The Great Blueberry Muffin Caper

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What Happens in the File Room...

An unusual thing happened at work the other day. An older co-worker discovered that I had filed something incorrectly. She called out to me from the file room, "Abby, come in here." I'm not used to being addressed that way in real life, and I became confused. Have I fallen asleep while daydreaming? I don't normally think about being spanked by a woman. What's going on? Is she actually going to...?

I walked over to the file room with my head down, deciding, just for fun, to play with this random situation. "Yes, Miss S--?" I asked. I never use "Miss" when speaking to her, mind you. "Abby, look what I found in the L file," she said sternly. It was a J file. She had a bit of a grin in the corner of her pressed lips. What was going on? "I'm sorry, Miss S--." Then she said it. I can't believe it, but she did. "I'm going to have to punish you."

No! Seriously? Is this happening? Does this sort of thing really happen? I'm going to be spanked in the file room by my co-worker? Not even by my boss? Should I ask if I can call my husband to come watch? Should I say no?

"Um, okay?" I said instead. Really, I was terribly thrown by the whole thing.

"Put out your hand," she said then. Oh. But still. I don't think this is technically supposed to be happening. Or...oh no! Does she have a ruler, or, heaven forbid and a bit of a shiver, a tawse?

Again, I played along. "Yes, Miss S--." I held out my hand, palm down. She took it in her right hand, then slapped it, rather hard, with her left. "There, you've been punished," she said.

I nearly laughed. Oh no I haven't! I wanted to say. Instead I told her that I would try to pay more attention when filing. But now that I think about it, perhaps I will try harder to file incorrectly, just out of curiousity. Perhaps I'll bring in a little strap and hide it in the folder of the incorrectly filed file, just to see. In case these things really do happen in real life.

What I pictured happening, before I had to hold out my hand. (photo from www.vintagespank.com)

Spanking by Numbers

When I was fifteen, just before dropping out of Honors Geometry, I stopped trying to invent the correct answers on tests and started writing my math teacher poems. He gaves me F's on the front of the tests but A's on the backs, where I'd written the poetry. Nevertheless, A's on my backside weren't going to help me pass, so he suggested I read Edwin Abbott's Flatland and drop down a level. I remember him telling me that someday I would understand the romance of numbers, if only I would give them a chance.

Instead, I decided that God had something to do with math and that I would never solve the numbers problem that would get me into Heaven, so I gave up on math altogether. Even now, I can just picture Saint Peter up there, standing not at pearly gates but at a chalkboard, pointer in hand, directing me towards the longest equation ever fathomed. I don't think I'd even try. I'd give up and ask if he couldn't just punish me with that pointer and let me in that way. He might acquiesce, but I just know he'd ask me, "How many? How many strokes do you deserve to be allowed into Heaven?"

As a girl who can't do arithmetic, there are two things I dread. One is being asked to count. The other is being asked to come up with the final number first. How am I supposed to know? If I choose too few, I'm just in for more. But if I choose too many, I will be a very sorry girl, sorry for more than just failing math.

Once a number has, or, sometimes frighteningly, has not been decided, there is then the matter of counting the strokes. We do this, I think, because I cannot count, and have been known to get lost between four and five any number of times. Occasionally I don't know I'm supposed to be counting and only find out at the third or fourth stroke. Then we have to start again. I am sure that is not fair! But so it goes. I count, and count, the number twelve looming before me, not because that is how many strokes I'm receving, as I'm almost certain to be in for more, but because it's after twelve that the numbers get especially difficult. Even before the implement comes down upon my bottom I am panicking over what the next number could be. Is it seventeen? Seventeen loses all meaning when its announcement is meant to follow a stripe of bright red pain across my bottom's tender flesh.

As the numbers increase, they stop being numbers. They become little prayers, meant to appease this mean God of Math, i.e. my husband, but my prayers are met only with higher numbers to reach. "Can't I just write a poem about this?" I want to cry out, but no, it is numbers, and numbers alone, that must get me through.

