limited.  When we did finally find a lot with a space available, we had to pay $25 for the privilege.  Inside, the music was cranked up to deafening levels, and the only alternative to buying booze was overpriced bottled water.  Our shoes stuck to the floors and the restrooms ...  Well, never mind.  You do not want to know.  It was impossible to have a conversation.  We were seated on miserable, uncomfortable, metal folding chairs with a terrible view of the stage.  The event organizer turned out to be a young guy with minimal social skills who seemed to find it painful to talk to us.  Other members of the group took one look at the three of us, and clearly decided we were too old to bother with.  When the show actually started, it turned out that most of the "dancers" were of the opinion that they did not need any talent as long as they were willing to show their butts and shake their tits.  We left at intermission.

Probably, we are done with Meetups.  We keep thinking that maybe THIS time it will be better, but it never is.  We sometimes imagine a social group of interesting, bright, conversant friends with whom we could just be who we are.  Statistically, there have to be people like that out there, but perhaps they are as "undercover and in the closet" as we are.  In any case, wherever they may be, it seems clear that Meetups are not the places where we are going to find them.

Monarchs

I have a friend and a colleague; a woman with whom I taught for a short while.  She owns a bit of land.  Among other things, she grows milkweed.

 Milkweed, as it happens, is the ONLY food that the caterpillars (larvae) of the monarch butterfly will eat.  We humans tend to view milkweed as a weed, and therefore, a nuisance.  We have worked hard to root it out of our gardens and our farm fields, and hence, we have left the monarch butterfly with severely limited range for laying its eggs and propagating successive generations.  Between the loss of milkweed, climate change pushing the distance the butterflies must travel on their annual migration, and large-scale logging in the regions of Mexico where the butterflies go to overwinter, monarchs are in BIG trouble.  Some counts put the loss of this beautiful, winged creature between 50% and 80% in the last few years.

So, a couple of weeks ago, my friend called me to say that her milkweed was just covered with growing caterpillars, and would I like some for my science classroom.  Oh HECK Yes!!!  So, now my room is filled with a series of glass aquarium tanks, with screen tops, housing the voracious and messy caterpillars, the pupa stage chrysalises, and a series of emerging butterflies.  My students are absolutely fascinated by the whole thing, and it has brought a lively dialog to life as they flock in and out of my room to check on OUR butterflies.

So far, we have released three of the magnificently lovely, orange and black, flying works of art.  We have seen them lift into the sky, flutter around in erratic, jubilant circles and then soar off; headed we hope back to their winter homes in the highlands of Mexico.  There is the scientific interest and inquiry that has grown up around it all, and that is very satisfying to my teacher's soul.  But there is an element of magic and wonder and pure amazement at the whole vibrant, insistent, nearly incomprehensible metamorphosis.  And, THAT is something I never expected.  What a gift for us all!

Quiet and Glow-y

School started last Tuesday.  Our long, lazy summer days have come to an end.

We did not spank much this summer.  Tom had his left shoulder replaced at the end of June, and the recovery period is long and very, very, VERY limiting in terms of the level of mobility that is allowed for weeks and weeks.  Even though it has been, theoretically, possible for him to spank me with his right hand, we both find that the activity is much more two-handed than it might seem.

So, except for a few sessions prior to that June 30th surgery, spanking has been mostly off the menu for the last two months.  We are, slowly, working our way back to it, but to me at least, it feels like beginning from the start.  I'm more iffy about the whole business, and more erratic in my capacity for just going with it.  I approach each attempt with some wild mixture of eager anticipation and intense anxiety.  It still IS my primary pathway into sexual satisfaction, but it never has been an easy path, and that does not get better as I get older.  I am not the sturdy masochist I once was.  Achy joints and fragile skin just complicate the story.

Too, my frequent migraines make my life an ongoing series of prodromes, actual headaches, and then post-migrainal after effects.  I find I have very few days when I just feel GOOD.  Not feeling GOOD makes much of the rest of life harder, and the sexual/erotic parts of life are no exception -- especially when the sexual/erotic mode that is best for you is firmly anchored in sadomasochistic impact play.  How I envy the folks who do all of this in some easy, "normal" fashion.  Ah, well...

