The Club - Meeting 326 - Chores

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

Hello all. Welcome back to The Disciplinary Couple’s Club.  Our weekly on-line gathering of men and women who are in, or would like to be in, a Domestic Discipline relationship.  I hope you all had a great week.

The first full week of 2020 got off to a slow start for me in some ways, though it already yielded some big changes in other areas.  I may be proven dead wrong, but it just feels like 2020 is going to be a big deal kind of year, hopefully in a good way.  One good sign is that twelve days into the new year, I haven’t had any significant failure on the exercise, diet or personal behavior fronts.  My weight is inching down slowly but steadily, and my biggest challenge around exercise is I’ve had a couple of days where I was very tired, achy and my strength was down, indicating the real possibility there was some overtraining at work.  But, if twelve days into the new year my biggest problem is overtraining, I’ll take it.

Of course, the more things change the more they stay the same.  Last week ended with another little exchange with “Jack,” my most reliable yet least welcome regular commenter.  As I was preparing for this week’s post, I looked for past blog posts on the same topic.  The last one was back in 2017, and as I was re-reading it I found this that I had written about feeling qualms about introducing a topic the week before about fantasies:

  

“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.”

Big sigh.  It would be nice to have a troll-free 2020, but no way that is ever going to happen, especially if the posting is tolerated or encouraged elsewhere.  To me, that’s kind of like feeding seagulls at the beach – fine as long as you’re OK being mobbed by more squawking seagulls. But, it's ultimately each blogger's choice as to how much distraction and aesthetic distraction to allow on their blog. Jack was irked at me because I made a comment about one of his silly repetitive comments on Red's Consensual Spanking blog, but it was because I know Red has tried, repeatedly, to get Jack to stop posting there too. 

So, what is the topic I was looking for when I stumbled on the exchange about Jack from three years ago? I decided to go with “chores.”  I’m not sure why that topic was on my mind this week, but I suspect it is because I’ve been pretty well-behaved in my bigger ticket areas like drinking too much, temper, etc. When those issues aren’t drowning out everything else, my mind turns to more everyday, pedestrian areas for improvement.

I also think it has something to do with my renewed interest in exploring the FLR and dominance aspects of our relationship. While our approach to Domestic Discipline has focused from the beginning on punishing for significant behavioral lapses that we both agree are substantial problems, that approach is almost entirely reactive.  It’s all about punishing something after it has happened.  The same is somewhat true for chores, but I feel like punishing for those gives her more opportunities to flex her “Head of Household” muscles by setting expectations, monitoring and evaluating performance, and setting appropriate levels of punishment or consequences.

 

 There also an undeniably “parental” or “maternal” aspect to her having the authority to assign chores and enforce compliance.

I also do believe that encouraging a level of submission to authority and holding me accountable for small things has ripple effects, at least if done consistently.  When it comes to developing good habits, what you do every day is more impactful than what you do every once in a while even if the latter is bigger, weightier or harder.  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.

We have talked about incorporating a more rigorous approach to chores and punishment for not doing them, though we never seem to get into much of a groove.  That’s unfortunate, because I think it could be a game changer.  I've talked about this before, but one incident that has stuck in my mind for a very long time involved one of the occasions when I was punished, somewhat unexpectedly, for not doing chores.  Most of the time, 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 and do the dishes.  Most of the time. But, I also have a tendency to get distracted and to leave aspects of the job uncompleted.  I’ll load the dishwasher but leave a few items in the sink.  Or, I’ll do all the dishes but fail to wipe down the counters and clean the stove.

An ongoing problem was a string of incidents in which I forgot to clean a rice cooker. I just totally spaced it, and a few times she would find leftover rice in the cooker several days later.  The third time it happened, she texted a picture of the uncleaned cooker with rice still in it, expressing 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 and started pointing out other chores that had been done in a half-assed ways or lapses in attention that created problems.  Sweeping the floors but leaving tufts of dog hair in several places. Leaving the door to our bedroom closet open, which allowed a misbehaving pet to go in and pee on things. And then there was the chronic failure to really clean the kitchen after dinner without leaving things, like the rice cooker, undone or at best half-done.  She was having none of it.  "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."

And, that’s what happened.  I thought since these were fairly small matters, it might be a light spanking.  Nope.  She thoroughly blistered my ass with a combination of the strap, the paddle and the bath brush.  It was kind of like the story on the Disciplinary Wives Club website written by our Al, in which a husband asks to try a “real” disciplinary spanking, he and his wife agree that leaving the toilet seat up will be something that earns a spanking, he immediately leaves it up then tries to talk his way out of getting his first spanking. His wife carries through with a very harsh spanking, which on the surface might have seemed like more than such a small offense merited, but it got the message across and helped him understand what it was he was asking for.

In my case, as I collected myself after it was over, there was a small part that resented getting such a hard spanking for such "small" things, which really boiled down to simple forgetfulness and not paying attention, but I also felt a new respect for her and the first glimmerings of that "healthy fear" I had told her I wanted.   

The resentment and the respect were 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 was what made the exercise of authority real. More than just about any spanking she had given me for "bigger" issues, where we both agreed they merited not only spankings but very hard ones, getting spanked so hard for a poorly done chore was a powerful experience that showed her really stepping into her role.

Do chores play a role in your Domestic Discipline relationship?  Who assigns them?  What chores is the disciplined husband required to perform?  What are the consequences for not doing them or doing them poorly?

Ladies, do you assign chores to your husband?  If not, would you like to?  If you do, is there any protocol or standard you apply to inspecting his work and deciding whether it is sufficient?  If he doesn’t do a chore or does it poorly, how consistent are you in dealing with that?  What are the consequences?  A lecture?  A spanking?  Some other form of punishment?

I hope you have a great week.  Get those chores done!