Only once the equation has been solved do I understand the math. I reach back to touch hot skin and welts that will bruise, the soreness that is the solution to this problem, perhaps to all problems, if I had my way. I'm sure this isn't what my geometry teacher meant when he said one day I'd understand the romance of numbers, and it's certainly not what I was thinking when I decided that I'd need to do math to find Heaven, but isn't it funny that we both turned out to be right after all?

The Old Woman Who Whipped in the Shoe

Mother Goose makes me nervous. Despite my love of fairy tales and children's literature, I think of Mother Goose as a Victorian schoomarm, yielding a birch in one hand and a book of terrifying and surreal rhymes in the other. She gleefully reads to trembling schoolchildren of cradles falling out of trees, mice having their tales cut off with carving knives, and the ring around the rosy that we all now know to be a metaphor for plague.

As my particular predilection is for that birch, or other academic implement, to be in the hand of the Headmaster, I can't blame my fetish for this Mistress Goose invention. I think the trouble lies in my childhood, at a place called Benson's Wild Animal Farm (aka The Strangest Farm on Earth). Benson's was a zoo, circus, amusement park, and storybook-land that seems in retrospect as if it should have only existed in dreams. Open from 1924 to 1987, it featured, among other oddities, elephant and camel rides, a 500-pound silverback gorilla, performing tigers, a Santa's Village complete with singing elves, a rickety-rackety roller coaster, and, most relevent here, a giant shoe.In searching online for a picture of this giant shoe, I learned an unsettling thing. The park has been closed for twenty years. The shoe still stands. In the 80's, when I would have been visiting the park as a very little girl, it had a wooden staircase leading up to that small window, wherein you could view the animatronic actitivies of, naturally, the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. Most times she'd be doing the laundry, her arm in a steady up and down rhythm against a washboard. A few times, however, she'd been repositioned onto a chair, an animatronic child kicking its legs across her lap as she spanked the poor little robot all day long. I was always disappointed if she was only doing the wash.

The first time I would have seen this, I would have only been three or four years old. It was probably one of my first encounters with spanking. Perhaps I'm embellishing, but I can almost remember blushing. I do remember always wanting to go up those stairs alone after that, in hopes of seeing a spanking but knowing that if I did, I wanted it to be private, that I didn't want my mom or dad to know I was excited to see that animatronic arm rise and fall upon that shiny, plastic, and yes, bare, bottom.

This must be how I came to confuse Mother Goose with that mean old woman in the shoe. It was a Mother Goose rhyme that enabled this little girl to see her first spanking. Lest we forget, the original certainly has a CP flare at the end:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe;

She had so many children she didn't know what to do.

She gave them some broth without any bread;

She whipped them all well and put them to bed.

(Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England, 1853)

As illustrations life-size and otherwise of spanking disappear (or become graffitied and overgrown), as it becomes uncouth to reference in mainstream literature, even as it appears in our pop-culture only in a horrible, tasteless, and unrealistic Girls Gone Wild sort of way, how will the wee spanking enthusiasts of the world come to know their kink? How might I have turned out if it hadn't been for the Old Woman Who Whipped in a Shoe?

Rhyme text and Old Woman illustrations: ECLIPSE

Book cover illustration: Children's Books Online

Benson's Old Woman's shoe: IUSSA.Org

The Weight of the World

Despite my red hair and curves, I confuse myself with Buffy the Vampire Slayer more times than you'd imagine. It's not all about wanting to be spanked by Giles, either. One of the main themes of the show is her struggle with balancing being a regular girl with being the girl who saves the world. Although most of the demons I battle are my own, I have spent years wondering how I can stand upright with the weight of the world on my shoulders.

The answer is surprisingly simple: Don't stand upright all the time.

