Age-Related Musings

Seems I’m running into this a lot these last few days. Living and writing in the blogosphere might have something to do with that, especially if you hang out in the kinkier neighborhoods – feels like everyone is younger than me; than us. Now, I just know that isn’t true, but, my goodness, I’m talking sex to people who are years younger than my children!!! And if that isn’t bad enough, these same folks are wondering if people “their parents’ ages are comfortable talking about/thinking about sex!” Ummmmm… excuse me? Am I in the room here?

Then, just last Saturday night, we went, the three of us, to a local comedy club. You see, T, who acts as the social director for our family, seeing to it that The Heretic and I get dragged out into public once in awhile for an “airing out,” had won us some tickets. Now, if there is a single activity on the face of the planet that is guaranteed to make you feel like an “olager” if you are over the age of 30, it is walking into a comedy club. EEEEKKKK.

We dressed up in what Master calls our Poly “bowling club” shirts – polo style shirts with logos that indicate, if you look closely, that the three of us consider ourselves “married.” Arriving at the door of the place, we stood in line with a lively bunch of youngsters, Master leaning on His cane, and shuffled toward the front, where a sign warned ominously that everyone must HAVE THEIR ID READY… Master wasn’t entirely sure when He’d seen His last, and joked that He’d had to surrender it when He’d received His “Golden Buckeye Pass” (the card that the state of Ohio issues to senior citizens to allow them free admission to state parks). Of course, when we arrived at the head of the line, the young fellow checking ID’s just laughed and waved us on in. Sigh… You can’t fool Mother Nature.

Now, for grins, if you want to put a twist in people’s shorts, sit down in the midst of a bunch of too-cool-for-school 20 and 30 something’s as a poly triad family in your late 40’s and 50’s and start holding hands and kissing on each other and make not-so-subtle references to your relationship – just sit back and watch the ripples begin to spread. It wasn’t too long before the tables around us were beginning to do some sincere head scratching… Take that, young whippersnappers!!! Hehehehehehe. Anyway, I digress…

Jokes were about getting along with your parents (or not), the stresses of work and school, dating and getting laid (or not), being newly married and having babies (been there done that)… At least what’s funny at a certain age in life hasn’t changed much.

Anyway, all of this has me thinking about the route I’ve traveled to HERE. Here is a time and a place in my life where I proudly claim the title of submissive and slave, masochist, and poly wife and sister-heart.

I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I am a product of the women’s liberation movement of that era. We fought our mothers to be able to wear bras and then took a page from our brothers’ books and burned the damn things!

I attended the Colorado School of Mines, studying mining engineering, where I was one of 25 women in a class of 400. I remember, as a freshman purchasing the required uniform for the required physical education class. It included a jock strap. I stood, indignantly, in the middle of the teeming field house at registration, holding the offending item aloft, demanding to know what the hell I was supposed to do with this thing, and making it clear to anyone within ear shot, that I had no intention of paying for something for which I had no earthly use. The cost of the ATHLETIC SUPPORTER was duly subtracted from my bill. And, yes, while I was there at Mines, I learned to blow things up, use a rock hammer, use a surveyor’s level, and program a PDP 11 computer (in Fortran IV – look it up historians).

In the workplace, I did civil engineering drafting, mining engineering mapping, uranium mining and oil and gas land lease work, and a fair amount of survey crew work. I was often the only woman in the office besides the secretary. I got a spanking one time in front of the whole office, by a geologist in his 40’s who just thought it would be fun to see if he could get away with it. The boss’s office was only 20 feet away and his door was wide open. I fought like a wild cat, but stopped short of cold-cocking the bastard… to my everlasting regret. Another time, the marketing guy at a civil engineering firm where I was part of a 7 person drafting/surveying crew walked right past the two secretaries, with a client in tow, and shouted across the drafting room at me, “Hey, Suzie(no one but my Dad has ever called me Suzie – not even Master goes there), bring us some coffee, would ya?” I was livid and blind with rage, but I got up from the plan I was working on and went to get the coffee pot and two mugs. I set the mug down in front of the client, poured his coffee, put the other mug down on the marketing prick’s desk and emptied the pot in his lap. Then I turned around walked out of his office and got my stuff and went home. I figured I’d need a new job, but no one ever said a word and I came back the next day and went right on as if nothing had ever happened. The secretaries got the coffee from then on.

In my generation of women, we paid attention to words. We worked hard to take back the language, to the point of silliness sometimes. Waitress became “waitperson” and we sometimes joked that the person who delivered the letters we got from our parents when we were away at college should maybe be referred to as the “person-person.” When it came time to marry, the debate over whether or not to take our new husband’s names led to all sorts of naming contortions and hyphenation-hideousness. That discussion often led to the musing over whether keeping the name you got at birth was really any better because, after all, that was just the name your mother got from your father when she married him – how far back did a woman have to go to get an “authentic” name? Sigh. We were so awfully serious. And then we had our own sons and daughters and the whole naming issue came up again. With first names and last names… No silly girl names for us – oh no. No Sallies or Suzie’s or Betty’s… Our girls were going to have good solid, serious, sensible names that no one was going to screw with. Good grief!

Raised on Steinhem and the like, I hid the dark dreamings of submissive and masochistic fantasies for years and years. Imagine my chagrin when I began to come to grips publicly with the first inklings of my submissive nature. I struggled mightily to accommodate the very idea of submission as part of who I am. Master still delights in teasing me about those early days as I twisted and turned trying to alternately shake it off like a cobweb one day, and then somehow, squeeze into it and see if it fit the next. Quite a dance it was. I did that dance first and then we tackled the bit about masochism. Too much to take on all at once…

I’ve left behind an awful lot of friends and folks who once were part of my life. They couldn’t see me through the transitions. A bra burner and petition carrier who wears a collar and cuffs just can’t be reconciled in some people’s cosmologies. There are folks who cannot connect those dots.

I’ve gotten older along the path. It takes time to walk the distance. To learn all the lessons and meet all the teachers and fellow travelers. Some days, I get exasperated with young folks who just think it has always been as free and easy as it seems today -- who can’t imagine that there was a time when there were no Internet places, no birth control options, no easy career choices for women, no real decisions to be made about the path of marriage and family and sexuality if you were female… I want to scream at everyone who looks at the conservative takeover happening nowadays, and shrugs as if it doesn’t matter: that there is so much to lose and that going back is really, really, really a bad thing… But then I realize that doing that would just make me sound, well, “old…”

swan