Cloth Diapers & Panties

Yay.  Looks like we're headed to Vegas.  Love it.

Goodbye 

I recently wrote a new story. It consists of a prologue, 23 chapters, and an epilogue. It is a different writing style from my previous stories, but I hope that whoever reads it enjoys it just as much as I did when I wrote it. It is based on true events, with a great deal of fiction woven through, and I won't be saying which is which. Underneath everything, it's a love story. Prologue — The Fitting Room I was standing in a department store fitting room in my socks and my shirt. A pair of grey trousers hung on the hook, waiting. And on the other side of a thin curtain, less than two meters away, my wife of thirty years was discussing my underwear with a complete stranger. "No, not the slim kind," Ellen said. Her voice was calm and friendly, the voice she uses with bank clerks. "The proper kind, with the tapes. He wears them day and night now. That's why the usual cut doesn't work anymore. There is no room in the seat." "Ah," said the sales assistant. I waited for the rest. The pause. The pity. The carefully hidden smile. I had spent the whole drive into the city preparing for it. It never came. "Then we should look at the comfort fit," the woman said, as if Ellen had told her I had long legs. "And honestly, I would go one size up in the waist and have the length taken in. It falls better over everything." Over everything. I am fifty-four years old. I have built software that moves money between banks on three continents. I have raised three children, given a best man's speech in a language I barely speak, and survived a kitchen renovation. And there I stood, behind a curtain, in a thick white diaper taped snugly around my hips, listening to two women plan my wardrobe around it. Let me be clear about something, because this story only works if I am honest with you from the first page. I was not fine. My ears were burning. My heart was hammering somewhere up near my throat. I was gripping the little chrome hook on the wall like a man on a cliff edge, and I was seriously calculating whether I could get dressed and reach the escalator before Ellen finished her sentence. I did the math. I could not. Ellen never finishes a sentence later than she intends to. Thirty minutes earlier, in the parking garage under the store, she had changed me. That sentence still looks strange to me, written down. But that is what happened, and it happened the way everything happened in those months: efficiently, on her schedule, and one step further than I was ready for. The garage had a toilet for disabled drivers, locked, with a sign saying the key was available at the attendant's office. I had assumed we would skip it. I had assumed wrong. Ellen walked to the little glass booth, smiled at the man inside, and said, in the same bank clerk voice: "Good morning. May we have the key? My husband is incontinent and needs a change before we go shopping." The attendant looked up from his newspaper. He looked at her. He looked at me, standing three steps behind her with a gym bag and the facial expression of a man waiting to be sentenced. "Of course," he said, and handed her the key. "Just bring it back when you're done. The light switch is on the left, it sticks a bit." That was it. That was the entire catastrophe. The light switch sticks a bit. Inside, Ellen spread the changing mat from the gym bag over the fold-down table, pointed at it, and had the wet diaper off me before I had finished arguing that I could do this myself. Maybe I could have. It would have taken me five minutes and two attempts. It took her ninety seconds. Trousers down, tapes off, wipe, the fresh one pulled up snug between my legs. Bottom tapes angled up, top tapes angled down. Then a flat hand pressed once to the front, between my legs, and a finger run round the leg gathers, to check the fit. "There," she said. "That's how it's done." She says that every time. She had been saying it for two months, ever since the first night she took the tapes out of my fumbling hands. I had learned to stop hearing it as an insult. I had not yet learned what to hear it as instead. So no. The man standing in the fitting room that Saturday was not at peace with his situation. He was a man who wet himself without warning, who wore diapers because his wife had decided he would, who got changed in parking garages because his wife had decided he would, and who had not yet found a way to say no to any of it. Worse: he had not yet understood why he didn't really want to find one. "Mark." Ellen's voice, through the curtain. Not raised. She has never needed to raise it. "Try the grey ones first." I tried the grey ones. And here is the first thing that surprised me that day. The trousers slid up over the diaper, I closed the button, and when I looked in the mirror I did not see a catastrophe. I saw a man in well-cut grey trousers. The bulk was there if you knew. You would