The world balances just as well on one's bottom, and having them both whacked about a bit lessens the universal weight considerably. As a woman, I want to be in control of every aspect of my life. My name is on all the bills. But I have also felt too responsible for too much--from everything from my parents' divorce, which happened so quickly after I moved out of my childhood home that I could not help but feel that I'd been the glue for years, to my little sister's virginity, which, at almost 27 years old, is inconceivable and yet somehow my fault for having set an Ophelia-like example by loving the wrong men and then going a bit mad over the loss of them. Turning into a little girl, receiving punishment with the transformative powers of forgiveness, lightens the burden. Letting go absolves it.

Hitting the breaking point, the moment between taking the strokes and being consumed either by pain or the dark headspace that serves as both vessel and cocoon, is something I crave more than white chocolate or Chinese egg-rolls, more than Fresh's Rice Sake Bath or Cosabella (photo, right) panties. The trick is getting there. Some days, I just can't even begin. I'll be weeping within the first stroke or two. Others, I want to be brave, I want to take it and take it and take it, to be a brave little girl who can carry the world on strong shoulders or a stinging bottom, seeing no difference between the two.

It's the days when I'm ready to let go that I live for. The days that I can start by saying to myself:

• "This stroke is for my boss who'd rather talk about herself than help me."
• Then, "This is for not paying the cable bill, always overdue."
• And, "This is for not doing the laundry yet, even though I meant to but got distracted with spanking blogs."
• Then three, thank you Sir. "This is for having the nightmare I couldn't shake all day."
• And four, thank you Sir. "This is for the naughty thought I had about Anthony Stewart Head as Headmaster in that episode of Doctor Who, even though he turned out to be a flesh-eating monster alien.
• Five, thank you Sir. "For liking this."
• Six, oh, thank you Sir. "For wanting to always be your naughty girl, so you'll do this with me."
• Seven, thank you. "For wishing I was an only child, even as an adult."
• Eight, ow, ow, ow, thank you Sir. "This is for wanting to be thinner, when you love my bottom as it is."
• Nine, thank you. "For wanting this to end."
• Ten, thank you Sir. "For wanting to tell the world that I am brave and strong and can take a caning when my co-workers can barely take a phone call, but I can't tell them who I really am."
• Eleven, oh, oh, ow, Sir, please, thank you, "For wishing you would only be inside me."
• Twelve, thank you Sir. "For..."

And when I do break, when I do begin to weep silent slow tears, then sob, when I can't hold back a cry with every stroke, when I know I've built up to it, have earned it, have struggled through every part of my mind and have released it all, I can let go. Every pain throughout the day is gone. Every familial agony and workplace drama is released in the whoosh of his chosen implement. Swish. I pay every bill in full. Crack. I am beautiful and striped and proud. Then, slice, I'm only a little girl. I'm only a little girl. With each stroke, this is all I know now. I collapse into him afterwards, this little girl fully punished, released of all her sins and the sins of those around her, and he holds me, curls around me, gently, whispering how proud he is of me. My hips begin to rise and writhe, pressing back against him even with the pain, and I am a woman, ready to carry the weight of the world once again.

The Ouch

When I was little, I refused to have my hair washed. I wore it in braids every day, Laura Ingalls style, and although I loved to take baths, I did not like getting my hair wet. My braids would slowly grow into dreadlocks, at which point my mom and my tiny self would begin the "well, we can wash your hair or cut your hair" debate. I have never had short hair, which means I instead not only had my hair washed, but then--here's where the trouble starts--had the knots taken out.

It's not surprising that, as a five year old having the knots taken out of her dreaded hair, the hairbrush came to be known as "the ouch." "No, Mummy, not the ouch," I'd cry, and I have to laugh as, twenty-four years later, I find myself crying, "No, Sir, not the brush, please not the brush." Yesterday, as I moaned those same words, I began to wonder just why it is that paddles of all sorts are my least favorite implements.

