A little girls subspace

My daughter spent some time today brushing my hair while she was playing at hairdressers, and i had a memory about something that happened when i was a young girl of 5.

My family was very matriachal, it was the women of the family that controlled things, the men just .. seemed to provide that means, and mostly stayed quiet and differed to firstly my grandmother and then my mother. My nan was often jokingly called the head of the family but it was funny because of the truth in it. When i was a young child i would often go and stay with her and my grandad at weekends. She was very strict, and quite old fashioned. Being seen and not heard, mind your p’s and q’s, playing only in the garden or the bedroom, helping her set up the breakfast table and making tea, running little errands for her, holding her shopping basket etc. She kind of doted on me a little as the little girl she never had. She had had 2 boys. She always had me in cute dresses and i always did very girly things there, she got me a porcelain doll called emily that i loved, we would look through her wardrobe looking at things from when she was younger, she taught me to bake, and make bobbins and pompoms. The thing she loved best though, was that i had gorgeous long blonde hair when i was a child that went down to my waist. If i was a very good girl she would play with it, she used to curl it into ringlets and brush it for hours sometimes and i loved it. It felt very nice to be treated like this and i knew it made her happy so i would be as good as possible so she would. When she curled my hair i would stand on a dining chair bent over the kitchen sink, she would use the plug socket nearest to it. and she would spend ages seperating my hair into small sections and she would curl it, i remember the warmth from the curling irons and how.. relaxed and kind of floaty i got when she would do this, like every part of my body was all tingly. I remember one time in particular when she was sitting in the easy chair by the fire in the dining room and i was kneeling on the floor so she could reach me more easily. She was combing through my hair which had been up all day in a french plait she had put in so it was already kind of sensitive. I got very relaxed and i kind of felt all floaty, she would move my head as she needed to brush my hair and i remember how heavy my head felt, like i was floating in space and i didnt have control of my body. I don’t know how long she was brushing, i had lost track of time even though there was a little grandmother clock on the mantleplace that chimed once every 15 minutes. I just remember how when she had finished she lifted me to her lap, she carried on stroking my hair and just held me close as i sat on her lap while i floated happily wherever i was. Eventually grandad brought in a snack, tea and a scone for my nan and milk and cookies for me ( i liked to dunk them) and we sat and ate together watching a cat in the garden underneath the big conifer tree. The food stopped me feeling all floaty but i was still all relaxed. It was nice.

In a way i was thinking on this as my daughter brushed as i had just finished a writing assignment to Mistress and i thought about how similar that feeling was to how i get in subspace. I know the above account was just a normal childhood thing but thinking on it there was a kind of show of power there, a power play. It came into my head so vividly i felt i had to write about it as i sat and thought more and more that maybe that was my first experinece, in a way, of subspace.

~ by chyldeofthenorns on August 11, 2008.