Family

This is a lengthy missive from me that I apologize for in advance.  I have learned much the past few days that I felt compelled to share, since it is significant and part of our journey together. I have been exceptionally concerned about Mouse of late. The crying jags, the sobbing were all quite unlike her, when I would ask, she would dismiss it as nothing, a song, a film, her age.

The doctors did warn me that Mouse could suffer some depression following her time in hospital,  this was not uncommon, and if it became worrisome, we could get medications for her. I had already placed that call to her doctor, unbeknownst to her.

Then I learned that my own siblings were manipulating (my brother used the term "gaslight") my lady. Filling her head with nonsense. She is always my first concern, I did not reveal my rage to her, just requested that she have a rest and leave it to me. Since she divulged to me what was in fact going on, she has not shed but a few tears. The weight she felt was immense on her, far too great a burden for her delicate condition. Again, I would be remiss if I did not express my disappointment that she felt she could not share this with me when it began. She said she did not know what to say partly due of my "history"with drug abuse, and not understanding my siblings true intent until that day I arrived home very early. I completely misunderstood Mouse's intent. She has assured me that she does trust me completely and I believe this to be true.

I have dealt with my siblings. They were well aware of my lady's vulnerable state, they had learned this from me. Three of them launched a multileveled attack on her. Filling her head with nonsense using the religion and a family angle as a crux. I believe they were quite self-assured that she would not reveal any of this to me but would rather simply leave our marriage. This nearly happened had I not returned home early.

I can surmise, they were not getting the result, so my sister dragged our late mother into it. Realizing that would hurt mouse. My mother adored mouse and did not care in the least that mouse was not a member of the "tribe." She lived with us on and off after our father passed. My sister would often bristle at our mother's closeness to my family. Jewish families can be cliquish and feel that Jews are best marrying other Jews, they can also be highly skeptical of people who convert to Judaism for a myriad of reasons that I will go into. I was never overtly concerned with my religion. My sister wears her wig, two of my male siblings are never seen without their kippah (yarmulke).

My mother believed Mouse was my "beshert". A word she would call my dad that means roughly destiny or sometimes soulmate in Yiddish. My mother also said to me more than once that I "should marry that girl," because I was different around Mouse than I ever was with any other female my mother had witnessed me with. I assumed it was the fact, I never brought many of the women around, few were what I considered acceptable to meet family. Over a twenty or so year period my mother met three women I was involved with and one I was not involved with directly. She never liked the three I had "relationships" with. The other woman was Mouse.

I should probably account for how that first meeting came about. Mouse came to my office, she had been doing some work for me and discovered the meeting scheduled for the next week was cancelled, which was very rare. After discussing the business, the topic came up about why the meeting was cancelled and I explained that I was going to my parents home for Passover (Pesach) Seder. The former Catholic girl had no clue what that was, so I explained it a little and she seemed fascinated by it. She thought I was going back east, and explained no that my parents had relocated to be closer to one of my brothers who had recently married.

Since she seemed keen to go I found myself asking her, couching the statement "If I spoke to alpha, and he agreed, would you like to go along with me?" Her eyes lit up and said sure. I nodded, I might have smiled, and went to him. He agreed, somewhat reluctantly. Then I called my mother who readily said I could bring along whomever I wished. I explained she was a non-Jew and my mother said she would take care of it. I made arrangements with the travel department, who also handled personal travel arrangements, and they got back to me with a new flight itinerary. I enjoyed that time with her immensely, having her away from the office and him. I learned a few things about her, more than we dated. I always enjoyed her whimsical attitude.

At the hotel, I noted that he had heavily marked her, probably to remind me that she was on loan. Some of those marks had to hurt, and it actually bothered me. I had marked my slaves in a similar fashion before I had left for airport, yet seeing Mouse marked somewhat unsettled me, still I went about my business of fucking her, many times. My siblings were polite and our mother made that comment about marrying her. She was not mine to marry but I simply said we are just good friends and tried to leave it at that.