This morning, however, we hit it just right.  Pun absolutely intended.  I got my spanking, He got to spank, and we were right there together, in a really good place.  The sex was good for us both, and the after glow was comfortable.  I noticed that, in that space, my mind is quiet, and the world seems glow-y.  Not church this bright Sunday morning, but surely a chance to touch the divine.

Jimmie

I dreamed up Jimmie a couple of nights ago.  Literally, I dreamed him:  a beautiful young man, with dark eyes, gentle hands, and an uncanny sense of how to please a woman (especially a woman of 60 years who just isn't that easy anymore).

The interesting thing about my dreaming Jimmie is that I put him into a context where I got all the goodie out of the encounter without having to supply anything much in return.  Jimmie and I met at a party.  That's all I really know about that part of the dream.  No real context; just a gathering in someone's home.  There was music and food, and lots of general milling around and social chatter.  Jimmie materialized out of nowhere, and we talked.  We talked for a good long while, and then, after a bit, I suggested to him that we might go downstairs and find someplace quieter.  He agreed, and we wandered off into the basement of the house, and into a back bedroom.  There, Jimmie used his hands and his mouth in ways that were quite wonderful and left me panting in delight.  However, when I offered to return the favor, Jimmie, who had not even unbuttoned his shirt, declined.  He told me that he had gotten into poison ivy, and did not want me to be exposed, and then he was gone, and I awakened.

Not the most sophisticated dream.  There doesn't seem to be much of subtlety to all of that.  I am laying it at the door of an anti-depressant medication that I was given to prevent migraines, and have recently stopped taking.  I feel certain that the medication was suppressing my libido and my sex drive, and that the removal of the drug has turned up the heat on my sexual urges.  And so, Jimmie.  I wonder about the imbalance between us, but then it seemed that neither of us were unhappy, and so maybe that is the lesson:  things don't have to be equal as long as everyone gets what makes them happy.

Policing in Our Communities

I grew up in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, and Officer McCarthy was a fixture in our schools and neighborhoods.  There wasn't a kid who didn't know him and love him.  He was a one man ambassador for the local police department, working to promote safety and community relations.  Whether he was running a bicycle rodeo, or playing the role of Santa Claus, his big smile and booming voice made us all believe that the police were there for us; a part of us; people we could trust and count on.

I have thought about Officer Ed McCarthy many times over the last 4-1/2 years, wondering what distance has come to separate the inherently good, entirely service oriented Irish cop of my childhood from the brutish, thuggish types that answered my desperate calls for help when our family was in crisis. I've thought about him often in these days when the police have been so often in the news, at the vortex of a rising tide of inexplicable violence tinged with racism.  I remembered him, with fondness, as our city buried a seemingly "good cop" who died trying to talk a young black man out of suicide in the heat of the summer.

What is it, I wonder, that makes for a "good cop?"  Over the years, I've known many law enforcement personnel; parents to the children who have passed through my classroom.  They are as uniformly human as parents of any other profession -- some are wise and kind and perceptive while others are frighteningly angry, mean-spirited, and vindictive...  It is my observation, based on limited data, that not everyone is cut out for police work; and that not all who begin the work should continue it.  The truth is that, in the performance of their duties, police see things that are hard to witness, and that can work to change them for the worse.  Some are strong enough, but not all of them.

Every time I hear another report of a young black man, woman, or child shot by a white police officer, I wonder why it matters what the respective racial identities might be.  Is it measurably worse, or better, for an armed police officer who is black to shoot an unarmed white citizen?   I don't mean to deny the depth of the pain at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement in this country.  I think that anger and pain is entirely appropriate and justified.  I do however wonder if our fixation on the race of the officers and their victims obscures a very salient fact:  Police should belong to us. They should come from our communities.  They should know us, and we should know them. They should serve as we choose for them to do, and they should yield only the powers with which we endow them.

