"First, He Said..." Part 2: "A Dangerous Dive Down"

The evening started wonderfully. The the mood was, quite literally, shot through the heart. The light of what was supposed to be a great night had been sucked out – and things had turned dark. Very dark. Her tears were a flood that morphed into my own waves of self-doubt. I wanted to remove the post. But more than that, I think, I needed her approval to leave it there. And then I realized that neither, my removal nor her approval, could salvage what I was trying to hold on to: my quaking Domdentity.

Things went from bad to worse when SugarAnne bolted on me. She just got up and walked out. I sensed it was going to happen. I could hear the rustling of keys out in the kitchen.

"Where are you going?" I called from the den.
"OUT!" she spat.
"NO YOU'RE NOT!" I shot back.

I have a smooth voice, not a deep voice. People sometimes say that I have a voice with the cushiony quality of a smooth jazz station deejay. From the tone of it no one would even remotely suggest that I might have clackers the size of mutant gelatin coconuts.  Actually, what I hear inside my head when I speak is the squeak of Michael Jackson with sinus congestion. But I knew she had heard me. Maybe she heard Michael deliver a faint squeak:

“No you’re not”.

Whatever. I knew she had heard me. But she left anyway. She frickin’ left anyway! I didn’t want to physically restrain her. Maybe I did. I don’t think I would’ve. I wasn’t close enough to her to exercise that option anyway. And, I certainly wasn’t going to chase her down the public hallway of the building. I mean, if I can’t stop my woman with my voice alone, what kind of HoH - hell, what kinda of man am I anyway? When the door slammed another brick tumbled out of my Domdentity. I was left sitting there feeling like a eunuch who didn’t make the cut for the Vienna Boy’s Choir tryout. Funny thing though, I wasn’t mad at her. I was mad at Me. Mad at me for NOT being mad at her. I begin to question myself. A torrent of questions washed over me and I began a deep sea dive that had me swimming in an ocean of self-doubt.

“I guess I’ll have to run every post by her now, huh?”
“That’s it for me, no more blogging, I'm done.”
“Hey! Do I tell her what to put on her blog?”
“Yo, she just walked out on you dude, and you’re not even mad?”
“What the fuck?”

Over and over again, for I don’t know for how long, I considered and questioned and doubted. We had actually had a “talk” about the walking out on me thing in Jamaica. A “talk” about communicating before cuttin’ out. This new walk out was clearly punishable conduct. Punishable as clear as if she had boldy lit up a cigarette and defiantly blown the smoke into my face. Punishment was imperative and, I thought, “should be” administered swiftly and effectively. I couldn’t say “would be” to myself. I no longer had the Domdentical fortitude to be certain that I actually would – that I actually could.

I wanted to be able to meet her at the door when she came back. I thought about it. I didn’t know if I should. I wanted to have the conversation that was aborted when she walked out. I thought about it. I wasn’t sure I would. I wanted to have my chosen implements of correction laid out already. I thought about it. I didn’t know if I could follow through, so I didn't lay them out. I wanted to be able to. I wanted desperately to be able to follow through.

When she came back I just lied there frozen on the sofa in the den. Neither of us acknowledged the other. She went straight to bed. I went swimming. Swimming deeper and deeper into an ocean of self-doubt that began to gel into a self-suffocating self-disgust.

“You chicken! You call yourself a man?”
“What a puss. What-a-frickin’-puss!”
“I guess we see who’s really running this show, don’t we? Punk.”
“Maybe YOU are the one who should be paddled?
“Maybe you’re not cut out for this HoH stuff, huh?”

“You don’t have the temperament for ‘This-Thing-We-do”! I mentally enunciated through teeth gritted with disgust.

For the rest of the evening and into the morning, save a couple of hours of sleep, I struggled with my Domdentity. Just as I was about to drive my spade into the floor of this ocean of self-doubt to mine the vanilla life that lives just beneath, SugarAnne came out to the living room. We traded “hellos” or "good mornings" or some such civil greeting, and sat for a few minutes - in silence - in the fading darkness just this side of daybreak. She suddenly stood up and stomped back to the bedroom in a huff. This, for some reason, was a maddening reminder of the bad ole B.S. (before spanking) days. Even madder than madness I was experiencing with this maddening self-doubt. I knew right then that I couldn’t go back to the old life. More importantly, I knew that old life wasn’t even me anymore. It was time for me to look up. Time for me to stand up. Yeah, I had leaned too far. Fell down in fact. But it was time to stand up now and recapture my growth -to  recapture OUR growth. It was time to get a grip on what was trying to slip through my fingers.

I stood up and headed toward the bedroom – headed toward the surface. Standing up was the turnaround: the beginning of my swim back toward SugarAnne, back toward my Domdentity and back toward a life of breathing freely again.