At no time did my mother ever use the term "shiksa" in reference to mouse or any non-jewish female either my siblings or myself were remotely acquainted with. The reason was simple, our father was "sheygetz" the, often lessor used male version of shiksa, who later did convert but that conversion was held with some regard but also suspicion. To be very clear both are, regardless of what popular culture might try to tell you, both are extremely offensive terms. Shiksa translated means abomination or loathsome and sheygetz, loosely translates into repulsive. These terms are used by Jewish people to denigrate the individual who has the misfortune of falling in love and sometimes marrying a Jew. Interfaith marriages are frowned upon. I do not believe there is an Orthodox, Conservative or Reform Temple that would consider performing one. I could be wrong about that. Most who do engage in what is known as "interfaith" marriages are probably most like myself, the cultural Jew, who are not very serious about the religious practice.

I explained to my siblings the very day I learned of this that if my lady and our marriage were not accepted, they were no longer welcomed in my home (not that they would be visiting, since my home is no longer considered Kosher to them). I have no issue with severing ties completely with them. I went twenty years with only scant contact with any of them. It probably bothered our mother more than any of us but when she was dying, I decided to honor her and become closer to all my siblings and remained so, again to honor her memory after she passed. We are finished. I do not wish to see them or hear from them ever again.

I spoke to the one sibling who was not partied to that mess, and said much the same to him as well. He assured me that he truly loves Mouse and considers her a sister. He also was not surprised when I told him what they had done to Mouse. He has often joked about their zealotry. He had a few choice words of his own, none I could disagree with. I am also contemplating removing our daughter from the school she attends, since my sister's children also go there. Mouse has since asked me to hold off on that, since our daughter enjoys the school.

With that settled I read again the journal post and certain phrases jumped out at me. These made me consider how little I knew of my lady's childhood.

Years ago, I had the great misfortune of meeting Mouse's grandmother, who "Alpha" once described to me as "a hateful, bitter and vitriolic woman." He had no idea how Mouse was possibly related to this person. My thoughts were exactly the same as we left the house. From the time that Mouse and I had rekindled our friendship and later began a romance, which led to marriage, she never failed to call the grandmother weekly or daily as she became more ill. She always sent cards and notes, and to my knowledge never forgot the old woman's birthday. Nothing Mouse could ever do was "good enough" for the grandmother.

When the woman passed away, Mouse paid for the funeral, even after learning that the woman left all her money to various other relatives (none who she knew and never met) and her church. Regardless of this, Mouse and I ventured to the city and I watched as Mouse truly entered a den of lions.

From the pulpit the scant few that bothered to attend and were not there for the 'funeral of the week' spoke lovingly about the grandmother and insulted Mouse at the same time, using words such as 'ungrateful' and 'heartless'. One said, they were pleased the money went to the church because the grand-daughter deserved nothing.

She sat in the back beside me, her back straight and head held high. After that shameful "service" we traveled the short distance to the cemetery for the second part. The minister, had the audacity to question Mouse directly about her relationship with her grandmother. Mouse simply thanked the minister and handed over the check and said nothing as we walked back to the car. I could not get out of there fast enough. When I yelled about the shameful display from this so-called family, mouse touched my leg, and said nothing.

This particular area was nothing but miles and miles of cemeteries. One after another, and there were several florists, when mouse suddenly asked to stop. I obliged although uncertain why and Mouse got out and bought a small bouquet of flowers, the woman working asked if they were for a wall, grave or something else, mouse indicated a wall, and picked out the flowers. Back in the car she directed me to an area of mausoleums and I chuckled softly when Mouse called it the "marble orchard". Then she said to stop and she took the flowers and got out. She went to this shed area nearby and got a cup for the flowers, and arranged then she went to a spot where a woman was interred. Silently Mouse knelt before it and was quiet for a few minutes and explained softly, that this was her "Nonna"  and  she taught Mouse everything she needed to know about life.

