EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever stopped to think about yourself and your story? If someone were to write your memoir what would it say? We all seek some level of authenticity but have trouble removing the labels and finding our whole story. Welcome to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. In this program we’ll explore diverse stories on identity to help determine what is truly yours. Now here is your host Diane Dewey.

 

Diane: Thank you for dropping in. welcome to the show everyone. I’m Diane Dewey and I know that busy schedules get in the way of meeting folks we want to meet. Dropping In is a lost art. When I was a kid my parents would sometimes go over to the neighbor’s house or vice versa just dropping in on them or we’d be hanging out and somebody would knock on the door and right away it was a fun surprise. Where I live now on the gulf coast of Florida I sometimes don’t see our neighbor friends. Our digital lives haven’t made it easier instead it’s more complicated. It’s time to drop in and see what folks are up to.

 

We’ll do a deep dive into the subject at hand. We’re dropping in to find out what makes our guests tick artists, musicians and writers who’ve discovered how to make a statement usually one that goes against the grain. Making a contribution to the world is tough. It’s a tough goal but there are people who’ve come at it usually the hard way and won. We will listen to their diverse stories about identity. Identity can refer to biological, nurtured, gender, cultural, racial and spiritual and other labels we assign ourselves insider, outsider, hipster, square or nerd. Sometimes the I in identity gets lost. Everyone wants to become our authentic selves despite the odds against it. We each have a context whether it’s in the family of origin, an adoptive family or a marriage. That makes maintaining identity the call to rediscover and reclaim who we are that much more challenging.

 

For me the call came when at 47 years old I got a letter from my Swiss biological father. Having always known I was adopted from the German orphanage at age one I faced his question. Would I like to meet him? I would I said and why did I agree to that? Maybe I was filling a void. My beloved adopted father had just died six months before. I’d ended a long-term romantic relationship with a man who just drove me crazy. I was ready for a new anchor and that letter started me on a 16-year journey of learning my roots and discovering a new identity.

 

I visited Switzerland with my biological father and went cross-country skiing in the Engadin Valley. He had done 18 ski marathons. I was petrified but I told myself I could keep up. Maybe it was to please him. The Engadin is a special place, very raw, very rural and remote where the old language Romansch is still spoken. It’s almost extinct. This struck me as being like I was far, far away from who I had become as an art gallery assistant in New York. My biological identity had been obscured but back there in my father’s homeland I had aha moments. Why had I gone to Vermont years before and become a cross-country skier? Had my genetic coding been in spooling all along? What else would I learn about myself that had been hidden?

 

Otto and I visited my biological mother’s family in northern Germany. Helena had passed away before I could meet her but the family showed me pictures in an old musty smelling leather album. In the photos Helena wore outfits that she’d sewn herself. I thought back to my teenage years when I told my adoptive mother that I had to have sewing lessons in order to make the kinds of clothes I wanted. It was another uncanny connection with biological identity but that’s not all. Her siblings had kept Helena’s baby spoon, pearl earrings and grandmother’s ring for me and while I didn’t have her through these talismans I felt I had found her love.

 

When I asked her siblings what made them think they’d ever meet me. They said we just knew. They didn’t question their intuition. It was something I’d have to reconnect with. Faith in what I knew that if I were to find inner guidance and stay true to my identity I’d need to accept my intuition. I felt like I’d won the lottery with this loving biological family. I knew many others didn’t get this chance. Even though it would be years before I pieced together what really happened to put me in that orphanage I had gained juice, strength and validation to move forward. Through meeting biological family I realized that love is the strongest force in the universe. People across the globe will find one another especially now with the advent of DNA kits.

 

I’ve also learned that the truth has a special force all its own. It will prevail over deception. Faith that the truth would come out gave me trust in the world, a world that had been uncertain. I’d been told by my adoptive parents that my biological family were dead. Finding this truth is the subject of my book called Fixing the Fates. My identity was formed by parts of all of these people, biological and adopted but I also became aware that I was a person I had created myself. I had to ask who did I imagine myself to be. After I sift through and locate myself who I am is who I designate myself to be, the labels I attach myself to.

