The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers

Chapter 8: Elementary

Six years ago

The concept of bedwetting wasn't something that had ever crossed my mind as a young kid. I had been dry at night nearly immediately after being toilet trained during the day. There wasn't a distinction between being potty trained during the day or potty trained during the night. If someone was potty trained, that meant that they never wet their pants at all. Period.

That changed when I learned my sister was a bedwetter.

In retrospect, the signs of Grace's bedwetting were practically everywhere.

But when I was six years old, the idea of my older sister peeing in her sleep was so completely inconceivable that I would never have entertained it. All the indicators that Grace was a bedwetter went completely over my head. And, looking back at it, there were many.

While the washing machine and dryer were inaudible from all the way up in my bedroom, the kitchen was close enough to the basement staircase that the rumbling sounds from either machine could be heard every morning during breakfast.

The distant sound of laundry tumbling in the dryer was a consistent part of the background noise in the house as I ate my regular breakfast of cereal. But I didn't think anything of it as I munched on my Captain Crunch pieces. I was more concerned with making sure I ate them before they got soggy than anything else that was going on around me.

Besides, I hadn't known a time when the dryer wasn't turned on around the time that I was eating breakfast, so I paid it no more heed than to the sound of Dad watching the morning news in the other room or Mom scurrying about the kitchen, prepping our lunches to take to school.

A family of four shouldn't produce so much laundry that the dryer would need to be run every day. But that wasn't something I'd have considered at that age.

The dryer simply ran nearly every morning, and that was that.

If I had paid attention, I would have been tipped off by the times Grace had tip-toed past me while carrying a bundle of freshly cleaned bedding.

But even when I did notice, I didn't think much of it. Laundry was just one of my sister's chores at the time, and chores were a topic I didn't want any more familiarity with.

Chores were a concept my parents had introduced to me last year, complete with a magnet chart on the fridge for documenting my progress toward earning various rewards. For me, that meant making sure all my toys were put away each evening, making my bed in the morning, and other random age-appropriate tasks around the house.

And then there was the question of pajamas.

Grace usually showered and changed first thing in the morning, so I didn't often see her in her pajamas after I had gotten out of bed myself, but there were times when she was wearing a different set of pajamas than what I had seen her in when she had been brushing her teeth in the bathroom the night before.

I certainly noticed, but it would never have occurred to me that she would have changed pajamas because she had peed on her first pair of them. I just figured she must have gotten uncomfortable in the middle of the night.

Then, there was the fact that my sister never had any sleepovers. My first sleepover actually came before she had a chance to do one.

My first sleepover had come a week into the summer after graduating from kindergarten when I'd had Emma sleepover at my house for the first time. It was another few years before Angie's parents would allow her to join in on our sleepovers.

Looking back on it, the fact that Grace hadn't complained at all about not going on sleepovers when I was allowed to have one was another sign that she had been perfectly comfortable avoiding spending the night with friends, likely out of fear of her bedwetting being discovered.