I was suddenly grateful that she had someone in her life and then I studied the birth and death dates, the woman was around 90 when she passed and Mouse could not have been more than 5 at that time. I did not know at the time, who she was exactly but whoever she was, my lady found her very important.

There have been hundreds of times that I wanted to ask about her childhood the very few times I did, she was deft at evading those questions. She would speak freely about concerts or parties she attended, but she seemed awfully young to be so independent. At ten she saw Led Zeppelin across the bay in Oakland and all the times she saw The Grateful Dead. There was so many bands she had seen, from Jethro Tull to Steely Dan. I figured location, San Francisco. If I wanted to see a concert, I would have to venture to NYC the Garden usually. Everything she spoke of occurred outside the home, there was never talk of the more "normal" holidays, gatherings, birthday celebrations.

On a lark one year I found a Grateful Dead DVD, of a performance they gave in 1978 on New Years Eve, wrapped it up and presented it for her birthday. I did not think much of it, except she would enjoy it. She hugged me tightly and talked about the concert, as I sat listening I realized she knew details that weren't included in the concert film. We were watching and she suddenly grabbed the remote, and reversed it, paused it, and moved slowly and pointed to the TV saying "there's me!"

There's this very young, too young girl sitting in the crowd, swaying softly to the music (she looked rather high, if you catch the meaning) and I realized as I looked that it was mouse. I was rather flabbergasted as I learned that the concert went on all night. At 12 she had stayed out all night on New Years Eve. I asked if she were high, and she said probably, but was not sure if that was the concert she was "dosed" or not. Her parents did not even know she was out of the house (she shared that when I asked). Alpha once said that she had lived an entire adult lifetime before she was 18. The "dosed" remark troubled me, since she was so young, also I found that to be highly dangerous. She had shared once that she learned to roll marijuana when she was 8 years old. Next month our daughter will be the same age and that was a chilling perspective for me.

How could this be? When I was in high school I would sometimes go out, and my parents always waited up for any of us. We rarely stayed out too terribly late, maybe 1 or 2 am at the utmost. They always needed to know where we were going. There were always subtle questions when we got home. She was far younger.

For clarity, mouse left drugs behind before I first met her, I had once offered her a line, and she refused saying she did enough of that in her "partying days".Years later, I did ask if she had been to rehab and she said no; she became bored with the crowd, they were going no where and she wanted a bit more. Since she was not already dead, she may as well figure out what to do with her life. She had that sorted out by the time she was a senior in high school. Mouse rarely consumes alcohol and never does anything, except for an equally rare joint that her and Lucy might share. When it became "legal" in our state, they both could not wait to go to dispensary. They both said with some measure of irony it was more fun when it was illegal.

Then I read her journal entry where she described how certain buttons were pushed on her, the parts about family. She could never understand family because she never had one. That came from mouse, not their words, her words.

We were in bed, and comfortable, relaxed. We had just made love and as I held her I asked her to please tell me about her childhood.

She replied rather confidently that I didn't want to know about that and she added "that people always think they want to know stuff like that. But what they really want is to hear a nice lie and not the truth."

I repeated it for her to please tell me.

I am glad she was not facing me as I listened to horror that was her childhood and my eyes became damp, taking it all in, the Readers Digest Condensed Version of all she suffered. I did learn that "Nonna" was a neighbor, who left her front door unlocked so in case mouse needed a safe place to land when "home" became too intense.

That is a nice thing for someone to do, and if I were unaware that the women died when mouse was only 5, I certainly would have thought that was wonderful.

I understood now that a child of five needed a safe place to hide because the adults around her were such dreadful failures. People (I cannot speak of them as parents) planned to wait until she was at least 13 before they completely traded the final vestige of her virtue for drugs or drug money.