 

We are always becoming. Part of this process is to look beyond a traumatic past and push through self-limiting beliefs and often to do a reality check on self-love where every dream is attainable. My job is to resist the traps of magical thinking either too positive or too negative. Part of my arsenal in this fight was knowledge. With a Master of Science and mental health counselling I’ve tried to unravel my story. I help writers get to where they want to go with their manuscripts and my strength is in analyzing the intention and execution to see if these two match up in their story. I investigate the writer’s goals and look at how language carries that out or doesn’t just yet.

 

Writing takes shape in the editing. I’ve crossed out and replaced all the way along and then I had a year’s plus worth of content and copy editing. Reviewing text to make it as real as life itself is an irresistible obsession for me. At True Nord Media I’m aided by two ace editors one from the world of journalism and one from corporate public relations. You’ll find their input indispensable. To light the way forward towards publishing we have an on-staff book agent. My fellow writers work forms, shared truths that we want to polish and tell through story.

 

I come out of the art world in New York where for much of the 1990s I worked for the Guggenheim Museum. It was a place of great visual beauty. The visual arts relate to how you set a scene in creative writing. It’s the revelation of the senses sight, smell, sound and touch that brings the scene alive. Since we live through our physical bodies and feel our instincts there. It’s key to listen when the stomach goes into knots or our breathing gets shallow or our eyes are squinting. Maybe we can’t adjust what’s happening or relax enough to breathe or there’s some, this doesn’t add up.

 

Writing is a way to access what’s happening with ourselves. We make sense of our own thoughts and emotions through words laid down side by side like bricks. There’s both left brain logic and insight and if we can name the emotion the right side brain forms a whole. That’s what I’ve done in Fixing the Fates which readers tell me reads like a page turning novel. I hope that you too will find the inspiration to define or redefine yourselves from dropping in. we’re stopping by to talk, to take a deep dive into a subject while we skip the small talk.

 

We’ll meet a musician who’s written a Grammy award-winning song when before his dyslexia delayed even his reading. We’ll hear from a best-selling writer who didn’t believe in his own strength until he found it through bodybuilding, violence and sometimes sentence building finally. We’ll talk to an intellectual who’s discovered that her elderly mother found her own truth sexually in the role of a dominatrix. An author who did things she swore she’d never do traveling in an RV for example. Now she lives full time on the road enjoying wanderlust. An American living in Qatar who woke up one day to find that the rug had been pulled out and she was no longer that person, that wife.

 

An individual who became a humanitarian when her father then governor of a southern state represented all that was evil in racism. Gender questioning persons for whom birthright is a starting point for the conscious choice of deciding who they are. Important truths about identities worm their way out. By listening to others get a foothold on who they are and learn about their process is to become more ourselves. I hope you’ll take away clues for how to do this at home. You may find the person you’ve always known and imagined yourself to be.

 

Dropping In guests are people like you and me who have shown the world what it means to be an individual to sift through, create, discard or reclaim and to listen to their intuition not always easy with all the noise of our busy lives, our yapping brains, our self-judgments and censorship. Somehow I never thought I’d have much to say. I wasn’t empowered but others who had more confidence encouraged me that everyone knows a unique truth. Now we’re empowered to tell our diverse stories about identity. Authors, writers, musicians and artists have been my teachers at how to arrive at a place that’s aware centered and even brave especially when the facts around me were collapsing. Their creativity is contagious. When we listen to their stories it’s easier to recreate ourselves the way we had intended. We may have gotten derailed by something shiny, hooked on a glamorous detour or focused on something that turned out to be false.

 

These distractions are not failures. They’re proof that we’re growing. Jim Carrey said that depression occurs when your avatar no longer identifies with who you’re trying to be. The psyche knows what’s real and what’s not. Its signal is whatever becomes vibrant to you an inexplicable affinity with African drums, an ethnic tile, textile or a poem. We construct identity constantly through an organic process of binge and purge.

