Cloth Diapers & Panties

I too have the odd night where I rouse from my slumbers with the sensation of needing to pee, relax and wet then fall straight back to sleep. Most nights I just go to sleep dry and wake up in the morning, wet.

Chapter 17 — First Fjord, and the Man on the Bus Before the fjords there were two days of open sea, the crossing up from Hamburg toward the Norwegian coast, and they taught me what a holiday could be when the one thing that had ruled my life for a year was simply handed to somebody else to carry. Ellen had the rhythm of it worked out by the first breakfast. At sea, with no excursions to time around, she anchored my changes to the shape of the day, one after breakfast, one before lunch, one before we dressed for dinner, the last at bedtime, and she announced it the way a purser announces the day's schedule, not asking, informing. "Four, same as home, just on ship time. You don't have to remember any of it. I'll tell you when." A pause, the dry look. "That's the whole point of a holiday, isn't it. Somebody else remembers." And I discovered, across those two days, the particular freedom of a man who never has to plan around a toilet, the freedom to settle into a deck chair in the cold bright air and simply stay there while the grey water goes by, no glance toward the facilities, no timed cup of coffee, no calculation, nothing to do when the moment came but nothing at all. The second evening the sea got up and gave me a small ungenerous pleasure I have decided to be honest about. The ship took to the long deep corkscrew the big ones do, and in the lounge before the show a queue formed for the toilets, a dozen people waiting with the grim patience of the seasick and the desperate. I sat in a comfortable chair with a drink in my hand, dry-trousered and entirely beyond the reach of their problem, and felt, God help me, smug. "You're smiling," Ellen said. I told her I was watching the queue, and she followed my look and understood at once, because she always does. "Ah," she said. "There's the queue. And here's you." She patted my knee. "Drink your drink. You've earned the chair." It was on those two days that we met Paul and Rita, our table companions, a retired couple in their late sixties who had been married long enough to identify each other's bad ideas before they were fully formed. Paul could tell you the class of a vessel from the arrangement of its funnels. Rita could tell, from the movement of his hand toward the bread basket, that he was about to eat something his doctor had forbidden. "Diabetic," she said on the first evening, moving the basket out of reach. "Oppressed," Paul corrected. "Alive," said Rita, and Paul considered the available evidence and asked me to pass the water instead. That was all the explanation we were given, and all we needed. Ellen noticed Rita noticing things; Rita noticed Ellen noticing her; and by the second dinner the two women had established the quiet recognition of competent people who each spend a good part of the day preventing a man from making avoidable mistakes, while Paul and I discussed the engine noise and pretended not to see it. On the third morning, we came into the first fjord. I woke before Ellen, which almost never happens, and I am glad it happened that once, because of what I would have missed. We had sailed up the coast in the night and turned inland in the small hours, and when I woke the quality of the light through the curtains was wrong, too still and too close, and I pulled on yesterday's clothes and went out onto the balcony without waiting for anything except the door to open. We were deep inside Geirangerfjord. The ship moved slowly along a corridor of black water between walls of rock that went straight up out of the sea on either side, green where anything could cling and grey stone where nothing could, and down the faces of them came waterfalls, dozens of them, white threads and white ropes and one great roaring cataract close enough for us to hear, all of it falling out of the low cloud that hid the summits so completely that the walls of the world simply rose and disappeared into grey. It was six in the morning. The air smelled of stone and water and cold green growing things, and the ship that had seemed enormous at the quay in Hamburg had become a toy on a black ribbon between the cliffs, and for a while I forgot everything except the scale of it. I was still in the night diaper. I had woken wet, registered it, and come outside anyway, because the view would not wait for Ellen's schedule, and that small fact told me more than another page of declarations could have. Months earlier the wetness would have occupied the whole balcony, would have stood between me and the waterfall and made itself the only fact in the world. That morning it could not compete with a mountain. It was there, and I was there, and the fjord was there, and the order of importance among the three had finally become sensible. Ellen found me in yesterday's clothes with two coffees, her dressing gown pulled close against the cold, and stood beside me long enough to look properly before putting one hand to the front of me and confirming what she already knew. "Couldn't wait, could you." I told her to look at it. "I'm looking," she said, handing me a coffee. "We'll do you when we go in. Stand here a little longer first. It's worth being wet for." So we stood at the rail in the cold with the coffee steaming between our hands and watched the morning come down the rock, and she was right, it was worth being wet for, and the fact that she could say it and I could hear it without shame was enough. The fjord did not need a speech from me. It had waterfalls. The excursion was a two-and-a-half-hour coach circuit through three viewpoints above the fjord, the viewpoints bearing the names Ellen had warned me about at the kitchen table months earlier, names full of letters that had no business standing next to one another, which the guide pronounced with great confidence and none of us attempted to repeat. The road climbed by hairpins, the water falling farther below at every turn, and the passengers made the small involuntary noises people make when a large coach takes a corner beside a much larger drop. Ellen had put me in the thick travel diaper, of course, the capable one