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When we first were introduced to Rachel one of the things we loved was her positive attitude. It wasn’t a secret that her and her husband had encountered their share of setbacks when they started domestic discipline, but she seemed to remain positive and upbeat through them, determined to make domestic discipline work for her and for their marriage. You’ll see more of what we mean when you read today’s column, appropriately titled “Trying to Stay Positive”. The one thing we hope others take away after reading Rachel’s post this week is that starting domestic discipline isn’t easy, but with the right attitude you can continue to make strides forward.
[heading style=”1″]Trying to Stay Positive[/heading]
Trying to mesh D/d into our busy lives has been a challenge for us and we finally thought we had it down. I had adjusted to waiting until our kids were in bed at night to receive any punishments, even if that meant waiting 12+ hours for them sometimes and my husband was finally seeming to remember the punishments, which was sometimes challenging after a long day at work. Things seemed to be going well.
My husband returned home one afternoon and I knew something was wrong. He had received a promotion with work, which was great news! It instantly calmed my fears, since I was worried he had lost his job when I saw him arrive home so early. But, a promotion was a great thing! Or so I thought. The pay difference was minimal, although enough to where it was worth considering. The biggest downfall was the position. He would now be working at an office almost 7 hours away from home. With our kids school, after school involvements, and community involvements, the thought of moving was difficult.
I felt caught in the middle of a rock and a hard place. On one hand, this promotion was great. It was a little more money (although with all the travel to/from home it would likely offset the cost) but more importantly it was something my husband would love, and in many ways what he had been working his whole career for. He would have been silly not to take it. But there was still that selfish part of me that kept coming through. I didn’t want to be apart from my husband all week, only seeing him on weekends, and I certainly didn’t want that for our kids. I felt conflicted as I tried to support him with this new job, but at the same time I wanted him to understand the profound impact this would have on our marriage and our family.
He seemed to understand, but a few weeks later when it was time for him to begin this new position, it became hard and D/d became almost non-existent. We both knew we wanted it to remain part of our marriage but only seeing each other on weekends made it hard since the time we did have together we wanted to be fun, and mostly about the kids as it was important they see their dad as well. Although there were probably 15 times I should have been punished, I had managed to go over a month without anything. A part of me thought that was awesome, but the other part of me felt defeated as I felt we had worked so hard at D/d and to have it change so drastically was hard to accept.
I tried to remain positive, reassuring myself that one day when we were able to stop the long distance and finally move that this would all be worth it and we’d be happy to get back on track with our marriage, our family, and D/d. But with each passing day it remained harder to stay positive because I felt like D/d was slowly becoming a non-existent option for us, and I felt our marriage growing apart.
And then something magical happened. My husband didn’t quit his job, didn’t move back home full-time and we didn’t pack up and move to his home away from home. Instead, we found maintenance spankings. I remained positive and it paid off. We found a way to make domestic discipline work long distance, finally, after so long and I think that is what really helped me. As strange as it sounds, getting spanked was actually a great thing in this situation. It really helped us to reconnect and we started doing maintenance spankings when my husband came home on the weekends which really helped us to get back on the right foot with D/d. I learned that when D/d is present in our marriage it seems like we can get through anything.
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We’re so glad that things worked out well in the end for Rachel and her husband. Maintenance spankings are something that we’ve heard a lot of long distance domestic discipline couples have success with, and we’re glad that it worked for Rachel as well.
See you this weekend – cross your fingers we get the directory done by then!
The post Learning Domestic Discipline Guest Post Columns – Rachel {Week 3} appeared first on Learning Domestic Discipline: The Blog.