The Forum - Vol. 207 - Chores, Sloppiness, Etc.

An exhaustive study of police records shows that no woman has ever shot her husband while he was doing the dishes. - Earl Wilson (1907-1987) US newspaper columnist

Hi all. Welcome back to The Forum. Our weekly gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, Domestic Discipline or Female Led Relationships.  I hope you had a great week.

Mine was more than a little unproductive.  Work wasn't very busy, which can be good every once in awhile, but there seems to be this near unbreakable pattern in which if I have 20 things on my to-do list I accomplish all 20, but if I have 2 then I don't get to either of them.  We also had a wave of colds and minor illnesses sweep through the family.  So, we are all feeling more than a little cranky, tired and, in my case, uninspired.  Which means there will be nothing particularly profound for this week.  Not that last week's was much better.  I had a lot of second thoughts about going down the "tell me your fantasies" road, particularly at a time in which one of my biggest blogging frustrations is the little pest who keeps farting at my blog with his repetitive "She spanked my bottom, and then she said something pithy about a wife spanking her husband, and then she made me face the wall, and then some of her friends dropped by and I was embarrassed and my bottom hurt." Over and over and over.  And, he's now leaving the same inane drivel on Kathy's Femdom 101 blog and KD's blog and Hermione's, using two or three different names, both male and female.  It's enough to make me want to remove all the links to other blogs, since the trolls seem to start here, then when I take down their content they follow the trail of links to pollute all the other blogs I like and respect.  But, in the end it didn't get out of hand and we did get a few thought-provoking threads going.

CrimsonKing brought up wanting to integrate Domestic Discipline into more of his everyday life and to help him meet goals, and also more naked chores now that he is in the process of becoming an empty-nester.  I have learned that given the Millennial generation's general co-dependence and lack of desire for anything resembling independence, empty-nester status is more a process than an actual binary change of life status.  But, I envy him his change and hope it does, in fact, allow his wife to take more control.  I share his desire for incorporating DD and FLR into my life on more of a 24/7 basis.  Part of that is about accountability and how lack of it has ripple effects.  We tend to focus on large-scale problems, like my ongoing issues with moderating social drinking, but like the transition to empty-nester status, discipline tends to be an ongoing process, not an event.  When I'm undisciplined and sloppy in small, everyday areas, that can't help but spill over into bigger things. It's kind of like the "broken windows" approach to policing, in which crime prevention focuses on things like petty vandalism and graffiti, because those petty crimes degrade the neighborhood and give people less of a sense that the rules matter. 

Do you get punished for day-to-day things like failing to do chores, or not doing them to her standards?  What kind of failings lead to that result?  Are the areas in which you fail things that are important to her, to you, or to both?

We have not incorporated this into our lifestyle in a major way, to some extent because of the empty-nester issue.  We are getting closer to that stage, but it's not there yet, and there still are more times than not that we have other people in the house.  But, I do think that once we really have the house to ourselves, things may change.  I've talked about this before, but one incident that has stuck in my mind for a very long time involved one of the few occasions when I've been punished for not doing chores.  We split household tasks pretty evenly, though we cover different things based largely on respective competence and interest.  For example, she manages the bank accounts and pays the bills.  I handle investments and retirement accounts.  Where meals are concerned, she shops and cooks, while I clean up.  Most of these divisions of labor are things we drifted into over time, as opposed to something more formally assigned.  But, when we started experimenting with broadening our DD relationship into something that empowered her with real Head of Household status, one aspect she took to like the proverbial duck to water was assigning me more chores.

One of my chores has always been doing the dishes.  While I almost always do them, I also have a tendency to get distracted and to leave a few aspects of the job uncompleted.  For some reason, I had a string of incidents in which I forgot to clean out a rice cooker.  The third time it happened, she texted a picture of the cooker with the rice still in it the next day, and expressed her dissatisfaction in no uncertain terms.  That night, I was sitting at the kitchen table doing some work, and she walked in from her office.

"You were supposed to sweep the floor this weekend, right?"

"Yes, and I did."

"That's 'Yes, Ma'am.," she snapped.

Pointing to some dog hair on the hardwood floors that I had missed, she demanded, "Does this look "swept" to you?"

"I'm sorry.  I will fix it tonight," I responded somewhat distractedly, as my attention was still kind of on what I had been working on.

"You also left the closet door open again this morning.  You know the cat goes in there and tears things up when you leave the door open." (I do, by the way, hate that damn cat.  I sometimes can't help but wish our dogs were meaner and would take her out, but they are cowards and scurry away whenever she strolls through the house.  While my wife may be a budding HoH, in truth its the cat that really holds that status.)

"Did I?  OK.  I'll make sure I don't do it again."

She was having none of this, and also getting more angry that I wasn't really paying attention.

"So, you did a half-ass job on the floors, you left the closet door open repeatedly after I told you not to, and then there is the damn rice cooker.  Shut down your computer, and go to the basement.  You are going to get spanked."

I didn't respond at first, as I was more than a little surprised and what had just happened hadn't quite registered yet.  This hadn't happened before.

"What are you waiting for?" she demanded.  "Get down there, get out the tools, and get your pants off.  You are getting spanked, and I mean now."

And, that's what she did.  I thought since these were fairly small matters, it might be a fairly light spanking.  No such luck.  She thoroughly blistered my ass with a combination of the strap, the paddle and the bath brush.  As I collected myself when it was over, there was a small part of me that resented getting such a hard spanking for such "small" things, but I also felt a new respect for her and the first glimmerings of that "healthy fear" I had said I wanted.  The resentment and the respect were strangely intertwined, because it was the fact that she had spanked for things that were important to her but not necessarily to me that led to the twinge of resentment, but it also gave me that "healthy dose of fear" that I think is necessary for the DD relationship to be real.  More than just about any spanking she had given me for "bigger" issues, that one showed that she was really starting to embrace her HoH role and moving from enforcing rules we had agreed on to imposing rules and assigning consequences regardless of my own views on the matter.

How does she let you know when you've left something undone or poorly done one time too many?  Do you find that being disciplined for smaller things helps you correct bigger behavior problems or meet bigger, more challenging goals?

I hope you have a great week.  Get those chores done!  And, as always, if you are new to this Forum, please stop by the Guestbook (tab above) and tell us a little about your DD or FLR lifestyle or aspirations.