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YIKES!! Can't imagine what her problem is, CAN YOU????

Two stories. First: There was for many years an annual New Year's get-together of old friends dating back to high school, plus spouses/kids/friends that were picked up along the way. At peak, 30 or so people would occupy a couple timeshare condos for 5 days after Christmas in various parts of the country. These are mostly fairly conservative folk, and I've never (knowingly) let most of them know our predilections. The day before 1999 started, several of us were sitting around a condo living room, perusing the timeshare catalogs for where we should go for the big end-of-century event. A couple people were advocating beach-based resorts, and a particular one was pointed out. One woman that I'd known almost 2 decades by then looked at the listing and said, "Oh, that one has a nude beach, and I just don't think we should associate with That Kind Of People." We stopped going to the New Year's get-togethers after that, due to both that particular comment and a couple others made within a day or so of that. No one actually called out anything they might have known about my and MrsVK's lives, but made it clear that our lives didn't intersect well with theirs. So when the pre-announcement about end-of-century planning was sent around the next October, and we didn't respond, the organizer (literally my oldest friend -- we've known each other since we were 4) wrote me privately to ask what was up. All I could do at that point was to say that it had become clear last time that we are all very different people than we were 20 years before, and I no longer felt very welcome. Second: A couple years later, my ex (divorced 10+ yrs) let her life fall down the crapper and we developed a custody issue because she literally wasn't caring for the kids. I finally felt the need to file a petition for outright change of custody. During the process leading up to the hearing, a guardian ad litem was assigned who had to interview everyone involved and render a recommendation. My brother contacted him, sent him a letter, in which he basically laid out every nasty (to him) thing that he'd ever known about me, including the preference to go nude, BDSM, the works. The guardian was legally obligated to share this with us, and with the court, but he told me that Ohio courts had worked for 25 years to avoid letting such personal crud be taken into account, and he was shocked that my own brother was trying to deprive me of my own kids. In court, when the guardian introduced it with me on the stand, he offered it in a way which overtly baited me into being able to dismiss it as irrelevant. He had let me know it was coming, and how he would present it. He was just fulfilling his legal duty. I just asked the judge if her kids knew anything about her sex life ("why, no...") and then said that my kids don't know squat about mine, either. We won -- what we had technically asked for was a mere inversion of "residential/non-residential" status, but the judge actually terminated the existing "shared parenting plan" outright and granted me sole, full custody. Brother and I haven't got a whole lot of relationship left. I tell people as I see fit and don't worry about it much. There is occasional fallout. But those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter. That includes family.

Resist the urge to be the director. Let things flow. Let them play without interference. I would have to say spanking/slapping/pinching/biting ... any kind of "rough" play without getting a kind of permission first.