As police departments have moved toward an increasingly militarized stance; equipped with weaponry and technologies developed for the battlefield, is it any wonder that our streets have come to seem like war zones?  How is it possible to police a neighborhood that is populated entirely by strangers -- the other?  How can we send young men and women out to prevent violence and protect the citizenry, if they do not know those same citizens.  Shouldn't our police be our brothers and our sisters?  Shouldn't the cop who patrols our streets know the elders in our communities; the power brokers; the neediest of our neighbors?  Shouldn't our children flock to greet our neighbors who serve and protect?  And -- shouldn't they be entirely safe and welcome in doing so?

I think there are some BAD cops.  I think there are some very bad cops; people who haven't the moral strength or judgement to fit them for that so very important role.  But I think there are some, even now ... decades from my childhood, who serve with honor and dedication and a sense of mission, and they should be the models for the future of a better kind of policing.  Our police ought to come from us.  They ought to be "of" us; raised in our neighborhoods, and intimately familiar with us.  They ought to derive their powers from our consent, and they should have no power at all except what we give to them.  We ought to be able to clearly define what it is we need them to do, and we ought to negotiate with them about how those needs can and should be met.  From the streets of Detroit to the sidewalks of Liberal, Kansas, there should be no police with power to destroy our children's lives.  They ought to work with us, for us, beside us.  We ought to embrace them and hold them close.

As long as police see the citizens who are theirs to protect as "THEY," there is a problem.  As long as we see our police as "THEY," there is a problem.  Policing is hard work, and it is work that we need to have done well.  But as long as we are not defining the parameters of that police work, we will continue to be served badly, and that is not a function of race.

Liberal Old School Feminist

I happened across this blog entry by Margaret and Helen, and it reminded me that I am of one mind with these two women -- feminist to my bones, and appalled by the anti-female bias that is so much of the fabric of the thinking that goes on in Republican political discourse.

Actually, I've been reminded of my liberal feminist leanings several times in the last few weeks.  I guess that the fact that I have been reminded points to the fact that those long-held fiery views have been somewhat more quiet of late.  I am, like Margaret and Helen, of a certain age, and so while I can get furious over threats to women's reproductive freedom, and the associated threats to their overall freedom to live and choose as their male counterparts can, I am no longer personally wrapped up in those issues.  For me, it is more purely political and less directly personal.  Life brings its own changes at every turn, and being 60 is a reality not to be discounted.

I've never made my political views a secret.  I am pro-choice.  I am anti-war, and anti-gun.  I think that everyone ought to have the same rights as everyone else, regardless of race, color, gender, sexual identity, economic status, etc.  I think that there are limits to the potential for the free market to get it right in cases of social well-being and simple justice.  I don't think that anyone should have their religious freedom curtailed, but I am adamant that your religious liberty should not ever impinge on me or anyone else.  I am for the living wage.  I am for universal, free educational access from pre-school through college.  I think that workers ought to be valued for the worth of their contributions -- tell me why the person who mops the floors and scrubs the toilets in the office tower is less valuable than those who sit in the corner offices?  Who values the contributions that each one makes?  I absolutely insist that climate change is a real thing, and that it is we humans that are the primary cause of the whole mess.

I have ALWAYS voted democratic, with only one exception. In the year that Jimmy Carter was elected president, I wrote in my vote for John Anderson.  It wasn't a lean to the right.  It was a declaration that Carter was too conservative in my view.  I will, again, cast my vote for the democratic candidate for president in 2016; whoever that may be.  I am not wildly enthusiastic about Hilary Clinton, but I absolutely think she is the best choice out of the likely options.  I'd be more inclined to vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but I am not thinking that those two will turn out to be choices this time around.  So, Hilary it is.

So, yes -- I am unashamedly, irredeemably liberal/progressive in my views.

But for today, let's talk about reproductive freedom and a woman's right to choose what happens to her body.  I was pregnant, for the first time, when I was 20 years old.  I was remarkably naive, and sexually inexperienced, and I thought I was in love.  When I turned up pregnant, I was scared and confused and defiantly determined to "take care of it myself."  I wanted not to marry BECAUSE I was pregnant.  I did not want him to feel trapped into a marriage he did not want, although that was my fear; not his.  I did not know what I should do.  Roe v Wade was, at that time, two years old.  Abortion was legal, although not widely or easily available.  I did consider the possibility.  I also considered leaving town; finding someplace where I could work anonymously and quietly and support myself and my unborn baby.  In the end, I was persuaded to stay, to keep the baby, and to marry that baby's father.  My firstborn is now 39 years old.  I've been divorced from his father for many years.  I am thrilled that I chose to become his mother.  I cannot say, looking back, that I made the correct choice regarding the marriage.  I do however remain convinced that, for right or wrong, all of those choices were mine to make.

