All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 67: No Letting Up

I extracted every last drop of liquid that I could from the baby bottle, sucking on it as hard as I could, not because I was still thirsty, but because Mom wasn't going to remove the rubber tip from my lips until the bottle was completely empty.

Mom had switched to having me drink baby formula instead of warmed-up milk. It was sweet and creamy. I had to admit that it did taste better than the milk, at least when it was either warm or cold, but not when it was at room temperature—another incentive for drinking it quickly.

"All done, such a good job," Mom said, as she used a small cloth towel to wipe my face dry of some formula that hadn't quite made its way into my mouth.

This was the morning routine Mom had settled in for me the past week. At least, I think it had been a week. It was getting hard to keep track of which day it was now. Mornings would begin with a diaper change in bed, followed by being fed in the highchair, which Emilia often assisted with. After that, Mom would have me come with her to the couch, where I would lie in her lap and attempt to drink a bottle of warm baby formula as fast as possible.

Each time I had attempted to hold my bladder in until the feeding was finished. I had only succeeded in that once so far. Mom never changed me out of my pajamas until after breakfast was finished, which today meant that I was only wearing a short nightgown to go with the diaper.

But even outside of bottle feedings, it was getting harder and harder to find the motivation to even try to hold in my bladder. It didn't help that the diaper was so much more absorbent than a pull-up that if I did have any small accidents, I was completely unaware that they had happened.

"Looks like someone went pee pee in her diaper," Mom said. She gave my exposed diaper a completely unnecessary squeeze with her hand. Even with how I was lying down, I could clearly see that the diaper was wet.

"Shall we go get your diapie changed?" Mom asked.

I was spared the indignity of needing to respond. The question was clearly rhetorical as Mom had just replaced the bottle with a pacifier.

There were few circumstances where it was more difficult for me to try to hold in my bladder. Something about sucking the warm liquid out of the bottle made it more difficult for me to focus on holding my bladder in. My goal had been for my diaper to still be dry by the time the feeding was over, but as was obvious to Mom, that had not been the case.

Mom had as much time off from work for Christmas as I did from school, so there hadn't been any question of what would happen to my babying should she need to go into the office. Emilia was also on break from going to her preschool classes. There were times when she had delighted in taking on the role of older sister in Mom's seemingly endless punishment of me, but Emilia was still a few months from turning four, and her attention span was short enough that she was easily distracted from that task.

Endless was the right description for how long Mom was keeping me in this punishment. I knew it would have been foolish to expect it to have gone on for only a day, like the previous times Mom had disciplined me for having multiple accidents in a day, but I had expected something like three or four days at the most. It was now only three days before Christmas and Mom had shown no sign of relenting.

One of the most important things not to do in the middle of one of Mom's punishments was to ask her how much longer it was going to continue. I couldn't recall a single instance where that question had ever been answered to my satisfaction. Any sign of impatience was only going to result in Mom deciding that I needed more time to learn whatever lesson she was attempting to impart.

The rare occasions where I had been successful in getting Mom to change her mind had always been ones where I had definitive proof that I was in the right, and even then, the topic had to be approached delicately.