Day 178 - On Having an Awful Time at a Class on Wax Play and Getting Slammed in the Back by an Inconsiderate Dominatrix, and As a Result Having an Emotional Breakdown and Ruining Much of the Weekend for My Master

Almost back to normal reality. Wait. I have no idea what “normal reality” is. Well, I’ve heard rumors of it, but … okay, back to “a-less-chaotic-reality-than-lately.”

Master’s plan for this weekend was taking me to an intensive series of three classes at the Sanctuary BDSM club by somebody named Julian Wolf. And in between the first and second classes, Master and I had been invited to a Mexican dinner hosted by two Master/slave couples in town. Master was quite enthusiastic about the weekend’s events, and I was excited, too.

Things didn’t turn out as planned, as you might have guessed. Perhaps I should have taken the brief visit by Coyote spirit a couple of days ago as an omen. Or as a warning.

The first class was supposed to be a three-hour presentation on wax play, which is a type of BDSM in which you pour melted wax on a person’s body. There’s a lot to learn about it, being that it could be quite dangerous, but Julian is a nationally known expert, and she had two attractive people to demonstrate on.

She may be nationally known, but she was an awful speaker. She rambled incoherently, babbling from subject to subject. She didn’t enunciate very well at all, and with my poor hearing I could barely hear her most of the time. Actually, at first she seemed to be focused and spoke well, but the longer the class went on, the more brain dead she seemed to become, and her presentation got increasingly disjointed. So when Master asked me at first if I could hear her, I said it was okay, but by the second hour I could barely make things out, and by the third hour … I was starting to totally lose it mentally. Then, barely hanging on, I saw the time was up and … but Julian kept going and going and going, not knowing when to stop. So, by the end of the fourth hour (of what was supposed to be a three-hour class), after I had been sitting all that time in a horribly uncomfortable metal chair with my flesh sticking to the vinyl seat (I had foolishly worn a skirt), not being able to hear the speaker very well and not understanding any of the jokes that everybody else was laughing at, and not being really that interested at all in the topic to begin with, I was totally and completely in mental agony. Most likely, the fact I have Asperger’s (a form of high-level autism) contributed greatly to the fact I was unable to handle the situation, but whatever the case, I wasn’t doing well psychologically by that point.

Oh, and I was stressed for another reason, too. A sadistic domme (a female dominant and professional dominatrix) in the audience who seemed to have little or no social skills whatsoever decided right in the middle of the presentation to grab a spiked club and barrel across the seats in an effort to hit somebody she knew in the audience. The domme slammed by accident into the rear of my chair, hitting me hard enough to wrench my back and making me feel unbalanced as if I had been almost knocked out of my chair. To make matters worse, I was totally focused on Julian, trying in frustration to understand what she was saying, and so when I was hit it was a total shock to my emotional balance. Master checked to see if I was okay and told me that the domme was known to be extremely flaky, and then then he went to the domme and confronted her about it. In response, she claimed that she didn’t even realize that she had crashed into me like that. She apologized, but I was still rather hurt and still rather mentally trying to recover from the incident, and didn’t say anything back – that is, until Master got annoyed and ordered me to verbally tell the domme that I accepted her apology. That situation lingered with me the rest of the presentation, making things worse all around.

During the last hour of the presentation, I went into a trance state because I just had to escape. It was actually the best part of the whole experience. As I think I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I do shamanic work, and during the last three years I’ve repeatedly spiritually undertaken trance “journeys” into a non-physical reality, where I’ve lived as a wolf bitch. And that’s what I did yesterday as I sat there, trying to mentally get away from my physical situation. I journeyed as a wolf with my pack. It was so vivid – I was gone from my human body. We were walking through a snowy valley. The light grey female cub from my first litter (about three years ago) was moving slowly toward in the back of the pack, and I could tell she smelled sickly for some reason, which filled me with sadness. We approached a thick section of woods then I smelled the elk beyond it and ran forward. Soon we saw the herd, and I worked around from one side which my mate and our cubs (who make up the rest of the pack) worked around from the other side. We ran at the elk and they started moving along but stayed together. I was approaching a doe when the lone cub from last year’s litter, a white male, ran past me toward the doe’s rear, and to my distress he got kicked hard for his efforts. I started to try and go at her but she stood firm, and then I looked behind me toward sounds of growling to see that my mate, a charcoal grey wolf, had surrounded a very agitated doe along with two cubs from the second litter (a black male and a grey male). As I watched, they proceeded to harass her with their teeth from different sides, ripping her flesh and taking her energy away, until finally she collapsed from her wounds, at which point my mate went in and ripped her throat open. I then came close as he was ripping her abdomen open and was given the chance to grab some meat from her front leg, which I happily began to devour in the snow. The rest of the pack took their turns eating, and I fell out of the trance for a few minutes. When I returned for a short while to the trance, I was finishing eating, and I went to my mate and laid down against him, my head on top of his neck, and we nuzzled and cuddled a bit until the trance ended. It was all so powerful I had to fight to keep from crying physically. I haven’t seen my mate lately – I have to admit that I haven’t journeyed with my pack much at all during the last year for various reasons – and feeling him rubbing against me tenderly brought a great and deep longing to my soul.