have to know. Somebody would have to tell you. Ellen, of course, tells people. That is rather the point of her. "How are we doing?" the assistant called. I took a breath. I opened the curtain. I stepped out into the menswear department of a busy store on a Saturday, padded, terrified, and certain that every person on the floor would turn and stare. Two women looked at my hips with complete professional seriousness. Nobody else looked at all. "Turn around, please," the assistant said. I turned around. Slowly, arms slightly lifted, like a man in airport security. Somewhere behind me Ellen and a stranger named Monique, I read it on her name tag, discussed the drape of the fabric and whether the seat needed more ease, and not one molecule of the conversation was about anything other than tailoring. "There's no line at all," Monique said, pleased. "That's the heavier fabric doing the work. You would never know." Then, to me, while she smoothed the back of the trousers as if I were a mannequin she was proud of: "You'd be amazed how many gentlemen I fit for exactly this. Truly. More than you would think." More than you would think. I have since learned that almost everything about my condition is more than you would think. More common. More manageable. More invisible. More boring to other people than your worst three a.m. thoughts could ever accept. I did not believe any of that yet, standing there while Monique went to fetch the same trousers in navy and in charcoal, because Ellen had decided we were taking three pairs, and by that point in our marriage Ellen's decisions had roughly the legal force of weather. But I noticed something, and I noticed it against my will. Nothing bad was happening. The world had been told, twice in one morning, by my own wife, in her bank clerk voice. A parking attendant knew. A saleswoman knew. And the world had answered with a sticky light switch and a fabric recommendation. All that shame, all those weeks of hiding and washing underwear at two in the morning, and when the truth finally stood in the middle of a department store in its socks, the world simply went on selling trousers. While we waited, Ellen stepped close. To anyone watching, she was smoothing the line of the new trousers, a hand passed over my hip and down, a light pat at the seat, the sort of fond unthinking touch a wife gives a husband she is pleased with. What she was actually checking sat underneath, and we both knew it, and she found everything in order. "Good," she said. One word. My face was still hot. My heart was still going. And underneath all of that, in a place I was nowhere near ready to look at, something settled and went quiet, the way a house goes quiet when the right person locks the front door. I hated that quiet. I needed that quiet. It would take me months, a specialist's verdict, a long conversation in a ship's library, and a midnight at the top of Europe to understand that those two things could both be true, and what it would mean for the rest of our lives once I said so out loud. We will get to the ship. First I have to tell you how it started, because it did not start with diapers, or with Ellen's doctrine that anyone who helps us helps better when they know. It started months before the fitting room, on an ordinary Saturday evening at home. A good dinner. A good bottle of wine. My wife's bare shoulder under my hand, and later, in the bathroom, on my way back to bed, a wet spot the size of a coin. I blamed the wine. It was not the wine. Chapter 1 — A Good Life, Mostly On the Tuesday this story refuses to start on, because nothing had happened yet, my alarm went off at ten to seven and I ignored it, the way I had ignored it for years. It was the back end of October, the clocks just turned, the mornings gone dark again and the year sliding down toward winter, though I had no reason yet to mark the season and would not have, except for what the season would come to mean by the time I understood the shape of that whole sliding year. This was safe to do. At seven exactly, the smell of coffee comes up the stairs of our house like a tide, and no alarm clock ever invented can compete with it. Ellen gets up at half past six. She has gotten up at half past six since before we were married, through three babies, through night feeds and exam mornings and one memorable decade of teenagers, and now that the house is empty again she still gets up at half past six, because the day, as she puts it, does not organize itself. I came down at quarter past seven, showered and dressed, because working from home is no excuse for pyjamas at the breakfast table. That is not my rule. I have exactly two rules in this house and I can never remember what they are. It is Ellen's rule, and like most of Ellen's rules I had stopped noticing it was a rule at all. It was simply how we lived. Breakfast was laid out. It always is. Two plates, bread, cheese, and a fresh jar of jam, because Tuesday