 

At Dropping In we’ll explore diverse stories on identity. What makes people unique? We’re done with shoehorning ourselves into preconceived notions of who we should be being told who we are. We’re going to take a short break now but by listening to others talk about our own paths ours can become less fearful. you’ll get the answers you seek and even the questions you want to avoid when we return today’s guest is Elizabeth Anne Wood, a noted scholar who discovered that her elderly mother found her own true truth sexually in the role of a dom. you won’t want to miss this. We’ll be right back.

 

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

 

If you are a pet owner you know there’s a special connection between us and our pets. They are part of the family. The owners of special breeds also understand the important roles they play. Tune in for Greyhounds Make Great Pets to find out more about one special breed. Hosted by Rory and Kathy Goree along with TJ Beader will focus on greyhounds but will also cover topics that apply to any pet owner like animal welfare issues, racing and more. Listen live Fridays at 10 AM Pacific Time, 1 PM Eastern on Voice America Variety.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: And we’re back. Today we’re dropping in with Elizabeth Anne Wood, author of the book Bound, a memoir of a daughter, a dom and an end of life story. It’s a beautiful book sensitively told and very, very enlightening about a lifestyle we may not know much about. I’ve called today’s show Bound and Bonded for the love of this daughter and her mother. You can reach Elizabeth and buy her book on elizabethannewood.com. Welcome Elizabeth. Nice to have you with us today.

 

Elizabeth: Thanks. Good morning Diane. It’s nice to be here.

 

Diane: Great I know that the question probably an uppermost in everyone’s mind. What was it like to discover bondage equipment under your mother’s bed. This is not something that we ordinarily experience. Although you’re well-versed through being an award-winning professor of sociology at Nassau County Community College and also a senior strategist with the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. I’m just going to give you this intro here. The nation’s only human rights organization working full-time to protect sexual freedom as a fundamental human right.

 

Clearly you earned your PhD having written your dissertation about gender, sexuality and society which you’ve written about ever since. Thank goodness. I just want to say you’re more than qualified and well-versed to experience what you did. I guess I’d just love to know both your reactions but also whether or not this population, this demographic of BDSM individuals faces a human rights threat in terms of protecting their sexual freedom. What are your thoughts?

 

Elizabeth: Well there’s an awful lot packed into that question. Let me start by just saying that I discovered my mother’s sexuality not because I came across bondage equipment under her bed but because she told me about it. She called me up one day and there’s a story I tell in the memoir about her calling to say she was very excited. Did you know that you could get paid to hurt men and you don’t even have to have sex with them? She was excited because she had these really terrible relationships with men earlier in her life and she wasn’t feeling very fond of men but yet as a straight woman wanted intimacy and wanted connection.

 

She discovered dominatrix ads in a copy editing job interview she had gone to. She called me very excited to ask me if I knew about this. I did and I gave her a book about BDSM. She as far as I know didn’t act on it for a few years and then she called up again because she was on an online bondage dating service. She wanted help with her profile. I knew about her sexuality before I encountered it face to face through the sex toys in her apartment but many people don’t know about their parents’ sexuality. They do encounter that moment where perhaps after a parent has died or when they’re sick they discover the vibrator in the drawer by the bed or they discover the handcuffs tucked into the night table.

 

These can be really disruptive moments for a person because as you were talking about identity in your intro we have ideas about what our parents’ identities are. Those stories we grow up with and we learn and we think about as real don’t always represent the whole person that is this parent in our life. I was really lucky to know about my mother’s sexuality through her telling of it instead of discovering it after I could no longer talk about it with her.

 

The second part of your question about rights and about sexual freedom for people involved in BDSM is a really serious one because there are threats to people’s freedom when they practice a kind of sexuality that is not mainstream. For instance there have been cases where after a divorce, one parent has been threatened with the loss of custody because of the kind of sexuality they practice or where people have lost jobs because their sexuality has become known. That is certainly true for people who practice BDSM. There’s a lot of stigma around non-mainstream sexuality even in a society like ours where we see sex around us all the time in the media. It is a very serious issue and I’m glad you raised it.