The last half-hour of the presentation was complete hell for me, a total nightmare. I was fighting everything I could to not stand on my chair and scream at Julian to shut up, or to run madly out of the room. Actually, that latter option might have been a good idea. At the end, Master noticed that I was totally withdrawn, curled up into a ball of agony in my chair, and he asked for an explanation outside. And I gave it to him in the car.

And he asked me why I didn’t request permission to leave to the lobby. “As I’ve told you before, I don’t want you to be tortured by anything or anybody -- expect by me,” he said.

And I told him it was the way I was raised. By my parents in boring church services. By my teachers in boring school classes. As a journalist covering boring city council meetings. By my ex whenever we’d visit his relatives at boring holiday get-togethers. By my employers at incredibly dull corporate meetings. I was always taught it was rude to leave those things in the middle. It was disrespectful to the speaker. It was disruptive to the rest of the audience. It was just something that wasn’t done, and instead you were supposed to sit down and shut up. It didn’t matter whether I could hear what the speaker was saying or was in mental agony. I just had to take it. Always.

Hell. I’m crying now. All those years of anguish for me are coming back all at once. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t focus because of my attention-deficit disorder. It’s hard to explain to somebody who doesn’t understand.

And I was crying as I told this to Master in his car. I curled up, holding my knees, and told him. And I told him how much I had been shaken by the domme hitting me.

And without further discussion Master started up the car and announced he was driving home. He said he believed that I wasn’t okay enough to go to the dinner or the evening’s class (which was about sadomasochism on the parts of the body from the knees down, particularly the feet).

I tried to convince Master to go to the party, as I could see he was clearly upset, but he said he didn’t have the mental energy to attend a dinner where he would have to worry whether I would be having a breakdown.

And so, with me withdrawn silently most of the way, we went home.

When we got there, he told me he had been embarrassed by the fact I hadn’t accepted the domme’s apology, and he was rather annoyed at me. It took awhile, but I explained to Master that the way I was raised, you didn’t accept an apology just because somebody offered you one. If somebody hurt you, and you were still hurt, they might tell you that they felt bad that they hurt you, but that didn’t get them off the hook in any way, and you were not obligated to accept their apology. I was taught as a kid to take responsibility for my actions, and that “saying sorry will get you nowhere” if you do something careless or irresponsible that got somebody else in trouble. Which is exactly what that domme did to me. Master, however, told me he was taught different, and he expects me to accept apologies from now on, even if I’m still upset or emotionally hurt by what happened. Well, I’m the slave, and I follow Master’s rules, so I’ll do it.

I also had to explain to Master why I was so withdrawn and miserable at the end of the presentation, and he eventually understood what I was going through and why I didn’t leave (although he said he still needs to read up on Asperger’s, although that was only a small piece of why I was in such mental pain. Or maybe it was the primary reason I was. To be honest, I’m not really sure what’s going in my head in that respect, but I do know that being incredibly bored has put me through what feels like intense mental pain all my life – so much that I find waiting in long lines to be almost excruciating, and I avoid them like the plague. Ironically, last night I had a book with me in my purse which I could have happily read in the lobby – that is, if I had the mental state to have known Master wouldn’t have minded me asking him if I could go to the lobby. And, yes, I was actually afraid to ask Master if I could do that. I’ve gotten the impression from Master’s responses to some of my questions at times that he doesn’t like me bothering him by asking things that he thinks I should already know, and because of the way I was trained all my life, I almost instinctually assumed that Master would be annoyed at me for asking if I could wait in the lobby.)

