How Do You Balance Kink and Parenting?

The first *strange* thing my stepson ever saw me do was polishing my spouse's shoes on a Sunday evening. It had only been a few months since he had been living with us and until then, I had mostly continued to perform my more slavish duties in the privacy of our bedroom. However, that evening, he was loudly complaining about the fact that he had to polish his shoes to get ready for school so I mentioned that I had to polish his father's shoes too and we could just do it together.

"*You* are going to polish daddy's shoes?" He asked me, "You would never even polish your own."

"I know but he cares so much about his shoes being shiny and well-polished that it makes me happy to do it for him," I told him.

"Ah," it was a contemplative sound he made, since then I've learnt that he makes it every time he is mulling something over and hasn't decided what he feels about it yet, "Okay fine, let's polish together."

We did. For the next couple of years, we often did it together. Sometimes fighting about who did it better and stealing equipment from one another. On the face of it, it may seem *strange* but it wasn't.

Right from the beginning of co-parenting (especially a child being socialised as a boy), I had many concerns about our relationship dynamic, the evidence of my masochism and the power dynamics at play in our household and their impact on the child. To this day, it is the most common questions I get asked by people have to do with the management of the intersection of being kinky and parents: *How do you hide your marks from your child? Do you talk to the child about the nature of your relationship? How do you keep the child from hearing you scream? How does the power-dynamic influence the child? How do you balance parenting and your dynamic?*

The core of the answer to this question is ideological and it goes back to the shoes, which is unsurprising, if there was ever a symbol that accurately and completely captured the nature of my relationship with my spouse, it would have to be *the shoes*. As part of educating and raising a child, you aren't just responsible for maths and manners, you are always the source of the answers to questions about love and sex. Right off the bat, we took a very deliberate approach to this. Instead of teaching him sexuality via declaration of our identities, we started to teach him about sex and sexual relationships as a component of the world, not just the medical and the biological, but also the social, interpersonal, political and the individual. Perhaps even more importantly, we started to talk to him about love and (romantic) relationships very early. The fundamental thing we have always taught him is this — *People love in different ways and the freedom to express your love in ways that are true to you is its greatest pleasure. How you love is as unique and creative as any form of expression can get, so don't stifle it because people think it's wrong, so long as you respect the choices of your partners, you should love how you please.*

Several years after our first joint shoe-polishing session, the concept of it came up in conversation. He said something to the effect of other people potentially finding it weird that I polish the shoes of my partner.

"Do you find it weird?" I asked him.

"The first time, I think I did," he said to me, "But then, later I realised, like you said, people love in different ways and this is just..how you do it."

"Then why do you think people will find it weird?" I asked him.

"You know people, bro," he said, looking at me, half-exasperated by my question, "They will probably think abuse and because daddy is a man that he believes women should serve him and all."

I had never talked to him directly about BDSM, power-exchange or the social power-dynamics that can influence its image but I had also never hidden exactly who I am from him, and that, coupled with free-access to knowledge and information about the world made him capable of automatically recognising that the way we loved was perhaps not normative but it was ours, *and* that there may be some social stigma associated with it, nonetheless. This is the reality. I don't think kink is wrong but I live in a world where a lot of people may see it that way, I don't need to raise my child to believe in the absence of stigma, only for him to be able to evaluate information, assess it and recognise bias, right/wrong and moral-policing for himself. This was the first indication that he was able to do that. This is the ideological reality at the heart of how we educate and expose our child to the world, we don't hide the strange and unusual parts of it from him, but we don't necessarily conceptualize them into data either. I don't feel the need to tell him *I am* a masochist or that *we are* in a power-exchange relationship, but I feel the need for him to understand that people can have a vast array of sexualities or none at all.

It was kind of the same with polyamory. We didn't lay it on him as something he had to deal with as part of our relationship and we didn't expose him to other partners or our comings-and-goings until he was a lot older but the way we talked about love always included ethical non-monogamy as part of the conversation, not just the educational conversation but also who we are as people. A few weeks ago, he mentioned to me that when he was much younger, and his parents had just recently divorced, he harboured the fantasy that his parents will get back together and live together, as children in that position often do. He continued that I would, obviously, be there as well and we could all have just been one, big family together. When I asked how he knew I would be *okay* with that, he explained that he just felt like I would, like this idea that there could not be three people in a relationship would never be something that I actually considered. I had *never* talked to him about polyamory at that stage but children can intuitively recognise who you are as a person if you are *emotionally* honest with them. That's been at the heart of parenting for us, from the beginning.

But, of course, there is also privacy.