 

Diane: I thought it was something that had to come out front and center because for one thing I don’t think people realize it and secondly as you just pointed out is the impact can be tremendous on one’s life. I knew of course from your book that you received the news from your mother conversationally or it evolved in a very organic way conversationally I guess I still was back on the mental picture of you entering the apartment. There was a scene where you entered the apartment and actually saw things for the first time.

 

I do think that has a different reverberation but I must say what you just told us really echoes so true to me because I tried to look up for example BDSM to research our talk and learned that Dr. Ruth for example, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the mainstream sexologist. You can approach Dr. Ruth with any kind of question you want about sex but not pedophilia and not BDSM. Right away I thought to myself holy cow. One is a non-consensual violation at a very profound level of the right for physical safety of a child. The other is a consensual sexual relationship. I wondered how did we get to this point where these are so mixed up and lumped together. What are your thoughts on that?

 

Elizabeth: That’s a really good question. I think because BDSM to people who don’t practice it can look like violence and because the idea of consenting to violence simply doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. It’s hard for non-practitioners to understand that this is in fact consensual sexual expression. For instance if you’ve been working for a long time on issues of intimate partner violence, domestic violence and then somebody comes to you and tells you that they really enjoy being tied up and flogged by their partner. It could be hard to get your head around that. It’s really important for people to be able to make the distinction between consensual sexual expression including BDSM and non-consensual interactional violence which is very different.

 

One of the things that I think people could benefit from learning quite a bit about is that consent, the negotiation of explicit consent in BDSM relationships is often much healthier than the vaguely pseudo negotiation of consent that many of us experience in our ordinary everyday sex lives because BDSM is built on negotiation and consent from the start kind of from the ground up. It actually can be a model. It’s unfortunate that Dr. Ruth doesn’t see it that way. I was unaware of that. I didn’t know that she wouldn’t answer questions about BDSM.

 

Diane: Well I was struck by it clearly. Your book really has gone a long way to opening my eyes to something that I think is stigmatized. I also relate very much to what you just said in the sense of explicit trust building because I also had a look at Camp Crucible. It’s a website that you acknowledge your mother partook in this event. I again came away feeling contrary to what I guess we just absorbed through our very judgmental cultures that there is so much respect. There is so much explicit boundary setting in the BDSM behavior and at this camp the mission is to educate people how to gain the skill sets, to gain the articulation as well as the physical skill sets to enter into this world safely, compassionately, mutually. I thought that your book, it truly humanized the experience. I wondered if that was part of the reason that your mother encouraged you to write the book.

 

Elizabeth: I think so. My mother wrote on her own also about her BDSM experience and her coming of age sexually in her late 50s and 60s. She wrote a few online columns about that before she got very sick. One of the reasons she wanted to do that was because she wanted other women particularly older women to know that there were avenues for pleasure and desire that they might not have considered. It might in fact be more fulfilling than the ones that they had been assuming as natural for most of their lives. She definitely encouraged me to write the book and partly because she wanted her story told and partly because she wanted to expand the space for other people to experience their own freedom.

 

Diane: I wonder about the point, counterpoint to her having had some very passive and uneven relation, unfulfilling relationships with men and also a sense that in your early life because you delved into your mother’s substance abuse with alcohol early on and that she really did kind of form dependencies before, she was sober for I think at least 20 years before she evolved and discovered this website that you mentioned. I wonder about this transition, this transformation from a relatively powerless person into what’s like kind of a cipher for gaining one’s sense of self and agency. Do you see that equating in your mother’s life and can that happen for individuals even now that women are say more liberated or how does it really work now do you think?

 

Elizabeth: One of the most remarkable things to me as her daughter watching this story unfold was that she did in fact become a very powerful woman. I grew up thinking of her as a very wounded person, a person who needed a lot of help. She got sober in her 30s. She was sober for about 30 years after that but that wasn’t the end of her dependency. She and I had a very codependent relationship for the whole of my growing up really. It took a lot of therapy for me in my 20s to develop a better relationship with her. I shouldn’t say a better relationship but a relationship that was healthier for me with her and to establish clearer boundaries and things like that.