is shopping day and the last of the old jar gets used up at breakfast. Ellen sat across from me with her own coffee and the crossword, which she does in pen, and read me one clue she had already solved just to watch me fail at it. "Seven letters," she said. "Begins with nothing." "That's not a clue." "It's a wonderful clue. You'll be annoyed when I tell you." She told me at lunch. I was annoyed. By eight I was at my desk. My office is the back bedroom, the one that was Daniel's until three years ago. There is still a faded rectangle on the wall where his concert poster hung. I work under that rectangle every day: two screens, one good chair, a freelance software developer's entire kingdom. That spring I was rebuilding the invoicing system of a logistics company, a long ugly job full of other people's shortcuts, and I had reached the stage of the project where I talked to the code out loud and the code did not listen. The morning went the way my mornings go. I sank into the problem and the world went away. This is the one genuine talent I have, the sinking. Give me a hard enough problem and I will forget meetings, meals, the season, and the existence of my own body. For six or seven hours I am a brain on a stick. At ten there was a knock, one knuckle, and Ellen came in with coffee. She put it on the cork coaster, looked at the screens, understood nothing, and squeezed my shoulder once on her way out. That is the whole ritual. It is eleven seconds long and we have performed it perhaps six thousand times, and if I am honest it is one of the load-bearing walls of my life. The coffee at ten. The squeeze. The door clicking shut. At half past twelve I ate lunch, because at half past twelve lunch exists and at one o'clock it does not. Soup, bread, the solved crossword presented as evidence of my inferiority. At one I went back up. Around three I surfaced briefly, stiff-necked, vaguely aware that I had been sitting motionless for two hours with my legs crossed, and that my body had been signalling for a while, with growing urgency, without quite managing to get my attention. I mention this only because of everything that came later. At the time it meant nothing. I went to the bathroom, came back, and sank again. That was Tuesday. That was, give or take a deadline, every day. I want you to see it clearly before I take it apart: a quiet house, a solid marriage, a man of fifty-four who believed the remaining chapters of his life had already been written and would only need proofreading. The brochure lived on the kitchen counter, leaning against the fruit bowl, and had lived there so long it had a tan line. It was for a cruise. Eight nights, Norwegian fjords and the North Cape, midsummer, sailing up into the season of the midnight sun, departing from Hamburg, to which we would fly because driving that far is for people with more patience and fewer airline points. Ellen had booked it more than a year in advance, the way she books everything, on the day a wedding anniversary with a zero in it appeared on the horizon. Thirty years. You get less for armed robbery, my brother said at the party for our twenty-fifth, and Ellen laughed harder than I thought the joke deserved. That Tuesday evening she had the brochure open at the excursions page, which was now soft at the corners from handling, and a notepad beside it. "Geiranger," she said. "There's a coach up to the viewpoints. Two and a half hours." The viewpoints had names, she told me later, names with letters in them I had never seen stand next to each other, names that were hard to write down and harder still to say out loud, the kind of words that make you suspect the Norwegians of having a private joke at the expense of everyone who sails in to look at their fjords. "As long as there's a coach back." "And in Tromsø I want the cable car. And the cathedral." She made a note. She makes notes the way other people breathe. "And on the North Cape day the excursion leaves late in the evening, because of the midnight sun. We'd be at the monument at midnight." "Midnight," I said, "is when I am asleep." "Not that night you're not." She turned the page. "It's the whole point of going, Mark. The sun doesn't set. You stand at the top of Europe at midnight and it's broad daylight." "And then a two hour coach ride back to the ship." "Then a two hour coach ride back to the ship," she agreed, in the tone of a woman who has already decided, has in fact already ticked the box on a form, and is merely letting me enjoy the impression that the matter is open. I gave it up gracefully, because thirty years teaches you which hills are yours, and reached for the laptop instead, because Tuesday evening is when Sophie calls. Sophie is our oldest, twenty-eight, and lives a time zone away with a man we like and a job none of us can explain at parties. Something with sustainability and supply chains. The call connected and there she was, in her bright kitchen where