Last night on the way home I was a bit afraid again that Master would finally decide I just wasn’t right for him, and that he would tell me to start looking for a new home. I felt that way despite the fact that during the presentation that very night, Master had turned to me and told me he still is very happy with me as his slave. I’m both deadly scared of being thrown out and expecting it to happen, despite my best efforts. Yeah. I’m pretty fucked up in the head in a few ways.

Once we got home, Master asked if I ever want to do anything at the Sanctuary with him in the public scene. He loves going to the Sanctuary, and he said he goes there to socialize for the most part, learn new things and occasionally take part in a low-key event. But he feels whenever we go there it always ends in me crying or me experiencing a big emotional release, and so I’m pretty much I’m taking the enjoyment out of it for him. And, to my surprise, he said he believed that I don’t enjoy high protocol. Add to that the fact that I don’t enjoy pain (I’m not a “lifestyle masochist”), and he said he really doesn’t know what appeal the Sanctuary might have for me.

I responded that I do like going there – actually, being there with him is usually one of the high points of each week for me, and I’m almost always disappointed when he plans to go and then changes his mind and stays home. The big problem there for me, I said, is because the atmosphere is so wild and chaotic, with people all over the place talking and bumping into each other and hitting each other and screaming in pain. It’s exciting but, for me, very overwhelming at times (which is definitely a symptom of Asperger’s). And when I get overwhelmed, my mental shields drop, and I express the torrent of emotions that are churning underneath. And I do have a lot of emotions churning, that’s for sure – I have an unusual hormonal state, and despite being a middle-aged woman, emotionally I’m very much like a post-pubescent teenage girl. (Master and I actually discussed that the other day, and we joked about doing “age play” – but we laughed and decided against it when we realized that would mean me coming home wearing a ratty t-shirt, listening to heavy metal music, having a boyfriend in a rock band and getting pregnant before graduating high school. Well, okay, maybe not. *chuckles*)

Anyway, regarding being overstimulated, it’s not just the Sanctuary where it happens. I get that way at amusement parks and shopping malls and everywhere that things are going on left and right with loud noises and bright lights. My kids are exactly the same way, which their psychiatrist says is a clue regarding exactly what I’ve got and what they’ve got, and hopefully will point toward finding the right medicine for all of us. With me, I’ve pretty much found the right medicine – it’s not perfect, but it helps tremendously. If you had seen me a year ago before I was on the current dosage, you would realize what I mean. My ex tells my kids’ psychiatrist that I’m a completely different person now, and that’s resulted in my son being put on a new medicine that has helped him to control himself tremendously. Now if we can figure out the right dosage for our daughter, a modicum of calmness might actually be able to descend on my ex’s household at times.

On that issue, Master and I came to a conclusion, and he told me he didn’t mind at all if I left him alone when we’re at the club and that I should go off to a place of solitude when I start getting agitated. The car would be a great place if it wasn’t too cold, we decided, and if not, he thinks the owner of the Sanctuary might have a quiet place somewhere I could go and, hopefully, meditate or read a book or listen to music, all of which have helped me dramatically in the past to calm myself down in tense situations. (At the airport as we were waiting to fly to Phoenix recently, for example, I was extremely glad I had packed my mp3 player at the last minute, because being able to walk around the empty concourses listening to the good tunes filled me with a warm relaxation).

Regarding activities at the Sanctuary, I told Master that I actually do like doing things there, and I was surprised he hadn’t realized that. I told him that, as he knows, I’m an exhibitionist, and I would love to be stripped naked, tied to a cross and experience intense electrical play as he runs a violet wand across my exposed flesh. (Master, by the way, loves violet wands, which is a device that uses glass tubes and metal contacts and creates intense electric shocks for therapy and kinky fun. He’s considered an expert in them, but for some reason he’s never used his equipment on me … yet.) He also knows I would love to be tied up there and left bound and gagged in public. I told him I would love to be flogged there and to use it to enter a trance state – to which he responded that he couldn’t ever find spiritual enlightenment while engaged in public activities in the club, but I smiled and told him that I can pretty much enter a shamanic trance anywhere, and I have (About four years ago, for example, I entered a powerful pre-ritual trance in, of all places, a McDonalds’ indoor playground. I was actually able to transform the sound of children playing into a rhythm in my head that carried me beyond normal reality. Granted, that’s not something normal for me, but a particular spirit … Dragon … wanted to talk to me and chose that avenue of doing it). And as for high protocol, I told Master that I do, indeed, love it. I had told him last month I was sick of it because two draining high-protocol events had been scheduled one night after another, and I wanted to get back to normal service afterward.