 

Even in her late 50s and 60s when she was practicing BDSM in her relationships with my sister and I she often seemed needy and dependent. It was wonderful to see her have this space in her life where she held the power and she was in control and she felt strong and competent. I wondered several times and I wonder in the book. I reflect on this throughout the book how it was that she could be so needy in some ways and so strong in others but that she had that space was really kind of a profound thing to see and to

To be able to conceive of her as a person with that kind of power and control was really wonderful. It was a real gift.

 

In fact I think in the show notes you quote a passage where I mentioned that being party to her sexuality was not awkward or embarrassing. It was a celebration and that was a celebration in part because she had this pleasure but also in part because she finally had a place in her life where she was strong and in control. I’m sure that’s not unique to her. I’m sure that many women can have that kind of experience. Likewise it’s worth saying that that some of the men that she encountered were men who had a lot of power and control in their lives and they were looking for spaces to give it up. They were looking for spaces where they didn’t have to be in control all the time.

 

Diane: This is an exchange, an exchange of energy, exchange of roles. I think that it’s great that you brought up the sense of vicarious pleasure in her liberation because you talk about witnessing her development as a dom had been liberating. You took pleasure in her pleasure. It hadn’t been an imposition. It’s been a liberation. I think that here’s a way that we can actually gain a lot of intimacy at least we all have dualities. Maybe some of them are not quite as profound. Maybe the dichotomies are not quite as stretched but I mean I think here you had a chance to really know your mother’s inner life and that was also a gift. Absolutely, it’s really very tender.

 

We’re going to take a short break again. I’m sorry to interrupt this conversation but when we come back we’re going to take a look at some of your abilities to understand this from an intellectual point of view as well as personal. Don’t go away.

 

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

 

Have you ever experienced the joy of living not just aspects of your life but the true joy of life itself? Barry Shaw has. You could call him an ambassador of joy. From a successful entrepreneur to becoming a quadriplegic due to a rare disease to his ongoing recovery through swimming and physical rehabilitation Barry now presents his gifts to others as host of the joy of living. All you need to do is tune in, listen live every Tuesday at 10 AM Pacific Time and 1 PM Eastern on the Voice America Variety Channel.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: And we’re back with Elizabeth Anne Wood. Dr. Wood has been teaching at Nassau County College in Garden City New York. She is a doctorate from Brandeis University and she has written critically about gender sexuality and society. Welcome back Elizabeth Wood. It’s delightful to talk to you. I think it feels as though we think of ourselves as being so liberal and yet prevailing misconceptions around the subject of BDSM still exist. I wonder how you address that in your studies and in your teaching and in your awareness building.

 

Elizabeth: In a bunch of ways I suppose. I mean going all the way back to my dissertation research which was on power and interaction in strip clubs not particularly BDSM related but another area where there’s a lot of misunderstanding about people’s agency and power to look at the ways that when men are tipping or when women are dancing those were the kinds of clubs I was studying. The interaction is not one directional. That it isn’t as stereotyped as it’s often made out to be. All the way through writing and talking about decriminalization of prostitution and talking in the classroom about issues of sexual violence and consent and identity building and gender expression to the work I did with my mother on a personal level. It’s part of my life talking about these issues and thinking about them seriously is just part of what I do every day.

 

Diane: I think that and that is to me a wonderful contribution. I think that back to when you were discussing the topic of explicit trust and how in a BDSM relationship for example there is so much more communication and intentionality about what will transpire in that exchange. It makes it seem at some level I have also worked with people, women in the decriminalization of prostitution it makes it seem somehow more humane than the process of being a sex worker and the sort of relative anonymity or distance that occurs and yet we have so much judgment around these areas.

 

I’ve read your book Bound with mesmerizing attention because it’s so compelling to finally get a human story about someone living this lifestyle. I’m wondering how writing the book has impacted your life in any way for you.

