Mommies and Daddies

I’m curious to see where the stories going

It usually takes them 1-3 months between chapters if we judge on their other stories

Friends- Bette Midler 

Thank you to everyone liking or commenting on the chapters so far. All feedback is greatly appreciated, and it motivates me to write new stories in the future. Chapter 6 — Rules of the House The warm night I had invented to explain the first damp patch lasted exactly until the night it became a soaked sheet, which was four days later, and which I could not explain to anyone, least of all myself. I woke at a little after three with the specific full-body wrongness that every parent knows from the other side, from the small visitor at the bedside, and that I had not felt from the inside since I was a boy. Cold. Wet. Not a patch. A spread, beneath me, gone clammy, the sheet soaked through to the mattress protector that Ellen, I would later learn, had quietly put on the bed some days before without telling me, because Ellen prepares the ground before the weather arrives. I lay in it for a moment in the dark, in the disbelief, and then I did what you do, which is the cold furtive choreography of the middle of the night. I slid out without waking her. I stripped my side of the bed by feel and by the landing light, the bottom sheet, my underwear, the lot, and I bundled it all into the wash and ran the machine on a whisper, and I stood in the dark utility room at half past three in the morning watching my own bedding go round and feeling about as far from a competent grown man as it is possible to feel. I told myself, again, the things. A one-off. The decaf. A heavy sleep. I made up the bed again on my side with fresh sheets from the airing cupboard, where the exiled guest towels now lived, and I got back in beside Ellen, who had not stirred, or had appeared not to stir, and I lay awake until the alarm. Three nights later it happened again. This time there was no telling myself anything. This time I woke, cold, and lay there, and did the arithmetic I had been refusing, and the arithmetic came out the way it had been going to come out since the first damp patch, since the cabinet, since the two packs cheaper by two. I did not even strip the bed straight away. I lay in it, which I am not proud of, defeated in a way the daytime accidents had never quite managed, because there is something about the night, about being unconscious for it, about your own sleeping body simply deciding without you, that takes a particular toll. In the day I could at least pretend I had been busy, absorbed, caught out. At night I had been doing nothing at all but sleeping, and it had still happened, and you cannot negotiate with a thing that comes for you while you sleep. Beside me, in the dark, Ellen's voice said, perfectly clear, not the voice of a woman just woken: "Get up. Have a shower, you'll feel better. I'll do the bed." She had been awake. I do not know for how long. I have never asked. I showered, because she had told me to and because I could not think of an alternative, and when I came back the bed was already stripped and remade with the brisk hospital corners she has never once in thirty years failed to produce, and the wet things were gone, and Ellen was sitting up against the headboard in her dressing gown with her arms folded, waiting for me, awake and entirely herself at four in the morning, which no one should be. "Sit down," she said, and I sat on the edge of the bed. "It was a one-off," I said, and even I could hear that the words had no power left in them, worn smooth as old coins. "It was the second one this week." She did not say it unkindly. She said it the way she says the things that are simply true. "I changed the sheets on Tuesday too, Mark. I know you did the wash yourself and thought I hadn't noticed. I notice. I've told you. I will always notice." She let that sit. "So. We're not doing this. We're not having you stripping the bed in the dark twice a week and lying to me about it at breakfast and both of us pretending. You sleep like the dead, you always have, it's one of the things I married you for, I can read in bed with the light on and you don't stir. That's a gift most nights. It is not a gift now. Your body is going to keep doing this while you sleep, because that is what the doctor told us it does, and I am not buying a new mattress every time, and I am not having you exhausted and ashamed at half past three in the morning twice a week all the rest of this winter. There's a simpler answer and it's in the cabinet and you know it is." "Ellen." "It's in the cabinet," she said. "I bought it weeks ago. You watched me put it there. We've been walking around it for a fortnight like it's a hole in the floor. It's not a hole in the floor. It's a sensible thing that sensible people use, and tonight it would have meant you were asleep right now instead of sitting on the edge of the bed at four in the morning with wet hair, looking like that." I did