Although Master said he agrees that the scheduling of the high-protocol events wasn’t the best, and they should have been spread out, he otherwise didn’t respond much to what I said about the things I might enjoy at the club.

And when I told him that I enjoy going to the club because he enjoys going to the club and I enjoy being his companion, he told me he doesn’t want to do things with me that I’m just “enduring”. He said when we do things together like that, he wants to know that I’m enjoying them, too. In response, I told that enduring things for one’s Master is what a slave does – and that the other slaves I know in the area all tell me the same thing – that giving of themselves to please their Master is what slavery is about, and that definitely includes enduring things purely for their Master’s enjoyment. (I was rather confused that Master didn’t realize and automatically expect me as a slave to be like that, but we were both tired by that point after a long and draining conversation, and so maybe I misunderstood his meaning.)

The conversation moved to me crying again because of us missing the dinner with the other Masters and slaves, and I told Master through my sobs that I wanted to go so much because the dinner was planned to be explicitly low protocol, and finally I might get to really know the other Masters and slaves in a setting that promoted casual conversation. Master said that he was, indeed, very disappointed we missed the party, but there will be other dinners. And, he said, I wouldn’t likely have been able to talk casually at last night’s event because, even though it was low protocol, there still would have been some protocol – and as a result, in comparison with other low-protocol events, the Masters would have likely maintained control of the conversations, and if something I wanted to talk about didn’t interest them, then I wouldn’t have been able to bring it up or would have been quickly dismissed. Such is the life of a slave.

*sighs* I feel Master’s missed so much he was looking forward to this weekend, all because of me, but I wonder how much of yesterday could have been avoided, or how much was something we needed to get through as a Master/slave couple.

Master wound up missing the class on “BDSM From the Knees Down” last night, and he decided not to attend today’s class by Julian on roleplaying. I have to admit, I was really looking forward to the roleplaying class but, after yesterday’s fiasco, I wonder if it would have been worth attending for me. Although I get a lot from some classes at the Sanctuary, other ones leave me telling Master I didn’t understand a word being said – and Master and I realized last night that it’s the classes held in the Sanctuary’s dungeon that are incomprehensible to my hearing. With that in mind, we’ll use that in the future to decide which classes I might plan to attend – and we used that to decide I wouldn’t get anything out of today’s class, despite a topic I’m extremely interested in.

Well, after everything calmed down and we worked everything out (for the most part), we ended the evening by getting Popeye’s chicken and watching the Batman: The Dark Knight movie together (which Master loved but I didn’t really like, to be honest – I thought the Batman with Cat Woman and the Penguin was a lot better. *grins*)

Looking back on yesterday’s events, I’m still tense from it all, and so is Master, clearly. Yesterday really ripped me inside emotionally in a lot of ways, and I went to bed sobbing while tightly hugging my stuffed wolf and stuffed horse. I don’t even know what I was crying about, but I needed release, deeply, and I only found it by going to sleep finally.

Today, I’m still a bit weak mentally and depressed, judging by the fact I’m still a bit on the edge of tears. I think things will be better as a result of this weekend, however. Somehow, better, in ways I can’t even imagine yet.

Actually, I’m sure of it. It was a hell of a weekend. It was, truth be told, a hell of a month, and I’m very glad January is over.

The final thing is, though, that I know I love Master. And I know this is the life I want to live.

The pain is worth it, without a doubt, for me, so that I can become the slave Master wants me to be.

My prayer is that Master continues to find it worth it to him as well, and that he always wants me as a slave as much as I want him as my Owner.

La kajira.

p.s. Yeah, I promised I’d talk about my experiences at the Southwest Leather Conferences in this post. Such is life. You’ll get a full report next time, though. *smiles gently*

Day 52 - On Depression, Money Issues, Power Exchange, Car Problems, Marionettes and Paying Things Forward

I hate having clinical depression. And, yes, I’ve got it. And most likely, Aspeger’s Syndrome, which is like being autistic except being able to function in society. Actually, it’s exactly like that, because that’s what it is. Oh, and I also suffer mood disorders to the level that my psychologist believes I suffer low-level bi-polarism. So, yeah, my brain’s fucked up. I’ve read the blogs of a few other full-time slaves, and a lot of them suffer similar problems. Am I saying that you have to be screwed in the head to be a slave? No, not at all. But I do think that people who have problems dealing with the complexities of life sometimes find solace in being able to give control to somebody they trust.

