All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 33: What a Mess

With the covers tugged off and tossed into a pile near the baseboard of the bed, I adjusted my position so Mom could slide a changing pad beneath me. I pulled my feet in closer so that my toes were rested on the bed rather than dangling off and my knees were pointed upward in the air.

With the resumption of my bedwetting, the alarm clock I had once relied on to wake me up on time — a task it had never failed to do — was now never turned on. Mom was my alarm clock. The gentle nudge of her hand against my shoulder a replacement for that awful, annoying buzzing. And she was just as punctual.

I struggled at that thought of how easily I had adapted to these changes in my life. Waking up to the feeling of a squishy diaper strapped around my waist and stuck beneath my legs. The ease with which I allowed Mom to change me. She had stopped checking to see if my nighttime diaper was wet, getting started with changing me under the assumption that I had failed to retain all the liquid in my bladder over the course of the night. Her assumptions about that were correct. The nighttime situation with my bladder had devolved to the point where I was waking up wet each morning without fail. Almost a week had passed since I had woken in the middle of the night with my bladder urging me to go sit on the toilet.

There are moments when you wake up and realize something is off. You have that leftover feeling of anxiety or nervousness that you were unable to shake off with a full night of sleep. I rubbed my eyes as Mom began removing the four diaper tapes one by one, each coming off with a loud ripping sound. Despite having been put to bed early, I remained groggy, and I couldn't quite put a finger on what exactly it was that I was supposed to be unhappy about. I knew I would eventually remember. And I knew I would likely be even unhappier when I did.

The diaper was eventually removed, and I readied myself for the pull-up Mom was about to put on me. I wish I was allowed to do that myself. Only, it wasn't a pull-up Mom was putting on me. It was a diaper, and I instantly remembered the source of my morning angst.

I fought against the urge to resist the diaper change. I wanted to kick Mom's hands away, grab the diaper, rip it up, and toss it in the corner of the room. That would do me no good. I knew that, too, but thinking about it made it easy to get through the diapering procedure.

The second factor that helped me keep restrained was the realization that I bore a decent amount of fault for this situation. No, I wasn't assigning any internal blame for having wet myself. The randomness of the accidents indicated that they were far outside my control. I did, however, blame myself for a factor that was completely within my control: how I had failed to hide my accidents from Mom.

So, I let the diaper change go by without any attempts to bring it to a halt, lifting my bottom at the right time, even holding the font of the diaper in place so Mom could get the tapes into a better position. It was just one day. I could suck it up and deal with it. I'd usually done a good job hiding my accidents and if I could manage to learn from the few mistakes I've made in recent weeks, I'd be able to exfiltrate myself from the web of these potty-training rules, especially if this laxative was anything close to the miracle cure I hoped that it will be.

My first mistake had been yesterday morning, when I had wet my pants outside the bathroom door while Mom was taking a bath. I had been wearing panties at the time, because Mom had put those on me after changing me out of the nighttime diaper. I should have been wearing one of Emilia's pull-ups as a precaution, but I hadn't managed to change into one of them yet that early in the morning because Emilia was nearly awake in her crib in the bedroom. I needed to keep more of her pull-ups in my backpack so I could have another way to access them and not get stuck wearing panties during an accident.

My second mistake had been much simpler, and I remained rather annoyed at myself for having made it. In my rush to get to Mom's car while leaving Lisa's house yesterday evening, I had failed to use the bathroom, despite the fact that I was about to go on a half-hour long car ride. Had I avoided just one of those accidents, I wouldn't be in the mess I was in right now. Mom would have put a pull-up on me and I could have worked toward another seven consecutive days of hiding my daytime accidents from her.