not say anything. There was nothing to say that the two soaked beds had not already said for me. She got up, and went to the cabinet, and I heard the rustle of the packet being opened for the first time, the cellophane, the particular sound of one being slid out, and she came back to the bed with it over her arm and the wipes and a folded towel, and she laid the towel down on the fresh sheet, and looked at me, and said, in a voice that had gone gentler but no less certain: "Lie down. Let's get you sorted and we can both go back to sleep." I want to describe what happened next carefully, because it is the hinge on which a great deal of my life turned, and at the time it looked like nothing at all. It looked like a tired married couple dealing with a practical problem at four in the morning. That is exactly what it was. It was also the other thing, the thing underneath, and I felt the other thing arrive in the room even though it would be months before either of us said its name. I did not lie down. Pride made one last small stand. "I can do it myself," I said, and took it from her, the taped brief, and stood up, and tried. Reader, I could not do it myself. I had never put one on. I had stepped into pull-ups, which are at least shaped like a thing I understood, but this was different, this was the real article, with the tapes, and there is a technique to it that nobody is born knowing. I tried to do it standing, which is wrong. I got it round myself crooked, the back too low, and reached for the tapes and found I had no idea which order they went in or how tight, and the first tape I landed sat puckered and useless, and the second pulled the whole thing askew, and I stood there in the middle of our bedroom at four in the morning, a fifty-four year old man, a father of three, a man who builds the systems that move other people's money, fumbling with the tapes of my own diaper and failing, and I felt my throat go tight in a way that had nothing to do with the diaper and everything to do with the failing. "Stop," Ellen said. Not sharply. The way you stop a child worrying at a knot. "Stop. You're folding the back wing under, it'll never seat like that. Lie down. Let me." And I lay down. I want to be honest about why I lay down, because it is the whole of it. I did not lie down because I had run out of options. I lay down because she told me to in that voice, the certain one, the one that had been steering me gently and inexorably since the laundry basket, and because I was tired, and ashamed, and cold-haired, and four in the morning, and because somewhere under all of that, in a place I was nowhere near ready to look, I wanted to. I wanted to stop fighting the tapes and stop being the man who builds the systems and just lie down on the towel and let my wife take over, and let it be her problem, her competence, her hands, and not mine for one blessed minute. I lay down because being handled, in that moment, was the most enormous relief I had felt in two months. She did it the way she had read it could be done, because of course she had read it, the forums, the charts, the cheerful technical club. She lifted, and slid, and settled the thing under me, square this time, the back where it should be. She brought it up snug between my legs without a flicker of anything on her face but concentration, the same face she has over a recipe she is getting right. Bottom tapes first, angled up. Top tapes down. Her palm flat against the front of it for a second, pressing, checking the seal, the way she checks if a loaf has proved. Two fingers run round the leg gathers to make sure they were out and not tucked, because a tucked gather leaks, she had read that too. Ninety seconds. Maybe less. "There," she said. "That's how it's done." And then she stopped, and so did I, and for a moment neither of us moved or spoke, and the room was very quiet, and very full. I lay on the towel in the dim light, freshly and snugly diapered by my wife's hands, and she knelt beside the bed with one hand still resting flat on the front of it, and we looked at each other. And something passed between us. I have gone over it many times and I cannot tell you what it was made of, only what it was like. It was like a door opening somewhere in the house that you did not know had a door. It was like the first second of a held note. She felt it too. I am certain she felt it, because Ellen always has something to say, a closing remark, a "now go to sleep," and Ellen said nothing at all. She knelt there with her hand on me and looked at me and the quiet stretched and neither of us filled it, and her thumb moved once, very slightly, against the front of the diaper, almost nothing, a single small stroke that I do not think she decided to make, and I felt it go all the way through me like current through wire. Then she took her hand away, and stood, and the moment folded itself up and was put away somewhere, unnamed, to be taken out and examined much later when we both had