One other thing I did this past weekend was to, quite deliberately, go against Bear’s wishes.
I had taken some downtime during the weekend, and time in the morning, to upgrade Bear’s PC to Windows 8.1, from Windows 7. The upgrade went well, but somewhere along the line his sound card acquired the most godawful hum.
I knew this was a hardware problem. I knew I had to get in there to fix it. And, Bear’s PC was on a small table by his desk, with a printer wedged in there, and a bunch of paper and stuff piled all around. There was no way I was going to fix it while it was in there. The cables at the back were bunching up against the wall, it was sitting at an angle propped up partially by the printer, with bottom airflow obstructed.
So I moved all of that out of there, at something like 8 in the evening. Everything under Bear’s desk, and everything to the side of Bear’s desk, creating a godawful mess in the middle of the floor. I knew he wouldn’t like this. He had talked about cleaning this area up for a while now, and as with several previous weekends, it hadn’t happened this weekend.
Bear came upon this and asked me whether that couldn’t have waited, and he was going to do it this weekend. He was annoyed. I told him that in order to fix his PC, I needed to tackle this now.
Once I had the PC out of there, fixing the sound card turned out to be a simple matter of taking it out, re-soldering the stressed power connector, and putting it back in.
I was feeling quite stressed. I didn’t want to incur Bear’s displeasure, but I had seen no good way out of this without doing so. Short of waiting for another undetermined length of time until I could get at the PC, and I wasn’t prepared to do that.
Once the PC was working again, with the mess still in the middle of the floor, I knelt before Bear and explained that I was sorry that I went against his wishes. I knew I had. I had done it because I believed that going against his wishes was the best way I could serve him, right now. And that if he felt that this needed to result in a consequence, I was going to accept that.
Then I set to cleaning up the mess I had created, with Bear’s help as to what could be tossed, what recycled or given away, and what was to be kept. Halfway through I asked him, with some anxiety, whether he accepted my apology. “Can I leave you hanging on that?” he said, with a bit of a twinkle in his eye.
Of course he could. An hour later, when the mess was taken care of and we were getting ready for bed, he told me he accepted my apology, and no further consequences would be coming.
One change I notice in my own behavior is that half a year ago, I probably would have also tackled this without Bear’s say-so, but I’d then have gotten into an argument about it with him, likely full of references to how long that area had remained cluttered, with shots fired back about my own cluttered desk, and so forth and so tiresome.
Now, I still did what I felt I had to do. But without accusations, but rather an apology and being prepared to accept the consequences of my action, should there have been any.
I don’t want to repeat that performance. In the same situation, I’d do so again, but I will aim to not let things get to such a head where I feel I have no choice but to go against Bear’s express wishes.
Two days later, by the way, Bear seems quite happy that this task is now done. As I am typing this, he’s chasing the dog through the house with a little mini-copter that was unearthed while going through that pile.
If you read this and you are in a D/s dynamic of some kind: How would you have acted in this situation, on either side of that dynamic?
I might have frozen up in the face of the conflicting situations (one would make her happy, one would piss her off). It all depends on how much the “make her happy” one was bugging me, I guess.
In any event, like you, I’ve found that I’m more likely now to apologize than confront. I think it’s one the best parts of finding my way into how I define submission. It’s not that I’m weak or will let her roll over me, it’s that I’m not as defensive. Less interested in confrontation or “winning.” I have less of an ego to defend or something. I dunno. But I’m much more likely to apologize and seek a resolution most of the time than I have ever been.
“Not as defensive” is a great way of putting it. I don’t lose anything by apologizing. We both win.
I would have been uncomfortable doing something against Master’s wishes, but I would probably have pushed Him for it beforehand and then insisted on doing it. We’ve been through a similar project actually, decluttering His and His primary partner/boyfriend’s home, and Master’s been very very stressed. He hates cleaning and His boyfriend hates cleaning and I’ve had to push them both through it (having them both sit down on the bed while I go through the wardrobe, one article at a time, asking “get rid of or keep?”). Master seems very pleased it’s done, though, so I’m fairly certain pushing Him is worth it – after all, I know best when it comes to cleaning, tee hee 😉
In general though, I understand where you’re coming from. I hate it when Master keeps me hanging and I would probably not have been able to stay peaceful and calm in that situation. Then again I don’t find apologizing hard in general when I’ve been wrong and I always apologize when I’ve fucked up.
Yeah, now if Dominant’s were perfect, and not people, there’d be no call for pushing :). Good to see my situation’s not an outlier.