The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers

Chapter 19: Not a Baby

Three Years Ago

I didn't let my failure to find pull-ups in my sister's bedroom deter me. I scoured the rest of the house. Jackson's bedroom seemed like a promising Plan B, but there were no pull-ups or even baby diapers to be found in there either. The same held true for the rest of the house.

But just because I didn't find any diapers didn't mean that there weren't other discoveries that were made.

The basement was the final frontier of my search for diapers or pull-ups. It was where things that were no longer needed were tucked away forever, or at least until Mom decided it was time to pull them out for a garage sale or donate them to a thrift store.

I had to tug hard at one of the doors in the closet that ran the length of the shortest wall in the unfinished area of the basement that was adjacent to the laundry room.

The door finally opened with a rather large bang. I hoped that no one upstairs wondered what I was doing. It was Saturday afternoon, so everyone was home. It would perhaps have been wiser to hold off on the search until Monday, when it would just be Grace and me at home during the summer while our parents were off at work and Jackson was attending preschool.

But I simply couldn't bear to wait any longer. I was so convinced that there had to be diapers or pull-ups somewhere in the house. The fact that I hadn't found them yet just had to mean that I hadn't looked in the right places.

But this first section of the closet didn't yield the results I had been hoping for. There were a bunch of storage boxes, but the contents of the clear plastic bins were obvious. It was just a bunch of Christmas decorations, ornaments, lights, and an artificial Christmas tree that would need to be painfully reassembled next year.

The door shut with a firm click. That was OK. There were still four more sections of the closet left for me to check. The next two were also disappointing, especially as they all contained cardboard boxes that I had to drag out and open before determining that the contents – old keepsakes, games, clothes, and other odds and ends – were not what I was looking for.

My anticipation was turning to despair as I approached the second-to-last closet door.

I tugged open the door. And there it was. For a moment, I thought I had hit the mother of all jackpots.

The cardboard box of pull-ups was sitting at eye level with me on the shelf. I would have preferred to have discovered a box of my sister's old pull-ups, but at this point, I was simply elated to have found anything at all.

It didn't matter one bit that they were pull-ups meant for boys. I was so eager to finally try one on that I was willing to overlook that detail.

I pulled the box out of the closet and set it down carefully on the floor. I paused before opening it, listening for any sounds of movement upstairs. But no one was walking around at all, and there were definitely no sounds of anyone heading toward the stairs that led down to the basement.

I was relieved that the cardboard diaper box wasn't taped up. All I had to do to open it was to unfold the top of it. My hands were shaking as I reached down and pulled the cardboard flaps on top of the box apart.

But it wasn't diapers that I found inside.

Instead, it was an assortment of all the baby items that my brother had outgrown. There were bibs, bottles, pacifiers, an old diaper bag, tiny baby utensils, and sippy cups.

I closed my eyes and groaned. I had been so close. I hurriedly opened the last remaining closet door. Nothing. Just more clear plastic bins that very obviously did not contain any diapers or pull-ups.