 

Elizabeth: Well that’s a hard question to answer. It’s had so much impact in my life. First of all I guess the writing of it was a process in a way of healing from her illness and her death. She and I had talked when she was sick about a book I might write about her experience, about our relationship, about being an older woman and having this kind of unconventional sex life, about having an unconventional sex life while you’re sick. Those kinds of things seemed intellectually interesting to both of us and personally interesting to both of us but after she died there was this wave, like a tidal wave of grief that I had to process. It took about a year before I started writing but part of the writing process for me really has been about healing and putting, grief is a very chaotic experience and writing can be a way of putting order around that chaotic experience.

 

It had effects like that still echo through my life. It also has had the effect of opening up a lot of conversations. One of the things I was not really thinking about when I was writing was what would it feel like to have colleagues read this book. When I was writing the book of course I had ideas that it would be published, that it would be out there, people would buy it and read it but I never thought about what it would feel like for people that I work with, people who may not have known all of these corners of my life to suddenly read it.

 

I didn’t think about that until it was already in the printing process. I was asked on an earlier podcast whether I had ever wondered about what that would be like. It was the first time I had really thought about it and the book was just coming out. I thought wow, this is awfully late to be considering this question but it’s been a really positive experience. I’ve had several colleagues read it now. There is a lot of my own deeply emotional personal experience. Some of it not very flattering that is revealed, that I tell in the book. People have overwhelmingly responded to that with generosity, with opening up conversations that they’ve been curious about but not had with other people. On a professional level it’s had that kind of impact.

 

Then it’s also allowed me to have a way to talk to people like you and people I had never met before, your listeners, listeners on other podcasts, people in bookstores about why it’s so important to think about sexuality as we age and why it’s so important to think about sexuality and conversations about it in the context of mother-daughter relationships or in the context of healthcare relationships. It’s had an enormous number of impacts in all kinds of ways. It’s been a wonderful experience.

 

Diane: I think that it’s opened up so many avenues. In reading the book too the other touching aspect of it is that a partner and several of them actually of your mother in her BDSM relationships actually tended to your mother when she became sick as did you and became kind of partners in her caregiving which I just found that just not only enormously touching but somehow with our very clichéd minds somehow unexpected. It wasn’t just sex. It wasn’t just about the sex.

 

Elizabeth: No, in fact one of the things that really moved me was the relationship she had with a person that I call Kenny in the book. Kenny was an incredibly special lover in her life at the end of her life particularly. They only met less than a year before she died. Kenny’s devotion to her at first puzzled me when she was sick it puzzled me at first because she obviously couldn’t be very dominant in her illness. The more I watched their relationship and the more I watched the way he cared for her the more I realized that his devotion was in a sense a form of submission to her. The kinds of things he was able to do for her I think it puzzled him that I couldn’t do those things. He would make her root beer floats out of chocolate ice cream that he got from the hospital cafe and diet coke or diet root beer that he scrounged up from the corner store because that’s what she wanted.

 

He did that out of this kind of loving devotion and submission that I couldn’t possibly feel. As the daughter who had grown up with her and had had this experience of her passive aggressiveness and her codependence I was always struggling with my own feelings of occasional resentment about her needing something or wanting something. I tell a story in the book about how I would create a ritual before I left where I would put all her things that she needed in a particular order around her so she could reach them. I would get to the door. I would take off my infection control gown. I’d put on my backpack and just at that point she would say oh, wait. She wanted one more thing. I thought I had thought of everything but I hadn’t.

 

Frequently instead of realizing that really what she wanted was just a few more minutes of connection. What I would feel is how could you possibly still need something. I’ve done everything I can do for you but Kenny would never have responded that way. First of all Kenny would arrive and he would stay straight through the day, the night, the next day, the next night until he left on the train again at the end of the weekend but it wouldn’t even have occurred to him to feel like her demands were anything other than this sign of her dominance and his life and that his fulfilling them with anything other than his love and his submission. his relationship with her really helped me understand some of the nuances of power and submission and also some of the real differences between the kind of love that a daughter might have for a mother and the kind of love that a partner can have. It was really wonderful to watch.