the courage. "Sleep," she said, and her voice was not quite even, and she turned off the light. I slept. God help me, I slept like a stone, the deepest unbroken sleep I had had in two months, because the dread was gone, the half-listening animal part of me that had been bracing for the cold wet shock at three in the morning simply switched off and let me go all the way down, and I did not wake until the smell of coffee came up the stairs, dry, warm, rested, and ashamed of how rested I was. That was the pattern, from that night. That was the shape of the strange new country I had moved into without choosing to. In the daytime I resented it. I want that recorded plainly so you do not think I went soft all at once. By day I was still the man defending the inner room, still flinching at the crinkle, still sliding my eyes off the cabinet, still telling clients I'd call them back and meaning I had to go and change. The pull-ups by day, the taped brief by night, and a low steady hum of humiliation under all of it that did not switch off just because a door had opened at four in the morning. But the nights. The nights were the thing I could not argue with and could not explain. For the first time since the whole business began, I slept. Properly. All the way through. The taped brief did its quiet work and I did not wake cold, did not strip a bed, did not stand in the dark utility room at half three feeling like the last competent man on earth had left the building. I woke rested. I woke, some mornings, before I remembered to be ashamed, simply rested, simply well, and the shame would arrive a beat later like a creditor, and I would lie there caught between the two, the genuine animal relief of a body that had slept and the mind's insistence that a man my age should be appalled. And every night there was the small ritual of it, which I also could not argue with and did not yet dare to like. Ellen taped me up before sleep. After the first night I never fumbled for the tapes again, not because I had learned but because the question never arose; she simply did it, the way she had simply edited the cabinet, no announcement, no negotiation, a thing that was now done and was hers to do. I would lie down on the towel and she would do her ninety competent seconds, the lift, the settle, the snug, the two tapes up and two tapes down, the palm pressed flat to check the seal, and the "there," and the light off. And some nights it was brisk and over in a moment and meant nothing. And some nights her hand stayed a half second longer than the seal required, and the quiet came back into the room, and we did not speak of that either. I told myself, in the daytime, that I hated all of it. I was telling myself a great many things in the daytime that the nights were quietly proving false. The specialist saw us the following week, and confirmed, in more words and with more equipment, what Dr. Meyer had already told us in fewer. He was younger than Dr. Meyer and just as unbothered, and he did his examinations and ran his small tests and looked at his screen and gave us the same shape of answer. Overactive bladder, urge-predominant, a stress component on top, no sinister cause that he could find and most likely no findable cause at all, which he said as if it were good news, and which, he explained, it was, because the findable causes are mostly the ones you would not want to have. "Here's the honest landscape," he said, and I liked him for the word honest, the way I had liked Dr. Meyer for it. "First thing, and the thing with the best evidence, is pelvic floor work. Properly taught, by a physiotherapist who does this, not exercises you guess at. It genuinely helps a lot of men, especially with the stress side, and it can take real pressure off the urgency too. It's slow. Weeks to months. But it's the foundation and I want you doing it, so I'm referring you." Ellen wrote it in the notebook. Pelvic floor. Physio. The notebook came everywhere now. "Second," he said, "there's medication. There's a class of drug that calms the bladder muscle, stops it contracting when it shouldn't. It helps some men a good deal. I'll be straight with you that it's slow to show its full effect, several weeks, and it has side effects that some people don't love, dry mouth, constipation, and in some it can affect concentration, make you a bit foggy. Given what you do for a living," and he had asked, earlier, and noted it, "the foggy part is worth thinking about. We can try it and see how you tolerate it. It's worth a try. It doesn't work for everyone and not everyone stays on it, but it's a reasonable thing to attempt and it's reversible, you just stop." "And in the meantime?" Ellen asked. "In the meantime," he said, "you manage. Which it sounds like you're already doing sensibly." He glanced at his notes, at whatever Ellen had told the receptionist, and did not so much as blink. "Protection, day and night by the sound of it, which is exactly right while we see what the