I've been struggling with a chapter of my thesis. This is because I'm lazy. But also it's because the chapter had little to do with the lovely, exciting European Court of Human Rights, which is my specialty, and lots to do with the dull, disgusting European Union legislation. Yawn. My usual way of dealing with a tricky piece of work is to avoid it for as long as possible, and then even longer, way past the possible avoidance cut-off date, and then get depressed because it had to be done OMG THREE MONTHS AGO, and freeze.
So I did that.
The complete freaking out over this paper happened just about at the time when we started this blog. Abel and I had been going easy on discipline for a couple of months. And the stuff we'd tried before hadn't really worked for me, because, frankly, I don't think Abel realised just how bad my work habits are, and how much control I need in order to work out some better ones.
But here I was, blogging about discipline, and at the same time having so little of that discipline that my work had got to the stage where the task seemed too great to even attempt it. So, you see, I *had* to tell Abel that it would be nice of him if he could rub my nose into my work more thoroughly than he'd done it before.
He's a soft man, but he obliged. He told me to submit a report on my progress every day, and that, if by 5 pm next Friday the paper wasn't finished, in our weekly review meeting he would put me over his knee and spank me harder than ever before. He would spank me for six minutes.
He'd spanked me awfully hard before, and for nothing like this long. In fact, just the previous day he'd spanked me for two minutes with his left hand, because it was the way I happened to have landed over his lap, and it had *hurt*. It was definitely going to be his stronger right hand doing the smacking if it came to that. I had an uh-oh feeling, and on Monday morning I got to work.
And immediately got a bad migraine. It wasn't an excuse, it truly wasn't, but all I could do was crawl into bed and forget about doing anything with my head. Abel was away until the end of the week, so I emailed him a plea for a day off, and got leave to recover before I did anything.
I was so incredibly grateful that I promised myself I wouldn't disappoint him, and on Tuesday, my head healed, I resolutely opened the file with my icky paper.
Not much happened. While I did some work, I had a browser open at the same time, and that kind of stopped any progress I might have been making on the paper. Besides, it was Tuesday. The paper was due on Friday. A little devil on my left shoulder kept trying to convince me that I had buckets of time, and would most definitely finish it by the deadline, if only the next day I worked really, really, really hard. An angel on my right shoulder realistically said into my ear: yeah, right. Both of them said: you suck and you know it.
I really didn't want to admit to being so very bad, but I had to face it: unless I was completely honest, all our disciplinary efforts would collapse, like the stuff we'd tried before had done. And so I heaved a sigh and tattled on myself in the report that I emailed to Abel that evening.
He very patiently told me that I didn't suck, but that the deadline was still there, and that I knew what would happen if I missed it.
The uh-oh feeling intensified. I didn't want the Very Hard Spanking. On Wednesday morning I opened the file with my paper and actually got to work.
Well, for about four hours, I did. Four hours seemed like a huge accomplishment, and I smugly reported the day as a big success. I actually felt it was: it had been a good three or four months since I'd worked for so long in one day. OK, so for some of that time I had been busy getting married, honeymooning and following a revolution in my home country, but I most definitely hadn't worked.
So on Thursday morning I rewarded myself with some browsing. And then it all went very wrong, all sorts of displacement activities going on until I had to admit to myself than under no circumstances would this appalling behaviour lead to the paper being finished on time. In fact, by the time I emerged from the web, I knew that only a large-scale miracle was going to make that happen.
Part of being an agnostic is that you don't believe that a miracle can actually happen to *you*. There was no doubt about it: come my Saturday meeting, I was going to be a very spanked girl. This was it.
Feeling icky, I wrote to Abel that the paper was not going to be finished.
My way of dealing with all this was trying to convince myself that a spanking wasn't the end of the world. I've been spanked before, you know. That's why I'm called a *spanko*, little as I like the word. Duh. OK, I don't like the pain at all, and while it's going on I'd give anything for a spanking to stop, but I could survive a few minutes of pain. (I'd actually forgotten how many he'd promised exactly.) Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it *now*.
