So, as-you-may-be-aware-Bob, I recently (last October) began a new relationship. What I may not have brought up (yet) (here) is that my girlfriend and I share an age-play dynamic. Which is to say that we have a D/s relationship wherein the power exchange shows up in the form of her being a Little and me being a Care-Giver. This gives her the opportunity to Need Things (including care and reassurance) and it gives me the opportunity to be both (a) bossy[1] and kind of a condescending know-it-all (and, okay, sadistic af), and (b) nurturing & affectionate… with a built-in pause button should I need that stuff to come back in my direction[2].
 
I wanted to try age play – this ongoing dynamic started out as a single scene at a party – because of a lot of things. Stuff that had shown up in an uncomfortable and unplanned, but still very clearly “resonant” way, in an earlier relationship. Stuff about my own ambivalence around the role of explicit care-giving “outsourced executive functioning” on the D side of D/s. Stuff around Glamour Magic, as it happens, and the Union of Opposites.
 
Stick with me.
 
So. If you’ve been following along over at Urban Meliad, you’ll know that, in fits and starts, I’ve been doing the “radical magical transformation” project (again), as well as doing some stuff around glamour as a magical practice. Largely because a friend of mine wrote a book on the subject.
One of the things my friend talks about in her book is how Glamour requires the reconciliation of your easy-to-like parts with your not-so-easy-to-like parts. She has a whole post about it here, to get you started.
 
So, quite some time ago now, I did some thinking about what my “easy to like” and “not so easy to like” parts actually are. And, while I shorthand that stuff as being my “Cancer Moon” and my “Scorpio Sun”, what I’m actually getting at is:
The scary parts of me – the parts that, in a nonconsensual setting, could look like anything from the annoying starting point of “I have kind of bad boundaries and give out a lot of unsolicited advice” all the way out to the extreme end of “I am a violent, controlling stalker” – are, in a consensual context, basically what I do in my D/s relationships and in SM scenes with my friends and romantic partners.
And the easy-to-like parts of me – the ones that my culture tells me are supposed to be the only parts of me, and that are culturally coded as both worthless/valueless and a requirement for me to be Gendering Properly – are the care-giver things I do like cooking, and emotional support, and generally mending people’s pockets. … Which is great, right up until you start noticing how imbalanced the care in most of your intimate relationships has been.
 
So I was taking a poke at age play, at the idea of “Mommy”, and wondering how you can play with that role, without ending up being “Wendy” for your partners at the expense of yourself.
I was prodding at this idea of the Black Swan, this union of my “scary” and “easy” sides, and thinking that maybe – just maybe – having a go at being a “sadistic, devouring, but very nurturing” Mommy might be a way to embody both sides of myself at the same time.
 
It’s certainly feels like a good fit, and a very enjoyable one, so far.
 
~*~
 
Notice Pleasure: Sensual massages. Eye-gazing. Solo dancing to pop music. Turning the heat up. Getting supportive, comforting snuggles. Sharing body heat. Scented candles. My partners’ respective cute smiles. Coffee with cream and sugar and dark chocolate to dip in it.
 
 
[1] “Because I’m the Mommy. That’s why.”
 
[2] My Little Girl – whose little-ness is wonderfully fluid in terms of moving between being my “kiddo” and being my peer – is actually very quick to offer me emotional support when she sees that I need it (a thing I’m not nearly as good at hiding as I might have once thought) without me necessarily having to say “I need to talk to grown-up you now”. Which is also really nice. But, none the less, the “pause button” language is helpful for me, so I’m hanging onto it for now.