All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 9: That Bully

I started the school day with a clear plan of action on how to avoid any further accidents.

Having been working to potty train Emilia for the past year-and-a-half, I had a pretty good sense of all the different strategies and techniques for getting someone to relieve themselves on a toilet rather than in their pants. I didn't really want to think of what I was trying to do with myself as potty-training – that term just felt demeaning when used with someone older than a toddler – but that was technically what I was trying to accomplish. I also didn't really want to think about the fact that my potty-training attempts with Emilia had been, well, rather less than successful.

While the day began with apprehension over wearing a pull-up to school, I had grown more confident in my plan once I realized that everyone around me was completely and fully oblivious to the fact that I was wearing it. My racing heart calmed down and in my mind I was again going through the plan I had formulated for the day and the rules of my own that I intended to follow.

First, I was going to use the bathroom on a set schedule. I didn't have a potty-training watch, like the one Emilia wears that reminds her to go to the bathroom every thirty minutes. However, my class schedule was a good enough substitute.

As much as I might like to go to the bathroom after every fifty-minute class period, I didn't care for the considerable attention that would draw from my friends. I needed to get back to the point where holding off on going to the toilet wasn't going to be a big deal. If I could try and use the bathroom at the start of school and then after every other period, that gives me enough bathroom breaks without appearing that something was off. I might break that schedule in an emergency, but I was going to do my best to follow it. I was not going to allow myself to use a hall pass to leave class early to go to the bathroom, either.

Next, I needed to control what I drank. I still had to stay hydrated, especially with cheerleading, but drinking too much at any one time would be bad. That meant I instead needed to drink lots of small amounts of water throughout the day, so I could be hydrated without overwhelming my bladder all at once.

The last part of the plan was the one I was most uncomfortable about. That's the pull-up I was wearing. After the trio of accidents and many other close calls over the past two days, I couldn't risk anyone noticing if I did have an accident, especially at school.

However, I was not going to use the pull-ups on purpose again. Once was more than enough. The purpose of wearing the pull-up was that it gave me leeway to try to hold my bladder during class without running off to the bathroom, since if I didn't succeed the pull-up would conceal my accident.

I began my plan with a stop at the bathroom before the start of our first class. Samantha, who was stuck as being one of the first students picked up by the bus, also needed to go to the bathroom, and Desi, who didn't need to go, hobbled to the bathroom with her crutches in an act of solidarity. I managed to get a decent amount of pee out, which made my odds of surviving until second period was over without an accident rather promising.

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So far so good. Until today, the phrase "relieving yourself" had never quite made sense to me, but as I sat on the toilet following the end of fourth period, relief was a fully accurate description of how I was feeling.

It was strange, sitting in the bathroom stall, using the toilet while staring down into the pull-up hanging between my legs. I'd tucked it down into my jeans, since I didn't even want to chance that someone might get a glimpse of my pull-up through the gap between the wall and the bathroom stall door.

The interior padding of the pull-up remained white. I'd not even let a drop of pee escape my bladder so far during the first half of the school day. Had I not been wearing the pull-up, I'd probably have used the hall pass at least twice already, having lost confidence in my bladder's abilities to make it through to the end of a class.