Perhaps its their seeming innocence that troubles me so deeply. (In fact, I know it is that thuddy sting that troubles me so deeply, that feeling of having a thousand bees alight upon my bottom at once in force that is the problem, but allow me the extrapolation for a moment.) The darling paddle to the right is one such an example of a paddle's innocence. My husband and I found this in the kitchenwares section of 1874 House Antiques in Portland. One of the owners suggested that it was from Norway, though even if it had been made locally, it would have been no less charming. It is hand-cut, carved, and painted, with a hook at the end for hanging. It reminds me of the paddles at Rosy Bottom, but it is clearly quite old by the wear of the wood. For all its old-world charm, though, it hurts! It's friendly flower hides a crueler backside. The wood is just thin enough to leave barely a mark, and thus all my yelping does no good.

How is it that I prefer a caning over a little paddle? I even avoid spanking stories that note at the beginning that there is paddling involved. And yet, at the grocery store last night--after a spanking that included a paddling, mind you--we encountered a back to school aisle and were delighted to find a simple wooden ruler. For some time, new wooden rulers featured a metal strip that ran along the full edge of the ruler. "Did you ever have to fight with needle-nosed pliers to get rid of that strip?" I asked. He laughed; he had. The 100% wooden ruler went into the basket. Why why why why why? But that voice screaming "Why?" in my head and in my flesh is probably the reason that it came home with us, just like the Norwegian paddle, just like the hairbrush (above) we bought together before we were even a couple, nevermind married, but knew just how it would be used when we got home that night. The "why why why" becomes "ow ow ow" and then it all fades and there is only fire. The Ouch breaks me faster than anything, but it leaves me riding the break, like surfing heat, like floating on flame.

Even my cat wants to punish me. You can see it in her eyes. I call her Fetish Kitten as a nickname.

The New Girl

Had I greater self-awareness, vocabulary, and anything more than a Commodore 64 computer when I was seven years old, I could have started a blog about spanking then. After mythological creatures and Ancient Egypt, it was one of my earliest fascinations. Sitting at my orange and yellow Playskool plastic picnic table, I'd ask the neighborhood children about their most recent transgressions and punishments. My hometown, a small New England colonial town, was still old-fashioned in its ways, and my parents were more liberal than most. I had no stories, but everybody else did. I'd listen in torrid fascination as my friends' bottoms were bared in tale and in my mind.

My second grade play may have defined my destiny. I was cast as a colonial mother to seven children, all of whom were apparently quite naughty, as I was made to threaten them with punishment. My line, as I remember it, was, "Best behave, children, unless you want to get a switching before supper." I wonder now how many second-graders today would even know what a switching is. I knew quite well at the time, because I had a book about the daily life of colonial children. My favorite page was the one that described the concepts of the switch and the birch--with illustrations. The problem with knowing full-well what I was saying in that play was that I didn't want to give anyone a switching. I was relieved once the line was said, knowing I would never have to be on that side of an implement again.

The problem with being a seven year old spanking enthusiast is that it's a very lonely thing, and not especially comprehensible. I couldn't exactly ask my strictly-hands-off-except-for-hugs parents to spank me, and my friends saw spanking as a bad thing, so they were out, too. I had to make do with having countless "rose gardens" grown on my arm. If you aren't familiar, "rose gardens" were a strange exercise in elementary sado-masochism. One girl would take another girl's arm and, with her fingers, enact a farmer going to buy seeds ( soft tickle), planting the seeds (a little scrape of the nail), the fall of rain (the pitter patter of fingertips), and finally, the roses bloom (mean little pinches that made red spots appear). I hated the pinches but loved the marks left afterwards--a sentiment all too familiar now that those "pinches" are the strokes of a cane, strap, or paddle.

Only now that I am grown am I starting to feel like I have the right to be that naughty girl. My recent discovery of spanking blogs (thank you, Misses Haze and Flynn) and my June honeymoon (a road-trip up the Pacific coast, planned for the scenery but turned into a thousand-mile run through a candy store as we stopped at every antique store along the way in search of canes, straps, and other toys of ill-repute) have made me at long last comfortable in my skin--except for the skin of my bottom. It's been five days since my last caning and I'm still a bit tender, still a bit bruised, but even those marks are proof that I am finally the naughty little girl I always wanted to be.