whose reserves we had measured in an airport stall, and she had packed one spare in the excursion bag. One. She had held it up before closing the zip and said, "This is the reserve, not an invitation to find out how long the first one lasts." I had said I understood. "Good," she said. "Then we won't need it." It was the kind of exchange that had become so ordinary between us that I forgot the spare entirely until, at the first viewpoint, Ellen asked me to give it away. The coach pulled into a car park beside a café and gift shop, and everyone began the slow business of getting off, coats gathered, cameras found, older knees negotiated down the steps. The man was a few rows ahead of us, perhaps seventy-five, in a good blazer and a flat cap, somebody's lovely grandfather, I thought, the kind of well-kept elderly gentleman who has been handsome all his life and is handsome still. His wife came behind him with one hand on the rail. He reached the tarmac, and something in his face changed. I knew the look before I saw the dark patch at the front of his trousers. It spread while he stood there, not enormous but unmistakable, and he went rigid, then half turned as though he might conceal himself by presenting the disaster to a different part of the car park. Almost nobody noticed. That is the truth of these things, the truth I could never believe when it was me, that the world is mostly occupied with its own coats and cameras and difficult knees, and that a dark patch on one man's trousers is seen by almost no one. But the man himself sees it as though it has been written in fire across the sky, and his wife saw it, her hand going to her mouth, and for one second the two of them stood at the bottom of the coach steps with no idea what to do next. Ellen was already moving. She passed me and crossed the tarmac with her handbag open, and by the time I reached the bottom step she was speaking to them in the low practical voice she uses when panic is wasting time. "Don't worry. Half this coach has had a close call since breakfast. There's a gentlemen's toilet inside the café. We only need to get you there." She took wipes from the bag and put them into the wife's hand, then removed her own coat, folded it once, and showed the man how to knot the arms around his waist so the body of it covered his trousers. He let her. Shock will sometimes accomplish in ten seconds what persuasion could not accomplish in a year. And I should tell you, because there is no point telling this story now if I improve myself in the remembering, that the first thing I felt was jealousy. It was small and ugly and it arrived before anything kinder: her low voice, her open bag, her coat around someone else's waist, the complete certainty with which she had stepped into his worst moment and made it manageable, all the things that had become the deepest private language of our marriage being spoken now to a stranger. Some possessive part of me, the part that had only recently learned to be cared for and was not yet secure enough to be generous about it, looked at the man in Ellen's coat and thought, You do that for me. That is ours. I am not proud of it. I am only telling you it came. Ellen looked over at me, and if she saw the jealousy she filed it for later, because there were more useful things to do. "Mark. The spare. Side pocket. Offer it to him." For half a second I did not move. It was our only spare for the excursion, the reserve she had shown me before closing the bag, and if he took it I would spend the rest of the mountain circuit without one. The product I was wearing was more than capable, Ellen had chosen it precisely for that, but she never took me out for hours without a reserve, and I had come to rely not only on the protection itself but on the folded second chance that travelled with us. Then I heard the arithmetic I was doing. A man stood three metres away in wet trousers, wrapped in my wife's coat, and I was counting my safety margin. I opened the side pocket, took the folded white block across and held it where only the four of us could see. "We've got this," I said, keeping my voice low. "New. If it would make the rest of the trip easier." The man recoiled more sharply from the product than he had from Ellen's coat. "No. No, thank you. I don't need that. It was the coach, that's all. I waited too long." His wife looked at him, then at us, still holding Ellen's wipes. "I've got clean underwear for him," she said quietly. "I always carry a pair now. There have been little leaks. A few. Never anything like this." The man heard the word leaks and straightened inside the coat. "Nothing like this," he said, too loudly, then brought his voice down. "It has never happened like this before." I knew every part of that sentence. I knew the fierce need for the size of today's failure not to alter the category in which he kept himself. Small leaks were one thing. Spare underwear in a wife's handbag was preparation, prudence, hardly worth naming. The folded product in my hands belonged to another category entirely, one he had not agreed to enter in a Norwegian car park in front of three strangers, and I could have told him that the categories were inventions, could have told him what waiting too long had cost me and what the thing in my hand had given back, could have made his accident into my opportunity to deliver the lesson I had taken a year to learn. I nearly did. Ellen met my eye and gave the smallest shake of her head. He had said no. "All right," I said. "The offer is there. That's all." I put the spare back into the bag, and the return of its weight should have relieved me, because it restored the safety margin I had been ashamed to count. Instead it made me understand that helping was not the same as persuading, and that a kindness stops being kind at exactly the point where it requires the frightened person to accept the meaning you have chosen for it. His wife went with him into the café. Ellen told them to keep the coat for as long as they needed it, and I held the door, pointed out the gentlemen's, and went to buy four coffees because coffee was the next useful thing and standing outside a toilet was not. On the way back with the cardboard tray I thought of Carmen on the service stair, the paper towels and the locked room and the way she had helped