Depression sucks. Imagine walking down the street and suddenly tasting extremely strong espresso while you’re eating a hamburger. Or hearing the clash of cymbals while listening to a violin concerto. Today I was feeling wonderful about life, and I was thinking of how I’m blessed in so many ways – and I suddenly started feeling overwhelmingly sad and burst into tears, and felt that way for a long time.

It also hit last night … which sucked big time. Mistress knows how much I’ve been wanting to get tied up, but she hasn’t done it in earnest, and so last night she decided to give me a treat. She tied my hands to my knees with me lying in bed, and then tied my wrists together so I couldn’t move, and proceeded to take a dildo to my vagina and a vibrator to my clit and ... I didn’t enjoy it because I had been suffering a low-level depression all day. Being tied up and lightly tortured is supposed to be a weird release based around the discomfort being turned into a thrill, but ... my depression kept that from happening, and instead I started crying. And the fact I didn’t enjoy what Mistress did for me greatly disappointed her, and the fact I wasn't enjoying it pissed the hell out of me because I had been wanting for a long time for Mistress to tie me up, and the fact that it happened on a night I wasn't emotionally stable made me even more depressed. Mistress says she’ll tie me up again someday here, but she doesn’t know when. *sighs*

Asperger’s causes me to feel incredibly confused and scared when I’m in a situation that’s overly chaotic, and as a result I feel like running away and hiding. And if I can’t run away, I get all upset and angry. Basic fight or flight syndrome exhibited by a wild animal in a tense situation. And being bi-polar shifts me up and down without control.

Mistress knew all that about me when she collared me. And she took me in anyway. Which is why, despite the problems we may have, I love her dearly.

And, yes, we do have problems. Definitely.

For example, today Mistress reminded me that I’ll need to pay my half of the rent soon. As things are, I pay for the cable and Internet bills, half the rent and another $75 for storage space away from the house. Mistress pays for heating, water and half the rent. And yet, my possessions take up only a small fraction of the house – a few boxes in the garage and a few boxes in an upstairs room. And I have pretty much no say regarding finances or any of the big matters, such as the fact we moved out of the old house into this townhome. Plus, as a slave, I’m doing most of the chores around the house, and I provide Mistress with sexual pleasure whenever she desires. We’re both on unemployment, but Mistress is able to work odd jobs for extra cash here and there, while I can’t. Even more, my duties as a slave sometimes get a little in the way of my search for employment.

Do I feel like my submissiveness and slave heart are being exploited? Yes, sometimes I do. Maybe.

In a non-fiction book entitled, “Separating Fact from Fiction: The Life of a Consensual Slave in the 21st Century” By Shannon Reilly, she says, “As equals, the members of a consensual slavery relationship will exchange power with each other, giving and taking that power in a constant flow. Power is neither created nor destroyed in power exchange relationships. Rather two equals remain equal while power flows between them.”

Mistress controls my life to a large degree. Not as much as I want, but she does impart control. And she takes responsibility for me, taking care of my needs. I’d prefer the relationship was much stronger, in that I could totally give up myself and almost all control in exchange for being able to be nothing but a slave almost all the time. Mistress, however, doesn’t want that. She told me tonight she still struggles with the word “slave” (despite all the talks we had a month ago), and she doesn’t think we’ll ever be in a situation where she’ll support me financially. *sighs* Such is life. Mistress is the best Owner I’ve found, and the only one where the mutual attraction has been strong enough to result in us living together, so I should count my blessings, without a doubt. There might be a better Owner out there for me, and there might be a better slave out there for Mistress. But, for now, we’re going to try our darn best to make this work for as long as possible. The way Mistress puts it, she and I satisfy each other’s needs, and that’s why things work. I hope so.