As a parent, I feel, I have a responsibility to educate the child in my care, but I don't think that necessarily includes befriending them in quite the same way as I do my *actual* friends. It is my job to teach him about things in the world but he doesn't need to know the details of my sexual relationship with his father. I talk about sex with parents but those conversations are not about how kinky I am or what exactly they like in bed and more importantly, they have changed a lot as I got older. We talk about the gender politics of pleasure and the impact of age on sexuality, and as he gets older, I would discuss those things with my kid (if he wanted to) but i don't feel the need to tell him what *I* do sexually. Obviously, over time, he has figured some things out for himself. For instance, my passion for pain is pervasive, it extends to how I view the world and what I consume in it. I will openly delight in having cramps, reading a sad book and talk about pain in over-the-top poetics because that is how I live and eventually, the second he learned the word *masochism*, he was able to immediately diagnose me as such. I said the word (in context to something I was reading), he asked what it meant, I told him.

"Oh, that's what you are!" He said, instantly.

I nodded my agreement and that was that. It wasn't new information, it was just a new word. I prefer it that way. Terminology is most beneficial after conceptual understanding has already been achieved. Of course, that doesn't mean that we didn't have to make an actual effort to adjust our power-dynamic in the beginning and as much as that was about him, it was also about self-discovery. For instance, I frequently talk about how domestic service (in the form of housework) was not something I was able to continue to solely do in front of him as part of my role in my relationship because I realised it was far more important to me to have him *see* that men in households are also responsible for domestic labour than it is to express my slavish desire in this form. Especially since, he had already demonstrated that he had been taught some gendered ideas on that front. I could have *explained* that the fact that I do the cooking and housework is a personal choice but I had that explained to me as a child too and it didn't quite mitigate the gendered-conditioning. We had to change our behaviour because we made a different choice about the behaviour we wanted to model that was best suited to the needs of the child before us and sometimes, you just have to do that. We changed the forms of service we enjoy in our relationship to things that were less gendered because our priorities were different.

As for marks and screams, that is a more complicated question, with a less clear answer. I *am* an accident-prone individual who is frequently bruised and hurting from how I live life in general, so when he was younger, any visible marks were very easily explained as *Ancilla being Ancilla*. I didn't even lie, I just re-purposed stories. For instance, once I had cuts all over my arms from some play, and a few years ago, I did actually get cuts all over my arms when I jumped into some brambles to get an adorable lil puppy out of there, so I would say things like that. This is a tough one for me. It feels personal enough that I don't want to tell him, nor really, anyone (except, you know, thousands of people on the internet but that is different) but I also don't like to lie. This is where privacy really comes in for me. Privacy is not just about having the space and boundaries to be able to do things in *secret*, it's also about being able to enforce what is appropriate and what really isn't. In general, I do not believe it is appropriate for people to point to a bruise on my thigh and ask questions about it and if they do, they have to be willing to accept the lack of an answer as an answer. It's hard to teach this to a child but my kid is a teenager now, and through the years, we have focused a lot on comprehensively approaching ideas of entitlement over the bodies of others. I have never told him that he is not entitled to asking me questions about my body, but the message has definitely become engrained.

The concern here arises if your child may suspect you are being abused (or are chronically ill in a way that shows up on your body visibly). He knows I am not sick and he knows I am not being abused. We have discussed to death the dynamics of abusive relationships, signs of issues in relationships and in many ways we model our relationship around him to be as honest as possible and that includes demonstrating how we handle conflict. I was terrified of my parents fighting because they got violent and involved me in their fights as a mediator. He does not have to experience this at all. He gets to see how to mature adults handle conflict without being scary to him or each other, which makes it easier for him to contextualise other aspects of our relationships. He can accept that I am bruised without worrying that someone is beating me in an abusive way. He doesn't need to know why he heard weird sounds coming from my bedroom, he just needs to know that sometimes people (which includes his parents) do private things that elicit weird sounds. Besides, i am the quietest masochist to ever have masochisted, which is ironic because as a person, I am ridiculously loud. I don't need a megaphone, I am one but not sexually, I am very quiet.

The point still is that it is possible to find a balance between thoroughly educating your child about alternative sexuality without compromising your privacy or oversharing your personal life. It just takes time and some intentionality. I am completely sure that a dozen well-intentioned high-dose conversations would not have accomplished what genuine honestly and continuous open dialogue can accomplish. The temptation to sit a child down and explain polyamory or kink could be high but I don't need him to bear my flags, if he feels the need to bear them for himself someday, that's great, if he recognises the right of people to sexpress themselves however they choose, that is wonderful and enough. It's important that he know me, and us, well enough to never discover things about us that *shock* him. If someone told him tomorrow that his parents were into BDSM, he would ask what that means and respond as he did when I said the word masochist.

"Oh that's what they do is called," he would say, "Cool, people love in different ways."

That's all I really want to accomplish. The rest, the little things, they're details you deal with as they come up, but at the heart of it, you have got to know what you are trying to accomplish. That's how you balance kink and parenting,

by knowing what that balance means to you.