09/03/2020
I was sitting by my in-laws’ pool, watching three-year-old Ben splashing around in the shallow end. “Guess what, Mom!” he called. “I know how to swim now!”
His voice held such utter confidence and sincerity that it never occurred to me to doubt him. For all I knew, he’d had a sudden epiphany in which the physics and body mechanics of swimming had been revealed to him in a vision. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s see you swim.”
He strolled nonchalantly out to where the water was over his head. I sat there and watched him – or at least I watched the part of him that was above the water, a circle of scalp about the circumference of a large apple.
It took a minute or two of waiting for the swimming to start before I realized that there wasn’t going to be any swimming. I kicked off my shoes and waded fully clothed into the pool, where I picked him out and carried him back ashore, coughing and spluttering.
The first thing he said when he got his breath back? “Well, next time I’ll know how to swim.”
There is no question from whom he inherited this blithe belief in his ability to do something he’d never learned how to do. I wasn’t much older than him when I believed with all my heart that if I ever really needed to fly, a good running start would launch me into a low graceful Peter Pan soar across the living room – it’s pure luck that I never attempted to prove that belief.
In the six decades since, I have done all kinds of things I didn’t know how to do – mostly very badly, at least at first. Before I founded Greenery Press in 1992, my only experience in book publishing was a part-time gig as a glorified secretary at Jalmar Press, the home of the 1970s classic TA for Tots. (TA, for those of you who missed that era of psychobabble, stood for Transactional Analysis, a trendy way of understanding interpersonal communications. I still don’t quite understand the philosophy but I do remember drawing a lot of “Warm Fuzzies.”)
But in 1992, I wrote, designed, illustrated, produced and marketed my first book, The Sexually Dominant Woman: A Workbook for Nervous Beginners. It was terrible in almost every way. I’d actually been a dominant woman for two or three years, I’d never designed a publication, and I had no idea how to market a book. But SDW went into a fourth edition a couple of years ago, a quarter century later, and is still in print, so apparently I figured it out as I went along.
My early kink scenes weren’t much better, constructed as they were from a knowledge base consisting of a lifetime of wildly unrealistic fantasies, a couple of articles in Penthouse Variations, and a paperback book published in the UK called S&M: The Last Taboo[1]. I hurt one guy significantly (how was I to know that you had to stretch an anus before sticking things in there?!), but other than that I got lucky. Once again, I learned as I went along.
I can’t possibly remember the number of rooms I’ve painted, repairs I’ve attempted, garments I’ve sewn or knitted, items I’ve bought in the cherished and false belief that I’d have enough money when it came time to pay for them, scenes I should have safeworded out of were I not afflicted with what a friend calls “masochismo” – well, you get the idea. Most, thank god, were easily repaired afterwards, when I noticed what a shitty job I’d done.
Another manifestation of the same worldview is my invariable belief that I can fix whatever is wrong with the person I’m sleeping with at the time. News bulletin: I can’t[2].
The only sphere of endeavor in which I lack this unearned confidence is the physical. My mesomorphic frame makes me pretty good at picking up heavy things, and I like doing it – but my 65-year-old back makes that particular pleasure a bit less pleasurable than it used to be. And as for any other physical enterprise, the ones that require stamina and/or flexibility and/or reflexes and/or coordination – well, let’s just not talk about those at all.
But I think my greatest baseless confidence was the day I said to Frank, “Hey, I think I might be pregnant,” and he said, “Huh, what do you want to do?” and I said, “What the hell, let’s have it, how hard can it be?”
I should note here that confidence like mine is a hallmark of privilege, which is why it’s characteristic of so many straight white guys my age. I think I’ve been able to maintain it all these years simply because I’ve rarely encountered serious consequences for getting stuff wrong.
And I’m a fairly quick study. I didn’t know anything about being a parent or a publisher or a partner or a dominant or a homeowner, but I figured it out – generally, thank god, before I’d made any mistakes I couldn’t unmake. And now that I’m old enough to have some dough and also old enough that my oblivious marches into the unknown are a bit riskier than they used to be, I’ve gotten a little better about hiring people to do the things I can’t or shouldn’t[3] – although I doubt I’ll ever learn to like doing so.
But I guess I can stand by my results. My kids are good human beings. Greenery Press published some terrific books. My exes are better off (I think) for having known me. And my current house contains no embarrassing paint jobs whatsoever.
I still can’t catch a ball to save my life, though.
[1] This book, charming as it is, reinforced my belief that “S&M” consisted entirely of spanking, plus maybe a bit of bondage to get them to hold still while you spanked them. There was no mention of D/S, or even of other types of sensation play. Which was fine for me, given that my tastes run that way anyway – but it came as quite a surprise, a few years later, to learn that kink comes in more flavors than breakfast cereal.
[2] Although I do take some pride in leaving them in better shape than the way I found them.
[3] I still suck, badly, at telling people what to do. I let Edward do that part.
Slut & Sons 