Bella's Accidents

A Desperate Hour

The last evening of summer before the start of eighth grade had come, and Bella's excitement about starting a new school year was mixed with a mingled sense of shame and uncertainty that she had never felt before. Ever since she could remember, she had prided herself on her independence and maturity for her age, but over the course of the summer this keystone of her identity had eroded almost completely. Her nightly bedwetting and her daytime accident in front of her cousins the previous week on vacation had broken her self-confidence into a million pieces, and she had now idea how to put it back together again.

After they had gotten back home from Hawaii, her mom had sat Bella down and told her how proud she was of her, how impressed she was at the way Bella was dealing with all of this, how she was sure that this was just a phase that would pass as quickly as it had come – but her encouragement did little to lift Bella's spirits.

When the morning of her first day of school came, she performed her usual morning routine. Stripping off her pajamas, turning on the shower, and discarding her wet pull-up into the special, airtight container which now stood in the corner of the upstairs bathroom, she looked morosely at her reflection. She had a pretty face; dark, keen eyes; smooth, warm, olive-colored skin; and lustrous, black, shoulder-length hair. She was skinny, slightly shorter than average for her age, and had hardly begun to develop the telltale characteristics of womanhood. Her physical appearance had never bothered her until recently, but now it struck her as childish and unattractive. I bet my parents never thought they'd have a diaper bin in their bathroom for their thirteen year old daughter, she thought silently as the steam swirled around her. I bet they wish they had adopted a different baby instead.

***

The first ten weeks of school wore slowly by. Bella was interested in her classes for the most part, getting top grades, had a circle of friends whose company she enjoyed, and yet was as unhappy as she had ever been. As she sat in class and looked around at her peers, she often found herself thinking unhappily, I bet none of them have to wear diapers to bed at night. I bet none of them pooped their pants in front of their cousins this summer... If Bella had been disabled or developmentally impaired it would have been one thing, but she wasn't. She was an otherwise normal thirteen year old girl – she had no excuse! 

On the weekends, when she wasn't busy doing homework, she spent most of her time up in her room reading. As much as she would love to have accepted invites to slumber parties with her friends, she knew that she couldn't. They wouldn't want to be friends with me if they knew I had to wear a pull-up to avoid soaking their bedroom floor at night. She had almost accepted an invitation on a couple of occasions when her desire to be included had come close to overwhelming her fear of humiliation. She was confident that she could change secretly in the bathroom and wear baggy pajamas under which the shape of her nighttime underwear would scarcely be detectible, but there just didn't seem to be an easy way in which to dispose of them in the morning. 

It wasn't as though she could just casually toss a used pull-up into her friend's trash bin. Even if none of her friends noticed it there, lying conspicuously atop the bits of wasted food and other ordinary household detritus, the parents whose house it was surely would. Although, Bella supposed, if there were several girls present, then no one would know for sure who had discarded it there... Still, there was far too much potential for something to go wrong. In any case, it was usually more or less the same core group of girls that congregated for sleepovers on weekends – if Bella's first appearance in months happened to coincide with the first appearance of a diaper in someone's bin in the morning, the correlation would point towards a fairly inescapable conclusion.

Bella had therefore continued to decline her friends' persistent invitations, usually pretending that she was grounded and forbidden to go out except to attend school and piano lessons. When mid-November rolled around, her nighttime issue having shown no sign of letting up, Bella began to dread the fast-approaching Thanksgiving break. Ordinarily it was something she would have looked forward to, but this year the prospect of seeing the relatives on her dad's side of the family filled her with shameful memories of the previous summer.