the afternoon light still held, an hour behind us, her evening not yet started while ours was winding down, talking before the picture had fully arrived, which is how she has entered every room since she learned to walk. We got the news. The job was fine, the man was fine, the weather was doing something dramatic. Then: "Show me the brochure again. Mum, show me. Dad will hold it backwards." I held it backwards. The ritual demands it. "You're going to love it," Sophie said, when Ellen had walked her through the itinerary with the notepad answers ready. "Tom says hi, by the way, I talked to him Sunday. And has Daniel hung his shelves yet or is everything still in boxes?" "Everything is still in boxes," Ellen said. "He's coming Sunday for dinner. With Thomas. I'll send a photo of them eating like civilized people, you can frame it." After the call the house did its evening settling, the radiators ticking, and we sat a while longer at the kitchen table the way we do now. There were years when this hour was homework and arguments and someone always in the bathroom. Now it was two cups of tea and a brochure with a tan line, and I will tell you something I would have been embarrassed to say out loud back then: we liked it. We had braced for the empty nest like a wave and it had turned out to be a warm bath. The children call, the children visit, the children are launched and healthy and ours forever. And in the meantime, on a Tuesday night, the house is quiet, and the woman across the table still has opinions about everything, and her ankle is hooked around mine under the table out of pure habit, and has been for thirty years. That is what we were. I am not building it up to knock it down. I am building it up because it is still standing. It just has different furniture in it now. Saturday we cooked together, which is our oldest ritual and the only one where I have any authority. I do the knives and the timing. Ellen does the sauces and the vetoes. It was one of the last mild evenings of autumn. We had the kitchen door open to the garden while we worked, the cool dark air coming in against the warmth of the oven, lamb and rosemary and too much garlic, which is the correct amount, and a bottle of white wine open on the counter that was not surviving until the food did. Ellen cooks in an apron older than our marriage and drinks her wine in small absent sips, and somewhere between the searing and the resting she was humming, off key, a song from the year we met. We ate at the kitchen table with the door still open. We talked about nothing that I can remember, which is the best conversation there is. She laughed twice, properly, the laugh with her head back. I poured the last of the bottle unevenly and gave her the bigger glass, and she noticed, because she notices everything, and gave me a look over the rim that I had been receiving across tables since before the fall of several governments. Some things do not need negotiating after thirty years. The dishes went in the sink to think about their behavior overnight. The garden door got locked. The stairs got climbed, not hurried, her hand finding mine on the banister rail, and if you had asked me at that moment how often this still happened I would have had to think about it. Less than it used to. Once a month, maybe, in a good month, where once it had been a weather system that never fully cleared. Neither of us was troubled by the arithmetic. What was left was not a remnant. It was a reduction, in the kitchen sense: less of it, and stronger. In our bedroom the last of the autumn light came grey-blue through the curtains. She stood at the foot of the bed and reached up to take off her earrings, which after thirty years I can report is the single most quietly confident gesture a woman performs, and I sat on the edge of the mattress and watched her do it, and she let me watch. "You're staring," she said. "I'm appreciating." "You're a fool," she said, with enormous tenderness, and crossed the room to stand between my knees. I put my hands on the backs of her thighs, over the fabric of her dress, and she put hers in my hair, which is greyer than it used to be and which she has never once mentioned, and for a moment we just stayed like that, my forehead against her stomach, breathing her in. Then I found the zip at the side of her dress and drew it down, slowly, because there is no prize for speed at our age and we have both stopped pretending there is, and she stepped out of it and stood there in the grey light and let me look at her, fifty-two years old and entirely herself, softer than she was at thirty and more certain of what she wanted, which is its own kind of beautiful and not a lesser one. She undressed me without ceremony, the way she does most things, competent hands at my shirt buttons while she kissed me, and pushed me back onto the bed, and followed me down. What I remember is her weight settling over me and the small sound