All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 26: The Countdown

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

I stared anxiously at my watch as the seconds slowly passed by. Time passes slowest when you are most attentive to it, but the anticipation of this moment has left my brain too overwhelmed to concentrate on anything but the ever-changing numbers on my digital watch until the numbers transform themselves into a meaningless blur of color in front of my eyes.

I wanted nothing more than to put the misery and humiliation of this past week behind me. Since last Sunday evening, when a leaky pull-up had betrayed me in front of my sister, I'd been waiting for this moment. Mom had used that lone accident as an excuse to put me through this charade of re-potty-training, supposedly to set a good example for my younger sister, Emilia.

It was a stupid rule to make a teenager follow. After all, why in the world would a teenage girl not be toilet trained? Unbeknownst to my mom, my bladder problems extended far beyond that one daytime accident and the bedwetting that had followed closely behind it. I basically hadn't avoided wetting myself during the day since the beginning of the month.

Her solution – to put me back in pull-ups and parade me around the house in them – was nonsensical under normal circumstances. Given that I was actually experiencing bladder problems, something did need to be done to get that issue resolved, but I was determined to do that on my own terms, not hers.

I'd been pestering Mom all day about when I could stop wearing the pull-ups. She finally got annoyed enough that she had me set a timer on my watch counting down to the exact moment when I'll have gone a whole week without any bladder accidents, or, to put it more accurately, a whole week without Mom noticing any of my bladder accidents.

If she found out... No. I pushed that thought to the farther parts of my head. It didn't do me any good to dwell on what might happen if Mom discovered how I had been scheming to hide my bladder accidents from her. I simply had to focus on how to best conceal my accidents until I got to the point where I wasn't having them anymore.

Fifteen minutes left. I couldn't stand the suspense any longer. I left my bedroom to head over to the living room. Emilia was on the floor, playing with her dolls. She was fully dressed, meaning that she was wearing a diaper beneath her dress and tights. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, sucking on a pacifier with a sullen look in her eyes as she lackadaisically fiddled with her miniature dolls and all their various accessories.

There were times this past week where I had been so, so furious with her for how she had tattled on me to Mom about my accident without giving it a second thought. But after a week of having to endure my sister's potty-training regime was coming to a close, the awfulness of it had brought me a new sense of empathy for Emilia. Could it be that it might be easier to potty-train her if Mom wasn't being so strict? I tried not to dwell too long on such a heretical thought. Openly questioning any of Mom's rules was a recipe for disaster.

The only upside to the past week of potty-training was that Mom had relieved me from my normal duties of taking care of Emilia's diapers and toileting. I had rather hoped that I would have been given a permanent reprieve from those responsibilities, but that was apparently not to be. Mom had made herself abundantly clear earlier today that as soon as I was done with her potty-training that I was to be back in charge of taking care of my three-year-old sister.

Halloween might be less than a week away, but Mom's mind had already skipped several holidays ahead to Christmas. She had finished re-arranging the furniture in the living room to create space for the Christmas tree in the corner. You would think that someone with her level of enthusiasm — no, make that fanaticism — about Christmas would prefer to use a real, live, actual evergreen tree, but Mom still preferred the nine-foot tall artificial tree that, when assembled in our living room, nearly touched the ceiling.