All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 53: Black Friday

For the first time in a while, I awoke to my alarm clock, which I shut off before it could wake my sister or mom.

The blue dashes on the clock interface indicated it was four in the morning. I wasn't sure why I had agreed to go Black Friday shopping with my friends. I was exhausted despite taking a shower and going to bed two hours earlier than normal last night.

Ever since my bedwetting had restarted, my morning routine had been Mom waking me up to change me out of my inevitably wet diaper. Her hand rubbing my back or shoulder had been my alarm clock.

Not this morning. Mom had me set my alarm clock before going to bed, so I could be up on time for when my friends were over to pick me up. I didn't think this was an act of charity on Mom's part. She probably just didn't want to be forced to get out of bed this early in the morning.

I looked over at the crib. Emilia appeared sound asleep beneath her blankets. I didn't understand how she had managed to stop bedwetting at her age with how deeply she slept. I also didn't hear any sounds coming from outside the bedroom in the hallway. I likely hadn't woken Mom up either.

I removed my pajama shorts to reveal a soaked diaper. That was no surprise. Despite my attempts to limit my liquids in the evening, my bedwetting continued without any changes.

The diaper and a half-dozen wet wipes made their way to the trash as I cleaned myself up. That left me with an important decision to make. One that needed to happen soon, as Samantha's mom was supposed to pick me up in about ten minutes.

I remembered how bad the lines had been at the mall when we had gone shopping on Black Friday last year. Like our plans for this morning, we had arrived a couple hours before the opening in order to secure good spots at the front of the line.

Even back then, before my bladder problems had begun, it was a difficult wait. A realistic assessment of my current condition was that there was no way I was going to survive the line without needing to pee at least once, if not several times.

Earlier this week, I had taken Lisa's advice when I went to restock on pull-ups. I grabbed two packages of the ones I had tried that evening at the sleepover, getting some in both the peach and black designs, though I made sure to bike to a different store so as not to run into Claire again. The soft pull-ups were more absorbent than the kid's ones I had worn for bedwetting, but I still didn't have the confidence in them yet to push their limits with how long we'd be waiting in line.

The amount of absorbency I needed was something only a diaper could provide.

And conveniently for me, there were dozens of diapers stacked in my closet. The only question was whether Mom would notice any of them missing. I figured taking a single diaper could be done without her noticing. I didn't think she was keeping track of them that closely. The worst-case scenario would be having to make up a story about how I broke her rules and changed myself at night. I'd get punished for that, but it seemed a reasonable risk to take.

I had to be certain that Emilia wasn't going to tattle on me for taking the diaper. I walked over to the crib, not quietly, but not intentionally making noise either, and gave her a couple of gentle nudges. My three-year-old sister didn't respond at all, further proof that she was completely out of it.

The next question was what I was going to wear with the diaper. I needed something that would both conceal the outline of the diaper and cover up any crinkling sounds. None of my jeans were likely to fit over it, and I didn't have any dresses I felt like wearing to the mall. That left leggings as an option, though I would need to figure out how to hide the outline of the diaper so that nothing would show through the leggings.