 

Diane: It’s very endearing and I think that Kenny’s devotion clearly came from conscious choice. Those of us that have mother-daughter relationships that is all of us. The DNA of those relationships can be imperfect. I think you talk about this very eloquently in a kind of an analogy with Buffy. It’s sort of, it’s an analogy the show no matter what I’m always Buffy, the chosen one. I alone can save my mother from disaster. At least that’s how it feels.

 

Like any daughter you had put an enormous onus on yourself whereas with her partner this devotion would be a conscious kind of willingness. It’s just told so endearingly in the book.  I just want one more passage that I can because I loved also the fact that you interject humor.

 

Elizabeth: Thank you. There was a lot of funniness in this story.

 

Diane: Now she’s got the equipment. The routine disarray of her apartment and to all the accumulated bondage equipment and sex toys my mother added catheters, machines and miles of tubing. She wasn’t even shy about her dialysis machine with a tube draining into the bathtub when she had overnight guests. Sex often involves dealing with bodily fluids one way or another and she saw these as no different. I mean this is incredible.

 

Elizabeth: That was definitely true. I mean one of the things that was so sweet about my mother is that she saw, she really did see very little difference between the kinds of things one had to deal with her dialysis and the kinds of things one might deal with sex. In fact in the way that she practiced her sex life many of the kinds of equipment were the same. In addition to her just having very porous boundaries as a human being to start with the boundaries between medical care and sexuality ended up blurring quite a lot too in some kind of funny ways. That’s a sweet passage. Thanks for reading that.

 

Diane: No, I loved it but this kind of reduction to of sex to bodily fluids. I’m sorry. There’s something to that and I think that you pointed that out in a very enlightening way like can we kind of get over it. It’s part of our beings. I think that also was very healthy.

 

I’d like to just touch on what’s happened to you, your evolution which I also admire. You’ve talked about end of life and the quality of end of life and how it is impacted by sexuality because whether or not you can express your sexuality whether it’s unconventional or not and some people can’t find it conventionally and so what happens to them at the end of life. You’ve taken on some serious, the two things that we can’t talk plainly about are sex and death. Now you’ve been blogging in this week in the wake of Kobe Bryant’s death. You write there are no perfect victims and none of this is equal to the worst thing we’ve done. I just wonder what’s the evolution for you Dr. Wood as you move forward through these extraordinarily sensitive subjects.

 

Elizabeth: Well one of the things I’ve become really committed to is the idea that we need to be better at talking to health care providers about our sexuality and our family members about our sexuality for exactly the reason that you’re highlighting in that passage that you were looking at because without openness around these things we’re going to find ourselves facing death with the potential loss of a very important part of our lives and ourselves. That’s an incredible injustice. That is a commitment that I definitely feel much stronger about since the writing of the book and since watching what my mother went through.

 

I mean it was an incredible gift that she got to have Kenny there with her so much of the time and that wouldn’t have been the case in many families. Had she had to spend more of her time in rehab facilities it wouldn’t have been the case for her even with family support because many kinds of rehab facilities are not set up for overnight guests. They don’t approve of sexual relationships all the time. Family members can be a big part of that so I feel really strongly committed to working on those issues.

 

The passage you read about Kobe Bryant I feel like that’s a very different set of issues but also one I’m very committed to. That has more to do with the way that as a society we tend to particularly after people die, we tend to either make them angels or demons and mostly we make them angels. When we do that we can’t possibly reflect honestly on their lives and it makes it harder for us to reflect on the lives of the people that we still live with. That is I think a really important theme to continue talking about.

 

Diane: It’s huge and it’s seminal and I’m so glad that you’ve taken it on. We’ve just got a brief moment left. I just want to tell you that your resolution and healing through this book that you’ve shared it is so wonderful. I want to thank you very much for being our guest today Elizabeth Anne Wood, author of Bound.

 

Elizabeth: You’re welcome. It’s been my pleasure.

 

Diane: Thanks so much. Be well.

 

Elizabeth: Thank you.

 

Thank you so much for dropping in. please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.