me without requiring anything in return, not honesty, not gratitude, not even the use of the new underwear she bought and I later threw away. I had spent months thinking the lesson Carmen taught me was how to accept help. It occurred to me in that café that she had also taught me how to give it: find the next useful thing, offer it plainly, and do not make the person answer for needing it. The man and his wife emerged about ten minutes later. He had cleaned himself and changed into the underwear she carried, and she had done what she could with his trousers under the hand dryer. The dark patch was fainter but not gone, so Ellen's coat remained tied around his waist, and he looked composed again, which is not the same as being untroubled but is sometimes enough to get a person through the next hour. His wife tried to return the unused wipes. Ellen told her to keep them. She asked about the coat. "Until the trousers dry," Ellen said. "I'm not cold." She was cold, plainly, and I took off my scarf and put it around her neck. She gave me a look suggesting this had not been authorized, but she left it there, and the guide called us back to the coach, and the four of us boarded without ceremony. Nobody looked twice. At the second viewpoint, while the other passengers photographed the fjord, Ellen passed behind me and put a light hand to the seat of my trousers, the only public check that could be mistaken for affection because, in part, that is exactly what it was. "Plenty of room," she said. "I knew there would be." I asked whether she had really been prepared to give away the spare. "Prepared to offer it," she said. "That isn't the same as deciding for him." Across the car park the man stood with his wife's arm through his and Ellen's coat around his waist, looking at the view as hard as a man can look when he knows he is being discussed. "I was jealous," I said. Ellen said she knew, which is one of the more irritating responses available when a man has worked himself up to a confession. I told her she might at least pretend to be surprised. "Why? You only learned to let me look after you five minutes ago. Of course you're still a bit greedy with it." She adjusted my scarf at her neck. "You offered him your only spare anyway. That's the part that counts." I said I had done it because she told me to. "You could have said no," she said. "So could he. And he did. Leave him his dignity, even if he's chosen the more difficult version of it. You should understand that better than anyone." Then the guide began attempting the next viewpoint's name, and the moment was over, filed, as Ellen files things, for the conversation we did not yet know we were going to have the next morning. The man found me at the rail of the third and highest viewpoint. Below us the fjord lay dark between the mountains, with our ship small and white on the water. The women were inside the café. He had returned Ellen's coat by then, though the front of his trousers was still a shade darker if you knew where to look, which nobody did. "I hope I wasn't rude," he said, looking out rather than at me. "Before. About the, ah, thing you offered." I told him he had not been. "My wife worries. A couple of small incidents and now she carries half a wardrobe. This was unusual." I said I understood, and there must have been something in the way I said it, because he looked at me then, properly, and I decided that if I was going to claim I had learned anything from the morning I could at least give him the one fact that made the offer honest. "The spare was mine," I said. "My wife packed it for me. I am wearing the other one." His eyes moved down and away so quickly that another man might have been offended. I was not. I remembered exactly how impossible it had once been to look at the pharmacy shelf. "I see," he said. For a while neither of us spoke. Then he asked, very quietly, "Does it help?" I said yes, more than I had wanted it to, and that earned the beginning of a smile. "My wife has suggested," he said, and stopped. "They usually have by the time we think it was our idea," I told him, and the smile completed itself. "Your wife is a remarkable woman," he said. "I know." We stood at the rail a while longer without improving each other. Then his wife came to collect him for the coach, Ellen came to collect me, and the mountain kept the rest. That evening I thanked Ellen. We were on the balcony after dinner, sailing back out through the fjord in the late gold light, and I thanked her for crossing the car park, for knowing when to offer help and when to stop offering it, for making me put our one spare into another man's hands and for not mocking the half second in which I had wanted to keep it. "I considered mocking it," she said. "I may still." I thanked her for her restraint. "Temporary restraint," she said, and because the day had opened something I found myself going further back, to the first time she had crossed a room for me before I knew I needed it. "And the wine," I said. "That Sunday with the boys. You heard what was happening and threw your glass into my lap before they saw. I worked it out that night. I never thanked you." Ellen looked out at the water and said it had been a perfectly good sauvignon. I told her I knew. "You should be grateful," she said. "I am," I said, and my voice had gone less steady than the joke deserved. "For the wine. For today. For all of it. I know what we chose at home, El. I know I want it. But today made me realize I don't know what it means out here, with other people. What is private. Where it stops. Whether handing you the decisions means I have handed you every decision, even the ones I haven't thought of yet." She was quiet for long enough that I looked at her. This was Ellen, who usually had the answer waiting before I had finished finding the question, and for once she did not. "No," she said at last. "It can't mean that." "Then what does it mean?" She put her hand over mine on the rail and looked out at the fjord walls moving past us, darkening in the long light. "I need to think," she said. "So do you. We'll talk tomorrow, properly." That was where she left it, which was how I knew the matter was serious. Ellen does not postpone a decision because she is afraid of it. She postpones only when she means to arrive prepared.