she made against my mouth when I touched her where she likes to be touched, a sound I have been collecting for three decades and have never grown tired of. I remember taking my time because she likes me to take my time, the slow build of it, her breath going short and then shorter against my neck, her hand gripping my shoulder hard enough to leave half-moons. I remember the moment she stopped letting me lead and took over, sitting up, setting her own rhythm with her palms flat on my chest, her head tipping back, the line of her throat in the dim light, and the way she said my name once, low, when it broke over her. And I remember following her not long after, her forehead coming down against mine, both of us slick and breathing hard and laughing a little at the end the way we always do now, because at our age something always clicks or cramps and you can either laugh or pretend, and we stopped pretending around the second baby. We lay tangled while our breathing came back down. Her hair was stuck to her cheek. I moved it with one finger. "Still got it," she murmured. "You certainly do." "I meant both of us, you idiot." But she was smiling into the pillow, pleased, and she let me pull her in against my chest, her back to me, the way we end up every night, and we lay there in our spots in the dark. "The lamb was good," she said, already going under. "I know." "Don't get smug. The sauce carried it." "Go to sleep, Ellen." She went to sleep. She does it the way she does everything, decisively, between one breath and the next. I lay a while longer in the dark with my nose in her hair, doing my accounting. Good work, good house, launched children, a ship waiting for us in Hamburg, and this woman, still, after everything. The remaining chapters already written, I thought. Proofreading only. Some time after midnight I woke needing the bathroom, which at fifty-four is not an event, it is a schedule. I padded across the landing without turning on the big light, did what I had come to do, and it was on the way back, in the small cold glow of the night light over the sink, that I noticed it. I had stepped out of my underwear to sleep, hours before, and dropped it next to the laundry basket instead of in it, because Ellen was not watching. Picking it up to correct the crime, I felt it before I saw it. A damp patch. Small. The size of a coin, there at the front, cold now and long dried at the edges. I stood in the little light and looked at it for longer than it deserved. There was a perfectly good explanation and I reached for it with both hands. The wine. We had finished the bottle, and I had drunk most of it, and a man of my age who drinks most of a bottle of white wine cannot expect precision instruments. A drop after. A moment of inattention getting up the stairs with my mind very much elsewhere. And besides, and this is the part I leaned on hardest, a small spot like that was not, in itself, a stranger to me. For a few years now there had been the occasional after-drip, the little betrayal at the end that a man past fifty learns is simply part of the equipment getting older, caught nearly always by the underwear, noticed nearly never, gone by the time you'd thought about it. Ellen had been quietly laundering the faint evidence of it for years, I would later learn, and never said a word, but I did not know that then, and to me that Saturday a coin-sized spot was nothing, was the known small nuisance and not the unknown large one, was easily and gladly filed under the heading of the wine. Nothing. Less than nothing. Not even worth the word that was trying to form somewhere at the back of my head, the word I declined to think, the way you decline a call from a number you don't recognize. I dropped the underwear into the basket, where it landed on top of Ellen's blouse, and washed my hands, and went back to bed. She had migrated into my half, the way she always does, a one woman occupying force. I fitted myself around her and she made a small sound, settling, and her hand found my forearm in her sleep and held it, and I lay there warm against her back and thoroughly, completely reassured. The wine, I told myself, already going under. It was not the wine. But that Saturday night, in that dark, with her breathing slow against me and the whole quiet house holding us like a hand, I was still allowed to believe it was, and I am glad nobody woke me to tell me what was coming. Some things you should be allowed to sleep through one last time.

It took some time for me to settle down and even had a few giggles come out as i still felt alittle needy needing mommy as my thumb slips in my mouth as i suck on it as my mind slipping in to my little head space then being in a 16 year old head space. Amy pops in to see if everything was ok as she smiles seeing how great her husband was at taking care of his niece so his sister could get some rest.

In this case that snap back resulted in a poopy diaper.