All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 88: Demarcation

What makes someone a big girl?

That was the question I wrestled with for the first week of living with Lisa and her family.

If the criterion was being able to successfully use the toilet, as those ads on TV liked to remind parents and young kids, then it wasn't a label I deserved. Yes, I had followed through with my plan of wearing pull-ups during the day. Lisa still had plenty of the extra-absorbent ones in her closet.

That extra absorbency was very much needed. I didn't make a single successful trip to the toilet during my first day with the Higgins. I really was trying, but months of neglect had made my bladder almost impossible to manage.

On that first Monday, Mrs. Higgins stayed home with me while Lisa and her uncle went off to school each morning. I mostly stayed in the bedroom and played video games, and she gave me plenty of privacy, checking in once in a while to see if I wanted to come out to get anything to eat or drink.

But on Tuesday, it was time to talk with my therapist again.

Mrs. Higgins dropped me off at the hospital. I had finally gotten used to that maze of the building and was able to navigate to the therapist's office, even getting there a few minutes early.

We spent a lot of time talking about the ads for pull-ups that would show on TV, with the sing-song catchphrase that would accompany them: "I'm a big kid now."

The therapist told me about how she disliked the way that slogan was used for toilet training, and it was one she had worked hard to avoid using for her three young children. The problem, according to her, was that using shame to get a kid to use a toilet could often work, but if the kid failed to use the toilet for any reason at all, there was the risk of emotional damage with the additional stigma that had been attached to that failure.

Being a big kid, the therapist told me, isn't defined by what type of undergarments someone has on but by the maturity with which they handle themselves and the situations they find themselves in.

There were two sides of me that had merged — the need for protection and being treated like a baby. She told me that they didn't have to coexist. They weren't two sides of the same coin. Whatever was going on inside my body should have no impact on whether I could resume living a normal teenage life.

It wasn't the first time we'd gone through some variation of that conversation in the past week-and-a-half, but something about it clicked this time around.

Later that afternoon, after returning home from the appointment with the therapist. I made it to the toilet successfully for the first time since the day Mom had put me back into diapers. It was a tiny victory, but it told me all hope wasn't lost for my bladder.

That night, for the first time since moving in with Lisa, I didn't suck on my thumb as I drifted off to sleep.

The next day, I got some bad news from the doctor. The test results were in. They'd reached a conclusion about what might be causing my incontinence.

Mrs. Higgins took me to the hospital to meet with Jane in person. I allowed her to come to the appointment with me. She had been incredibly helpful with getting additional diapers and pull-ups ordered for me, including several sample packs to see if there were some options Lisa hadn't used that might fit better on me.

It had been one thing to discuss my incontinence with my friends and another to discuss it with medical professionals and therapists, but doing so with a parent figure and having it handled so matter-of-factly in a non-judgmental way was an incredibly comforting contrast to how Mom had spoken to me about my bladder issues.