I am not totally disagreeing with you. I welcome the discussion only right now, I am exhausted, got 45 minutes of sleep and as is NORMAL for me, I am wake til sunrise, my PAIN is 10x worse at night. I promise to write more tomorrow. Just please  reply to this, even if 1 word, so I see the notification. I only used Dewalt batteries as an example, NOT comparing them to new batteries, but NEW batteries just cost FORD BILLIONS! I see Tesla's @ 4-5 years old needing 20-25k battery packs, car is not worth that plus in most cases, is not even paid off. I 100% see Hydrogen as the future though, NOT batteries, UNLESS, as you mentioned, they DRASTICALLY IMPROVE and they're have not come close yet. Trouble with modern batteries, 1 bad cell KILLS the rest or prevents a full charge, which equates to lack of range. I KNOW they are addressing that now, but these cells deteriorate from DAY ONE! NOT ONE MODERN BATTERY has solved that BASIC issue to date that I have seen PRIVE to be accurate. I KNOW they will get better, but I sincerely do not see batteries as the future....although I LOVE the discussion....my muscles between my shoulders are trying to pull my shoulder blade together right now, so I am off to stand in the hotttest shower I can stand...in need of major spinal reconstruction surgery, 4 or 5 levels in y cervical sine alone. My right tricep also feels like it is LITERALLY on fire. My Lumbar sine, while not as extensive, hurts even worse and with severe Coccydynia, I can't sit...   Thank you for the response, look forward to more discussion, FORD! (WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT REALLY STANDS FOR? GUARANTEE  you've never heard this one, I made it p in 19991 LOL..It is a joke, I just pick on FORD as I prefer Chevy, but honestly, RESPECT most muscle cars!) I'd have to message you my acronym for F O R D though. It is not kind 😉 CptKirk

After hearing Geordie, I could understand how they got Gates out of Goats. I was to return to Gateshead to show them how we made ¡Smartypants! It was me and my team that had developed them in the first place. I found out we could ta flight from London Heathrow to Newcastle upon Tyne Airport it took 45 minutes to an hour rather than almost 2 and a half to 3 hours by train. This time I took a flight. They didn't have First Class, but did have Business Class and we were served a meal. Our plane landed at Newcastle Airport  i took the train from the airport to the train station. Then a cab to Sunderland Rd. in Gateshead we talked about specifications, how we made them, they made a few  practice types and had a few secretaries try them out, one wanted to  know where to get them, appearantly she was having problems and they worked better than what she was currently using. Another Secretary was kind of kinky and liked wearing diapers also enjoyed them. I was asked about how we came up with the concept. I explained about how my wife was a lifelong bedwetter, and my own Mother was becoming incontinent from giving birth to my two brohers and I.  We were not finished I got a room at the Holliday Inn Express. They even had Breakfast in the morning I thought it was a bit weird I got a room cards after I had my door unlocked the card went into a thing that's how the lights worked.  If I removed my card the lights shut off. The door to the bathroom actually doubled as the door for the toilet as well. I thought how brillant. They served meals at night but you had to pay for that with a credit card, they wouldn't take money I kind of got hit twice, once for the conversion from Dollars US to British Pounds plus the service charged a fee for it like £5. I had a curry that was very good. I went to bed and I was still a bit jet lagged my watch said it was 2100 hours. They used military time, for me 9pm but we were 7 hours behind in the US. My body thought it was 1400 hours or 2pm. My flight was at 0900 hours of for me at 2am I was tired. I diapered myself and fell asleep. I awoke a at 0515 hours for us Americans it was 1015 pm. I showered shaved and went downstairs for breakfast. They had scrambled eggs, bacon that was closer to Ham, sausages that were closer to bratwurst size, tomatoes and pork and beans, for breakfast?. I sat and watched the TV in my room i had BBC Newcastle on soon it was 0745  I called a taxi to take me to Sunderland Rd. in Gateshead. The Secretary that was into diapers wanted to know if I fooled around on my wife? I informed her that wasn't happening!

Chicken and Stars.