Kink After Kids

A few random thoughts on kink post-kids:

• They're amazing at finding bruises with pointy little knees and elbows
• Gags are useful when your only set of eyebolts is 10' from the toddler's bedroom door
• Toddlers are terrifyingly handy with a short singletail. Mine has managed to catch me across the face with it twice... AFTER my attempts at hiding it in the closet failed miserably.
• Fetish parties don't happen anymore, unless you have a spare $60 for babysitting on top of the cost of going to the party
• It's amazing how much that can make me miss my community
• The 19mos old is the biggest sadist in the household
• On the previous note, kinkiness is clearly genetic. Ours has never seen us play, and yet takes canes, whips, or whatever else he can find (his current favorite is Mommy's dressage whip, which she can't seem to hide well enough) and beats the dog (surprisingly lightly, since I have seen him swing that sucker hard enough it'd have left welts), then set aside the whip and start petting her. 

I seriously wish I were kidding about all of these things. 

Another Laurell Hamilton quote

But this one isn't from the books, this one is from her blog. And this one hits home as
deeply as anything I've seen in one of her books:

"I am thinking of absent friends, and those people you lose in your life, some through death, and some through them just walking away. There is a reason I’m back in therapy, because the thought that went through my head is one I’ve had before. Why? Why wasn’t I enough? Good enough, pretty enough, whatever enough. But it’s a child’s thought, to believe if you were good enough, or better behaved, or better at something, that they would have stayed, or loved you better, or hell, even loved you at all. It doesn’t work like that. It really isn’t your loss, but theirs."

This ties in painfully well with the episode of "True Blood" that Jack and I watched last night, involving a confrontation between the adult daughter of an alcoholic mother, and the mother in question. Tara, the daughter, points out that she gave up her entire life to care for her mother, and received only abuse in return. Now, when Tara needs help, she again receives only abuse.

It was... painful to watch, and tears welled up in my eyes.
I don't know why my mother hated me. I don't know why she deliberately made choices to hurt me. I don't know why she chose to justify those choices by claiming they were "for my own good," despite knowing better.
I don't know why my mother made the decisions she did.
I'll never know now, because she's been dead for almost two years.

I keep wanting to make excuses for her, convince myself somehow that her behavior was "okay", was somehow noble (if misguided). I want to make it my fault, not hers. My father's fault, not hers. Her parents' fault, not hers. But there is no excusing the maliciousness of the things she said, the things she did. There is no way to make her flaws my fault.
As LKH said, that is a child's thought.

And I am not a child anymore.