It was no wonder she was free to come and go as she pleased and preferred to not be home. The fact no one phoned the police is beyond me. There was no home. There was a rented house that held what little clothing they allowed her to have and bed to sleep if she dared. Over the years I have known mouse, she has spoken of home rather as a concept than a place, I now thoroughly understood why this was.

My mother could be in a room with hundred people and pick out which ones had been through what she went through. She said it was how they carried themselves and maybe behaved, she knew they had lived through the holocaust and was rarely wrong. She had told me once she had the same feeling about mouse from the moment they first met, but mouse was far too young. My mother could never really sort it out, if mouse was just highly empathetic to the suffering or had herself suffered incredibly. I now understood this.

Around three am I kissed mouse's cheek and got out of bed, making certain she was covered up and warm. I went downstairs to my study and sat reflecting on all  I had learned. She was apt; I did not want to know this, a lie would have been preferable. I could not pretend to un-know anything I had learned over the course of an hour. Had she ever told a therapist about this? How could she just bury it?

My mother, often said that survivors carried the trauma with them but it did not often interfere with their willingness to live (this was not true of all, but many my mother encountered). My dad would speak of the nightmares my mother would have. She also had moments when we were young. My dad was there to remind us that it was ok. We were safe. The nazis were not coming. Mouse had to have similar moments while she was still a child.

My next thought chilled me, something my mother had said years ago, the reason she rarely spoke of it, people would ask, and listen to what she had gone through, but walked away with a sense of near disbelief. This was as late as the early 80s. It was too horrific for people to process. They would engage in a bit of self protection, and tell themselves my mother had to be exaggerating, it could not have been that bad. These are not people who deny the holocaust; those are a different bunch, but regular people living in post-war England and later post-war America.

The American culture largely ignored it. It was not until film tried to show it in a digestible way that people became interested. My mother was tattooed, if she wore short sleeves a person noticing it, might ask about it. They would bring up a movie they had seen and would ask if was really like that. My mother's reply was only that it was far worse than anything Hollywood could show. My mother, to her credit, never watched any films about that, except for Schindlers List and she had tears in her eyes throughout the viewing. A bit of survivor guilt had surfaced. She had survived and her entire family was wiped out, save for one distant cousin. She wondered if they had a "Schindler" in their life, would more have made it?

Perhaps that did somewhat explain why mouse never spoke of it, if she outlined the whole abuse from her very earliest memories, no one would believe it, not in 1970s California. I also, do not mean to imply that the abuse mouse suffered was in any way similar or to diminish the Holocaust my mother lived through, however there are parallels of ritualistic abuse, which include, physical, emotional and sexual, I cannot readily dismiss. My mother had been correct all along about her.

I was glad, no elated they were dead, the whole lot of them. She is well-adjusted despite her life, which she has struggled to make sense of. The drugs she experimented with were a way for her "to better understand what could be more important than your kid." She had been on her own from the very day she graduated high school, when her grandmother tossed her out on the street when she returned from the ceremony her own grandmother did not bother to attend.

I sense her relationship with Alpha was part of that, and perhaps why it became so damaging for her psychologically? Maybe her ultimate relationship with me?

Life has truly taught this woman to not really expect anything from it. Perhaps that is why she sheds tears after we make love? She had resolved long ago to just accept that some people "get the Leave it to Beaver life and others aren't so lucky." Regardless of anything she is an amazing mother to our children. She has never once raised a hand to them, and has always made sure that they felt safe in our home and incredibly loved.

I was lost in these thoughts, observing the clock in the entry chiming the passing hours, when I saw my lady come into the study. I smiled at her and watched as she knelt before me and asked if I was ok.

I decided to shift gears, staying away her childhood, and I told that I had a few things to say to her.

The first thing was that while she was in hospital I called the "pets" and told them it was over. Then I asked if she had any questions about that and she asked if I really wanted this and I told her yes. I was thoroughly, committed to her and she was my only woman from now on. She whispered a thank you.

