The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers

Chapter 4: Point of No Return

Past the point of no return

The final threshold

What warm, unspoken secrets will we learn

Beyond the point of no return?

The music Mom played in the car always had to be educational. She had been a theater actress until Grace was born, when she'd traded that for the stability of a tedious office job. Even after all these years, she still had a thing for musicals.

We'd been listening to The Phantom of the Opera on car rides for the past week and a half. It had been a desperate effort to keep Mom from singing along to the lyrics while my friends were in the car. It was one of her favorites; Mom had parts in the musical as a high school student and later as a professional actress.

Thank goodness the musical was nearing an end. But that raised the uneasy question of what Mom would have us listening to next.

Grace and Jackson had the two bucket seats in the middle row of the van, while I sat between Emma and Angie in the back row on the way home from the soccer game.

There were few things capable of fully distracting me from my years-long quest to get my hands on pull-ups or diapers, but soccer was one of them. And our season wasn't over yet. Emma had scored the winning goal with five minutes remaining, heading the ball into the net after I lofted a pass into the penalty box.

Mom was driving us home so that Dad could put in an order for pizza. Dad leaned over to tilt his head and look at us from the front passenger seat. "We need to figure out what kind of pizza to order."

That led to an immediate clammer of responses. I wasn't particular about my toppings. But my siblings and friends all had strong preferences.

"Hold up," Dad said. "One at a time. Tell me what you'd like when I say your name."

After getting each of our answers, Dad determined that we'd need cheese, pepperoni, and BBQ chicken pizzas to have something that would be suitable for everyone's palates. He placed a delivery order on his phone. The pizzas would arrive ten minutes or so after we made it home.

We pulled into the driveway. The ignition was turned off. The music came to an abrupt end just as the chorus was repeating.

Past the point of no return.

My efforts at being hydrated for tonight had continued throughout the soccer game. Playing midfield was hard work, so I didn't have any difficulty going through a couple of bottles of water.

This would be it, though. Once I began to wet the bed, there would be no going back to the way things were before. There would be no hiding that I was wearing pull-ups. Not from Mom and Dad. Most likely not from my sister. I felt confident I could keep my secret from Jackson. And there was absolutely no way I was going to allow my friends or anyone at school to discover it.

Could I live with that? Could I live with my parents and sister, thinking I was a bedwetter? Was that a fair price to pay for finally getting what I had been seeking for three years?

I tried to push those worries to the side. My sister had been a bedwetter, and she had turned out completely fine. Pretending to be one couldn't result in things going any worse for me. Besides, once I was old enough to be able to get pull-ups on my own. I could slowly stop wetting the bed, pretending that I had grown out of the issue.

I made my decision. I unscrewed the lid to the half-full bottle of blue Gatorade sitting in my lap and drank another few ounces. If the amount of liquids I'd been drinking so far this afternoon and evening had stood out to anyone as odd, no one said anything about it to me.