My mom was born in the 20’s. There were a lot of expectations around how she would act, what she would do with her life. She met those expectations, as most women did. I don’t think she was all that happy or fulfilled. Many women of her generation were not. I’m sure there were high points for her. Feeling empowered wasn’t one of them.

I was born in the 60’s. Things for women were different by then, and changed even more by the time I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. My mom watched the generation between hers and mine, saw the opportunities they were creating for themselves and for other women, the apparent plethora of choices they were carving out. She wanted those choices — for me. Like many women my age, I grew up to a chorus of “You can have anything you want. You can do anything you want.” I took that message in, absorbed it, made it part of me. I heard it from my mother, from my father, from my grandparents, from my teachers. My friends heard and lived the same message. With little variation, we did what was expected, never wanting to disappoint those who worked so hard to make sure we had those opportunities. So, we took school seriously, we dated boys who were enlightened and honoured our stellar futures, we went on to postsecondary education, we delayed marriage, we started our careers and bought our houses before beginning our families, we nurtured our careers, earned our promotions, followed the social issues, donated to the progressive charities, hired the childcare, earned as much as or more than our husbands, pushed against the glass ceiling, talked the talk, walked the walk. We had everything, did everything, exhausted ourselves fighting the good fight, achieving the good life. One thing we / they forgot though … we somehow missed out on some of the original intention — choice.

I followed the rules, lockstep. I didn’t follow the only possible path — I get that. There were variations I could have chosen. I could have gone to grad school and done the rest of it 5 years later. 10 years in, I could have divorced my man who would have turned out to be not such a supporter of feminism after all. Basically, though, I followed the rules. That’s how it felt — what we were really good at was the same thing our mothers were good at — following rules. This particular set of rules was about emancipation not subservience, but they were set expectations, nevertheless. It took me a long time to figure that out. Don’t get me wrong; I was grateful for the opportunities provided by those expectations and by the women who trailblazed to create them — I still am. But here I am, 42, and living in a box that is roomier and has better views than the one that contained my mother… but a box even so.

So… one night this week, I will meet Him. For four or five hours, I will accept a new set of rules, where I call him Sir, and he calls me pet, and I kneel, and he ties me up, and I shiver, and he spanks. The difference is that they will be rules that he and I negotiated together, and they will be all about feeling good and escaping, about fucking and being fucked, about pleasing and being pleased. It will be between him and me, and afterwards, I’ll write about it graphically and maybe poetically, and I’ll brag about the limits I pushed, and the boundaries I crossed, and all of it will be my choice. Mine.