All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 13: Sleepover Part 1 - The Bedwetter

The first thing I did when I got to Samantha's house was to make sure I knew where all the bathrooms were.

That might seem as if it would be a simple task, but Samantha's maze of a house was massive. I'd only been there a couple of times before, so I wasn't too familiar with the layout, but it had four bathrooms. Four. It was hard to imagine compared to the single-bathroom house my mom, sister, and I lived in. Given the likelihood that I'd use each bathroom at least once before tomorrow morning, I made sure I knew exactly where each one was.

I took a bathroom break as soon as I arrived at the house. My bladder had gotten close to bursting on the car ride over. Since I'd be staying the night this time around, Samantha gave me the whole tour. They had four bedrooms and two bathrooms alone on the second floor of the house, which I hadn't been to before. That meant that Samantha along with her younger siblings – Tommy and Lilian – each had their own bedrooms. So unfair. I was jealous. However, we'd be spending most of the night in the basement game room with a massive TV and big, comfy couches to lounge on.

We sat down on some waist-high stools around the island piece in the kitchen and snacked on some potato chips while trading gossip about how the week had gone. I'd been to Samantha's house before, but this time just felt so different. The fact that I was really able to stay here all night hadn't sunk in yet.

I watched Lilian run by the kitchen toward the bathroom with a bit of jealousy. The toddler was six months younger than Emilia, and she'd already been potty trained for nearly a year. I wish it could have been that easy with my younger sister. How could Lilian get potty trained so fast when it was such a struggle for Emilia?

Samantha had noticed me watching her younger sister. I'd complained enough about Emilia's potty-training woes that Samantha managed to guess what I was thinking about.

"Still having trouble with Emilia?" Samantha asked.

"Yep, I'm stuck on diaper and pull-up changing duty twenty-four-seven. I'm glad to finally get a break from it today."

"Gross," Samantha said, but her expression of curiosity didn't match what she was saying.

If anything, she was quite interested in the status of Emilia's potty-training. I was just happy to have someone to vent to.

"It wasn't too bad. She's at least gotten the hang of doing number two in the toilet, so I don't have many messy cleanups to do. Still, she won't stop wetting herself, even with taking her to the toilet every thirty minutes."

I neglected to mention how Mom had been forcing Emilia to wear diapers as a punishment. I didn't want to admit that the potty training had been going that badly.

"How old is she again?" Samantha asked.

"Three-and-a-half. So six months older than Lilian."

"They should meet sometimes. I bet they could become best friends. Just like us."

"That might be good. I would just hope that Lilian's potty-training skills might rub off on Emilia."

"Does Emilia still even fit in pull-ups with how old she is now?"

I had to suppress a laugh at that question. If only she knew that I could even squeeze into the pull-ups without much of an issue.

"Not yet. She's in the biggest size of the pull-ups we use during the day and the diapers we use at night."

This discussion about potty training made me realized I hadn't told my friends about the pull-up I had found in the high school bathroom stall. Two weeks ago, before any of my wetting accidents had started, and I had begun wearing my sister's pull-ups, I would have considered that a juicy bit of gossip to share, and no doubt we would have spent a bunch of time speculating about who the pull-up might have belonged to, but now I hesitated to share the story, even though this was an otherwise perfect time to bring it up. If I had my friends looking intentionally for signs that someone was wearing a pull-up, that might inadvertently lead them in my direction.