The second was half confession and question for her. I asked if she recalled years ago when I asked if she was interested in pursuing a Master/slave dynamic with me and she had told me yes. What I had not mentioned was at that time, I would have accepted vanilla. I wanted her that badly. I was willing to turn my back on my greatest desires to be with her. Yes, I admitted if she was not interested in that Master/slave union, and truly wanted vanilla, I had hoped that would change, but I would not push for that. She did smile.

Now, I was asking what she wanted.

I told her to forget what she thought I wanted, forget me all together. I asked what she really wanted. She has said time again that she would become whatever I wanted her to be. What did she want to be?

"I need to know what you want. What do you want to be? What do you want most for us?"

She said after a few minutes thinking that she really most wanted to be my slave. She said she needed me, to guide, direct and command her always. She needed to be corrected when she did something wrong. She admitted that she liked it when I was a bit indifferent to her, it heightened her awareness and increased her submission. She needed me to be me.

I would be a liar if I said I was not relieved and pleased with her response. I had been sensing for a while that we were on shaky ground where that was concerned. If there is not trust the dynamic falls apart.

Now I had rules that went a bit beyond "Obey" and beyond the expectations that I required for her. I do expect her to follow those without question and to trust me always.

I told her then that I believed that her staying with me if I ever used drugs again, was a naive decision. I would have shattered her trust and she was to take the children, leave me and not think twice nor even look back. She was to call Pete because he would know how to protect her. I need to believe she would do this. I need to trust that she would do this. Now, if I did reenter rehab and take steps to ensure I remain clean, through counseling we might be able to restore our relationship. I simply needed her to understand that this was serious for us and especially to me.

Once I had her word that she would do this, she did begin to cry.

I continued, unmoved for once by her tears, but offered a  pledge that I would far rather chew glass than ever betray her trust or misuse my position over her as her Master (or as a husband) in that particular way. Now that I knew exactly how her parents had died, I cannot go back on my word to her. Staying clean was important to me before and now it is doubly so for her, myself and our family. I have not used in a decade now, I have no intention of ever using again.

I also needed assurances that even if I were wrong, or made a mistake (which did not involve drug abuse), I needed her to just obey me always. If I say to Mouse, 'you stay at the lake,  then you stay at the lake.' Any errors are mine, and not for her to try to repair. If I need her to patient and wait for me, I need to know she will. I need to trust her.

My final point was that she cannot hide from me anymore. Not her tears, any pain she feels, her sadness, her life, her happiness, her joy I told her that she needs to be an open book and I need access to all those pages. I reminded Mouse that she is never allowed to lock me out, this includes physical door locking and now it included mental barriers. I did say at some point I might want to know more about her life, I expected her to share it with me. I also added that for now, I felt I had enough information and might not ever enquire further.

I  offered my word of honor that I will be the man she thinks me to be. I will try very hard to never disappoint her. I will always love her. She is now and forever my family. My real family. The only family that matters is the one we have created together.

Now she was crying the happiest of tears and they pleased me greatly.

This morning I woke after being pleasured by my slave; I was extremely pleased. I was looking forward to a quiet Sunday. As I walked passed the front door, I noticed two large boxes outside on our porch. I opened the door and brought them inside the kitchen, and opened them. Many years ago, I gave our parents a gift of Baccarat crystal, a complete service for 12 of water, wine, champaign and cordial glassware. Over the years, the original number had dwindled, but most remained. When our mother passed, I learned my sister had taken them. I had not said anything to her about this. It never bothered me. Mouse has a nice set of crystal, although not as large.

I resealed the box and dropped the first on the floor. Then I dropped the second box. By this time, Mouse was running into the room and I made an excuse that they slipped and I think she understood that was in that accidentally on purpose way. I carried them carelessly to the SUV tossed them into the back and closed the back. I watched as they slid around the back of the SUV as I took corners too quickly and laughed. I drove to my sister's house and dropped the boxes onto her doorstep and drove away.

It might not have been the right thing to do, but in that moment it felt damn good.