I cringe each time the news brings fresh reports of renewed assaults on that right to make a choice.  As our nation veers toward ever more shrill expressions of religious fundamentalism, it seems the chipping away at reproductive freedom is relentless.  Those who would view women as vessels for babies, are more and more strident in their calls for limits to access to contraception, access to safe, legal abortion, and access to fertility treatments.  There is the ever narrower window before our medical science can, in theory, keep a very, very, very young fetus alive; the point of, so called, viability.

Now, we have a presidential candidate who is pushing to apply our Constitution's 5th and 14th amendments to embryos and fetuses.  Because, of course, all life is sacred and worthy of protection ...  unless that life is female or black or brown.  Those lives become far less valuable and worthy at the moment of birth than they are at the moment of conception.  That is every bit as crazy as it sounds.  The truth is that, while we can see the chromosomal information that will result in the eventual formation of a fully formed human infant at the moment of conception, that bit of cellular material is more potential than it is human.  According to the March of Dimes, about 50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, many of them before a woman even knows that she is pregnant.

The current target for the anti-female conservatives is Planned Parenthood. Nothing particularly new there.  Planned Parenthood has been in the line of fire for years. This time, it seems that some young doctors with an unfortunate lack of good sense held a shop talk conversation full of graphic details about the abortion procedure and the use of harvested tissues and organs in a public venue.  It seems a remarkable and regrettable lapse in judgement.  However, that being said, the Republican rush to "defund Planned Parenthood" is as appalling as it is predictable.  The fact is that, while Planned Parenthood does provide abortion services to women who choose that option, that is a very small percentage (about 3%) of what the organization does.  Too, there is not one penny of federal funding for abortions at Planned Parenthood.  Some 2,840,000 men and women receive services and education from Planned Parenthood in the U.S. each year.  Other vital medical services and educational programs for women and for men, such as cancer screening, well woman check ups, STD testing, contraceptive services, etc., make up the vast majority of the health care provided by Planned Parenthood.  Many women in difficult economic circumstances, who struggle to pay for regular health care, are served best in Planned Parenthood clinics.  In fact, Planned Parenthood provides the information and access to contraceptive services that work to prevent a great many unplanned pregnancies, and thus reduce the demand for abortion services.

I think this anti-abortion push is grounded in exactly the same sort of argument that conservative fundamentalists make about same-gender marriage:  their religious beliefs tell them that it is wrong, and so they seem convinced that all of us must adhere to their belief system.  I don't intend to insist that those who have religiously based objections to abortion should participate in the practice.  If you think abortion is wrong, then don't have one.  Beyond that, keep your own counsel.  You have no right to impose your beliefs on women who do not believe as you do.

I am aware that this issue of reproductive freedom is not all there is to the feminist agenda.  Today's young women are in the trenches, fighting for equality for women on a wide variety of fronts.  Much of what the youngest feminist activists are about these days seems subtle to me, and I take some pride in that fact.  From my perspective, the good news is that the gross injustices that sent me and my feminist peers to the streets in the 1970's are largely absent from the lives of today's young women.  As the older generation of feminists fought for the right to equal access in schools and workplaces and the world of sports, the younger cadre of feminists see themselves as standing toe to toe with their male counterparts.  That basic equality frees them up to fight the more systemic forms of discrimination, and I am happy to cheer them on.  They make me proud.

If only, we were closer to the day when the idea of gender-based inequities were utterly unthinkable.  If only women could stop fighting against the system that disadvantages them relative to their brothers.  If only we could finally establish, the obvious -- that women's lives are inherently valuable; that women's bodies are their own; that no state and no religious institution has any claim to ownership or control over the lives or bodies of women and girls.  If only...