physio and possibly the medication can do. I'll tell you what I tell everyone, and the men never want to hear it. The protection isn't the failure. The protection is what lets you have a normal life while we work on the rest. Some men spend a year miserable and dry and housebound trying to tough it out, and they get nowhere faster than the men who just wear the thing and get on with their lives. Wear the thing. Get on with your life. Do your exercises. We'll see where you are in a few months." It was, almost word for word, the speech Dr. Meyer had given, delivered in the same even unbothered tone, and hearing it twice from two different calm men did something to me. Two professionals, independently, had looked at the most shameful development of my adult life and called it ordinary, called it manageable, called the protection sense rather than surrender. It is very hard to keep believing you are a uniquely humiliated special case when the experts keep treating you like a Tuesday. There was one small moment, in among all that reassurance, that I did not think anything of at the time and have thought a great deal about since. He had me undress for the examination, and so he saw what I had on, the daytime pull-up, the one the pharmacist had started me on, snug under my clothes. And when we were talking through the meantime, he nodded at it, professionally, the way he might note a blood pressure reading. "That's a sensible thing for when you're out and about," he said. "Belt and braces, hard to fault it. Though honestly, for around the house, on a quiet day at your desk, you'd very likely be fine with something lighter. A shaped pad inside ordinary pants does the job for a lot of men with your pattern, and it's less to deal with. No need to wear more than the day actually calls for. You can step it up for the trickier days and down for the easy ones. Match the protection to the risk." It was reasonable. It was, in fact, exactly the kind of sensible economy I would have expected Ellen to seize on, my wife who tracks the cost per unit of everything and does not believe in using a sledgehammer where a tap will do. She did not seize on it. "He'll keep to the heavier ones, I think," Ellen said, pleasantly, and without the smallest hesitation, in the tone of a woman settling a question rather than raising one. "For now, at least, while everything's still finding its level. I'd rather not be guessing wrong halfway through the morning. And I'm the one who deals with the laundry, after all, so it's really no trouble to me either way." The specialist looked at her for just a moment. Something passed behind his eyes, the briefest flicker, a man noting that the wife had quietly declined the lighter option he had offered and chosen, on her husband's behalf, to keep him in more than the situation strictly required. One eyebrow moved, a millimeter, and then it didn't, and he was a professional and it was, after all, her household and her laundry and entirely her business, and he simply said, "That's perfectly fine. Whatever works for you both," and made a note, and moved on to the referral letter. I did not understand, that afternoon, why my chest had gone warm at the calm certainty in her voice when she said he'll keep to the heavier ones. I told myself, on the way to the car, that she was only being practical, that she was the one rinsing things out, that it was sensible. I was right about all of it and I understood none of it. It would be months before I let myself see what the doctor, I think, had half-seen across his desk in a single second: that my wife had been offered the chance to put me in less, and had chosen, smoothly and immediately and without quite saying so, to keep me in more. "We'll try the medication," Ellen said, in the car, not really asking. "It's reversible. No sense not trying." "The fog, though. If I can't concentrate I can't work." "Then we'll see how it does," she said, "and if it fogs you, we stop, and we've lost nothing but a few weeks. But we try it. We try the things that might help. I'm not having you not try a thing because you're frightened of it." She started the car. "We try the medication, you do the exercises properly, not the way you do physio exercises for your back, which is to say not at all, and in the meantime you wear the thing and get on with your life. You heard the man. Twice now, near enough. Wear the thing. Get on with your life." "Yes, Ellen," I said, and I heard it come out of me, the small obedient cadence of it, before I had decided to say it, and she heard it too, and she did not smile, but something at the corner of her mouth moved, and she pulled out of the car park and took us home, where the cabinet was stocked, and the bed was protected, and the night, when it came, would be the one part of the day I no longer dreaded. I just wasn't ready, yet, to admit that last part to anyone. Least of all to her. Least of all to me.

I’m curious if he will have a run in with his old friends