As my punishment was now inevitable, I resigned myself to the fact that no schoolwork would be happening for the remainder of the week. And thus I moped about for the following day and a half, not even attempting to work. There was no point. I was going spanked anyway. For six minutes.
I tried not to think about that, though. It sort of worked: I'm good at compartmentalisation.
I didn't think about it when on Friday night Abel finally arrived. I didn't think about it while we cuddled, and chatted, and got re-acquainted after a five-day parting. I most definitely didn't think about it while I brushed my teeth before bed. I thought about, you know, *other things* people do when they're in love.
It was a nasty shock when I walked into the bedroom in nothing but my underwear and found Abel sitting on the edge of the bed, fully clothed and very, very serious.
"You know what's going to happen now,"; he said.
"But I thought it would be tomorrow... in our Saturday meeting," I blurted. I didn't have anything cleverer to say, because I could only think: now? not now! I don't want a spanking *now*, I'm not ready!
"No, there's no reason to put it off. Panties off. Get over my knee."
So I did that. Abel let me get comfy with my upper body on the bed, and asked whether I remembered what my punishment would be.
"You said you would spank me. With your right hand. Hard."
"For how long?"
Oooh bugger. I'd forgotten there was a time specification, too.
"Um, three minutes?"
"Six minutes. But I am prepared to be lenient. Because you did some work on two days, I will reduce this by two minutes."
These calculations made me just a little bit sick. I was grateful for the reprieve, sure, but this spanking was going to be longer than any punishment I'd ever received before, and right then I wasn't sure how I would survive it.
But more than anything, I was ashamed that it had come to this. While a punishment for a real-life offence is a hot fantasy, when it comes to the actual thing, I find a blow to my ego really hard to cope with. A demonstration that Abel knows that I'm not, in fact, perfect in every respect, especially when it comes to promises I make, essentially, to myself - I didn't want it, it was hard, and by the way, it would *hurt*.
I gritted my teeth, prepared to bite the duvet, and wished I could see the clock from where I was so humbly positioned. As it was, I hoped I could be brave and not give neighbours an earful.
What can I say? It was fabulously painful. Every impact astonished me with how much a bare hand can hurt a bare bottom. I tried to take it without much wriggling, just to show how seriously I was taking this, and I tried to be quiet, and neither attempt came to much, yet, I kept trying. I think, Abel, might have lectured me, but I don't know if he did: the pain had screwed my perceptions.
I remember realising at one point that Abel was actually getting short of breath, and the thought of him using so much force horrified me. He isn't into pain any more than I am; to hurt me so much would have been so painful for him. The empathy of this moment made me ill with guilt. I tried even harder not to wriggle away, just to make the job a little bit easier for him.
What do you know, by the end I was, of course, screaming enough that my voice started going, and I distinctly remember having to be told not to bring my feet up, and trying not to, just to be told again a second later. I remember dying of shame when I couldn't keep still or just a little bit quieter, and then I remember not caring.
I was too shocked to cry.
I don't remember how it ended; I was soon curled up in bed, humbled and sore, and Abel cuddled me to sleep, telling me how much he loved me. Half-asleep, I remember being surprised that he still did, after what I'd made him go through.
You would think this might be the end. But it wasn't.
I woke up in the middle of the night, because lying on my back was hurting my behind. This had happened before maybe half a dozen times, after playing particularly hard, and had always involved a heavy implement. The suffering had always been delicious. But now, as I turned onto my stomach, I could think of nothing but how bad I'd been - not just the previous week, but for a long time beforehand. I was so low. I felt chastised. Mortified. I couldn't sleep.
My mental howling at the moon woke Abel, who eventually convinced me that I wasn't a completely lost cause, even though the pain in my behind had been entirely deserved. And we talked about adjusting the regime so that I could learn some proper working habits. It was clear to both of us that I couldn't cope with freedom of unsupervised work. Abel told me how it would be for the next few weeks - however long it would take for me to separate working day from playtime. Luckily, he wouldn't have to go away again until the end of the next week, and so there would be plenty of supervision for me, whether I wanted it or not.
I listened to him, and became simultaneously dismayed and grateful.
But a story of my road to redemption is better saved for the next post.
