I am going to start filtering some of my more private musings. Since blogger does not have a tool for that, you will need to visit my Live Journal and ask to be friended there. I will continue to post Daily Gratitude and other subjects here. There is also a FAQ for my Journal at the same link.
| Tuesday, June 24, 2003 @ 07:36 For the past few weeks I've been dreading one event. In the end, it wasn't as traumatic as I feared, but it wasn't good. My boy is undergoing a wellness checkup with her new doctor. As part of the various tests required, she needs a chest x-ray before her followup visit with the doc. We quickly realized that in order for this to happen, I would have to remove the collar when I left for work in the morning so that she could go to the clinic during the day. The collar does not slip over her head and she does not have access to the key. It's a chain collar and a metal lock that hangs low enough to interfere with an x-ray of the torso or head. While it was good that we realized this before she went in for the test - saving her the embarrassment of explaining to the technician that, no, she doesn't have the key and would have to come back another day -- we had to live with the knowledge that there would be an entire day when she was without the physical collar. We reassured ourselves that it didn't matter: the chain is a symbol of her surrender and my ownership. The first few days after she surrendered to me, she did not wear a collar. However, the chain has been locked on her neck for almost a year without once being removed. We weren't sure how we'd each handle this change. I figured out I could put something else of mine on her so that even with the collar removed, she'd still be marked. Since there wasn't time for a tattoo or piercing (the piercing we're planning would have interefered too), I settled for crocheting a simple wrist band. Yarn doesn't register on x-rays and I crocheted the chain onto her wrist rather than tying it with a knot. Yes, yarn is easier to cut off than chain, but the fact that I made this band and wove it onto her wrist made it more symbolic than the alternatives. The wrist band went on before the collar came off, so she was not without some physical reminder of my ownership. Her neck looked very wrong and she reported that it felt very odd all day. Unfortunately, due to a mistake in timing with the clinic, she did not get the x-ray yesterday and will have to go in today. So the collar went back on last night (otherwise neither of us would have been able to sleep!) and will come off again in about 20 mins when I head out for work. With any luck, it won't be as traumatic as yesterday, but is that a good thing? I'm struggling a bit with this in my head. I've always believed that a collar is a representation of a dynamic. The dynamic itself exists with or without a physical symbol. However, as out as my boy is, we've had the luxury of being able to leave the collar on at all times -- work, visits with family, swimming, doctor's exams that don't involve radiation. I intentionally made the collar long enough to hang under most shirts, but short enough that it can't slip over the head. Still, unless it's a turtle neck or other tight-collared shirt, it is visible as chain, and sometimes as locked and tagged. I enjoy that knowledge and have incorporated it into myself. Yesterday, I learned how the absence of that certainty feels and I didn't like it, though I respected the necessity.
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