For a while today I was confused about Mistress, because she seemed to be both too much of a sadist and too concerned with not hurting me at the same time. Communication solved the puzzle. The answer was simple. See, she loves to pinch my nipples really hard until I cringe, and she loves to spank me unexpectedly. Yet, last night, when she tied me up for fun (as I mentioned earlier), she started to ram a silicon dildo in my pussy, but wouldn’t do it for fear of hurting me. And when my arms started getting a little sore when I was tied up the other day (for the benefit of the couple that had visited), she immediately untied me, even though I didn’t want her to. She said the difference is that with nipple pinches and spanking, she knows she won’t do permanent damage. It’s “known territory.” But with thrusting large things into my genitalia or potentially hurting my arm muscles, she said it’s “unknown territory” in which she’s afraid of causing actual damage to her property. So Mistress is a bit of a sadist, but she’s a caring one, in that she wants to keep her property safe and in good shape. Which is perfectly fine with me. *grins*

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I’m not automotive savvy, I hate to say. Mistress got me hooked up with a male friend who said he could fix my car for cheap. Well, turns out one of the belts was broken, and he replaced it and another that was frayed for $25 plus the cost of the belts. It was a great deal ... except suddenly I don’t have power steering, and I had had it before he started working on it.

Mistress just got off the phone with him. She knows cars pretty well, and she was able to talk shop with him. She can’t think of anything he could have done wrong, but she’s going to look under my hood to check his work tomorrow. I just know I have my car working again, but it’s suddenly hard as hell to turn the wheel, and I don’t trust the abilities of Mistress’s friend. Whatever the case, Mistress said she’ll deal with it.

Mistress had car problems of her own today and called to me for help. She rear-ended a pickup, which bent up the fender of her own pickup like crazy and hardly damaged the other person’s truck. She was so shaken up afterward she couldn’t drive, and she was a half hour from home. She called me first and then called her Master, and her Master happened to respond first, and he agreed to take her home, and she asked me to drive down and move her car somewhere safe. I decided she really needed something to calm her down, and I made an Irish coffee (whiskey, hot cream, sugar and coffee) and started driving down to see her. Half-way there she called and said her Master would handle everything, but she did gladly imbibe the hot toddy when she got home tonight, and she’s feeling quite relaxed at the moment, so I figure I did my proper duties as best I could. *shrugs and slightly grins*

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One a final note about money, a couple of nice things happened the last few days.

Today I was in the supermarket and I bought a cooked chicken for dinner for five bucks. Then when I checked out, I realized to my frustration that I had left my money wallet at home and so it wasn’t in my purse, and I had to tell the clerk to void the sale. Well, an extremely nice man who was a total stranger overheard the conversation, and he asked what happened, and he very generously pulled a five-dollar bill out of his billfold and said he’d pay for my purchase. Talk about shock on my part! I was extremely grateful and told him I’d pay it forward and return the good deed to somebody else, and he just told me with a smile not to worry about it!

And last weekend I wrote to the makers of the blond marionette I have and told them I was working on a play that I want to perform for kids in the community at libraries and schools, and they wrote me back and told me they would sell me any of their marionettes at wholesale prices, which is truly a great deal!

Oh, yeah ... I’m working on a play! In the back of a great little book on creating marionettes (“Marionettes: How to Make and Work Them” by Helen Fling) is a quite simple and quite short puppet play, and I liked it so much I’ve been working on enhancing it into a complete one-person production. I’ll need to create some backdrops and the puppet stage along with finishing up writing the play, but I was concerned about making the necessary marionettes, and now that I can get six great storybook marionettes professionally made for cheap, I’m pretty darn happy about the whole thing!

And that’s how I’m going to try and pay things forward ... by writing and performing a marionette play for local children that not only encourages environmental awareness but also has a strong, brave, smart heroine. Wish me luck!

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Before I sign out today, I wanted to mention a well-written blog by another live-in consensual slave, entited: Diary of a Contented BDSM Slave. I made a posting there today in response to her feelings of unease at how her Master took care of her physically when she was recently sick in bed. Here’s a snippet of what I wrote:

It's not easy being taken care of, indeed. I've known of more than one Master/slave relationship that fell apart because the Master truly enjoyed doing certain "chores" (such as cooking gourmet meals), and the slave felt indignation at seeing her Owner doing things for her that she felt she should be doing for him.

It all comes down to communication in the end. Sometimes, truly, the best way to serve is to allow yourself to be served.

When a Master serves his slave, he's not being less dominant in any way. He's likely being warm and loving. And he's also likely taking care of his property, as others have said.

If one's Master spent hours carefully polishing a beautiful sculpture, or repairing it should a piece fall off, is that being submissive? No, of course not. He's simply doing maintenance on his property.

And taking care of you when you're sick is him doing maintenance on you, his slave.

I pray that you get well soon, my sister. You'll be in our thoughts.

La kajira!