All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 39: What I Deserve

There is a moment that comes when you first wake up. The type that happens after you've had a long night's worth of sleep following an exhausting day. A moment of bliss before your cognitive gears begin to fully turn. You're happy and content beneath your warm covers. Everything is right in the world. Then a deep fog rolls in and settles across your mind. Something is wrong. Very wrong. Something that would mean your current happiness is nothing but an illusion waiting to be shattered. But in this moment, you can't quite put a finger on what the wrongness is. Its elusive name escapes your grasp.

I felt the clammy wetness of the diaper I had worn to bed. Yes, that was wrong. A 15-year-old girl shouldn't be wearing a diaper to bed, let alone wake up with it completely soaked. But that wasn't the wrongness that had invaded my momentary waking bliss. Against my best efforts, I had become accustomed to the wrongness of the feeling of a wet morning diaper, and I had gotten past getting shocked or upset by my nightly bedwetting.

No, the wrongness was something entirely different. And sheer terror set in as I went in an instant from having no clue about the horror in store for me later today to knowing exactly what was going to happen. I was going to have to wear a diaper to school.

I was such an idiot for getting myself into this predicament. Yes, the vast majority of accidents I'd been having day and night the past couple of months were not my fault. But with Emilia's potty-training basically complete – the laxative had worked wonders with her while leaving me to continue helplessly pissing myself at random – I had no source of toddler pull-ups that I could discreetly use at school to hide my accidents.

My solution to that problem had been to wet myself on purpose. I've made some dumb decisions in the past few months, but that easily trumps all of them.

One was indeed the magic number. Because according to my mom's strict potty-training rules, which she insisted had to apply equally to myself as well as my 3-and-a-half-year-old sister, any time you had two accidents in a single day meant you had to take a break from toilet training and spend the next day in diapers.

The first intentional accident – if the words intentional and accident can be used conjointly – wasn't the problem. That got me put back into pull-ups, which would spare me the shame of openly wetting myself at school. It was the real accident I had later yesterday evening that was the source of the current stress that was just now wracking every single nerve in my body.

I took a momentary pause from my fretting to turn and glance at the alarm clock. I still had nearly an hour before Mom would be in the room to wake me. Lately, mornings had sucked even more than usual, as Emilia could scarcely contain her excitement at waking up dry, which she had done all but one time since the experiment with the laxatives.

Emilia wasn't intentionally malicious – that really isn't something that can be fairly attributed to a preschooler – but with our potty-training statuses headed in different directions at a rapid speed, any reminder of just how I had fallen was increasingly painful.

Back to the task at hand. I had an hour left until Mom would come in to change me and help get me ready for school, and way more than an hour's worth of worrying to do.

I had to convince Mom to let me not wear a diaper to school. I simply had to. I couldn't recall a single time I had ever successfully convinced Mom to relent on one of her potty-training rules, but if there was ever one instance where I needed to succeed, this time had to be it.

What would convince her? I could argue about the unfairness of it. But who am I kidding? Mom's idea of fairness is that rules be followed to the letter of the law and that they be applied equally to either of her children. I would have no luck arguing that a pre-described punishment was unfair in a situation where there wasn't any question of whether I had broken the rules. Especially given the countless times Emilia had been made to go back to diapers during her year-long potty-training saga.