2011

Chapter 19 — Crossing the Line We crossed the Arctic Circle on the fourth day, in the afternoon, only a few hours after signing our terms and conditions in the library, and the ship made a great cheerful ceremony of it, the way ships do, complete with a man dressed as King Neptune, a beard that would not have survived close inspection, and buckets of water cold enough to make inspection the last thing on anybody's mind. The old sailors' crossing ritual had been turned into passenger entertainment, certificates and photographs and a ceremonial drenching for anyone foolish enough to volunteer, and by midday several hundred people had gathered on the pool deck and along the railings above it, wrapped in fleeces and good coats against the cold while waiting to watch other people get wet. There is no entertainment quite so reliable as somebody else's avoidable discomfort. And when Neptune called for volunteers, I put my hand up. Ellen, beside me, raised one eyebrow. "You're sure." It was not a prohibition, only a check, the first practical application of the page folded in her handbag. I said I was, and meant it, and went to change into my swim shorts before the part of me that had spent a year avoiding notice could request an adjournment. Under the shorts I wore a containment swim brief, the thin close-fitting kind designed for the accident nobody mentions at a swimming pool and not, as Ellen had explained while packing it, for the ordinary business of my bladder. It was enough to give the shorts a shape beneath them if the fabric clung, not a shape most people would identify and certainly not one most people would study, but enough that I knew it was there. Six months earlier that possibility would have kept me in the cabin. That afternoon it took its proper place among my concerns. I joined the line. The volunteers ahead of me emerged from their drenchings gasping and laughing, and when my turn came I stood beneath the raised bucket, heard the crowd count down from three, and had just enough time to regret every decision that had brought me there before a quantity of Arctic water struck the back of my neck and drove all regret, breath and coherent thought straight out through my shoes. The shock made me wet myself. There is no elegant way to report that, and no particular need for one. My bladder released in the same instant the bucket emptied, the warmth passing through the thin brief and down my legs inside a flood so complete that not one drop could have been told from another, and I came up streaming, gasping and laughing with the rest of them. The shorts clung. The outline underneath may have shown for a second. Neptune gave me a certificate while I tried to recover the use of my lungs. Nobody pointed because several hundred people had come to watch a man get soaked and were satisfied that this was what had happened. Ellen received me with a towel and the expression of a woman whose husband has done something ridiculous but, on balance, entertaining. She rubbed my hair hard enough to make the last of Neptune's dignity irrelevant and said, "Look at you. Up there in front of everyone. There's my brave boy." The words went through me warmly even in the cold, but nobody around us could have known what they meant in private; to the world she was only a fond wife toweling a dripping husband, and that was exactly the distinction we had spent the morning making. "Within the terms and conditions?" she asked under the noise of the crowd. I said it was. "Good. Because I'm not apologizing for that." She wrapped the towel more tightly around my shoulders and steered me toward the cabin before I froze to the deck. The ceremony went on behind us, Neptune calling for his next victim, and that was the whole of my crossing of the Arctic Circle: a certificate, an involuntary wetting hidden inside a great deal of seawater, and a photograph in which I look happier than any man with blue lips has a right to look. The library was in the morning, the Circle in the afternoon, and the formal dinner and show that same night, a full day by any measure and a particularly full one for a man who had begun it discussing safewords. Ellen had the timing calculated. Back to the cabin after the ceremony, out of the wet swim things, a shower and a fresh daytime diaper, then two quiet hours while the ship continued north; another change before the gala, because a formal evening ran through dinner and the show and possibly one dance if Ellen could persuade me, which experience suggested she could. She had brought a reliable evening product for it, not the enormous night one, nothing theatrical or punitive, simply the right protection for five hours away from the cabin, and she laid it on the bed beside my dress shirt while she stood at the mirror doing something precise with an earring. I was in a peculiar mood, pleased with myself from the bucket, relieved by the morning's conversation, and perhaps made reckless by the discovery that our agreement now had paragraphs. Ellen changed me, brisk and unhurried, taped the fresh diaper snug and pressed it flat, then left me on the edge of the bed while she went back to the mirror. My dress trousers were waiting over the chair. I looked at the white tape at my left hip. You will understand that I was not planning to go without it. I had no wish to spend a formal dinner calculating the distance to a toilet. I wanted the diaper on. I also wanted, with the irresistible foolishness that makes a child press a finger to wet paint under a sign saying not to, to find out whether the authority I had handed Ellen was as real in play as it was in solemn conversation. So I peeled one tape open. The sound was small but unmistakable. Ellen met my eyes in the mirror, one hand still at her earring, and looked from my face to the loosened side of the diaper and back again. "What," she asked, with dangerous calm, "are you doing?" I told her I was testing the terms and conditions. "By undoing my work." One tape, I pointed out. "One line," she said. There was no anger in it, which was why I smiled, and the smile was why she knew exactly what I was doing. I was not rebelling against her. I was leaning on the thing we had built that morning to see whether it moved, and Ellen, who understands structures and husbands, considered me for perhaps two seconds before finishing her earring and coming back to the bed. "All right," she said. She took the loose tape between finger and thumb. I expected her to press it down. Instead she peeled it the rest of the way open, released the other three and removed the diaper she had finished fitting less than a minute earlier. Being undressed again while she stood over me in her slip caused me to misunderstand the direction in which the test was proceeding. I looked up at her with what I hoped was an inviting expression. "No," she said. I had not actually asked anything. She folded the still-clean diaper and set it aside for later, because Ellen will make a point without wasting supplies, then went to the wardrobe. What she brought back was the thickest one we had with us, the high, heavily padded sort intended for a full night or a very long day and not for five hours of soup, lamb and dancing. She unfolded it on the bed with calm ceremony. I pointed out that the previous one had been perfectly adequate. "It was," she said. "Then somebody interfered with it." She fitted the replacement without hurry, drew the front almost to my navel and fastened all four tapes with particular care. Then she took a folded white garment from the back of the wardrobe. I recognized Monique's smooth cotton and assumed at first that it was one of the bodysuits I wore for travel, until Ellen put it on the floor instead of pulling it over my head. The ordinary ones went on like undershirts and fastened underneath. This one she gathered at my ankles like a pair of trousers. I knew then that it was different, though not how different. "Step in," she said. I was still smiling and did as I was told. She guided one foot and then the other through the openings, drew the cotton over the thick diaper and up my body, put my arms through the short sleeves and turned me with a hand at my shoulder. I felt her doing something behind me, then heard the small firm sound of a zip climbing from the base of my spine. By the time the pull stopped high between my shoulders and Ellen folded a protective flap over it, I understood how the garment closed. I had not yet understood what that meant. She turned me back towards her. I reached automatically for the fastenings I expected to find underneath and met an uninterrupted seam. My hands went to my waist, then behind me, first from below and then over one shoulder, but I could not get within a handspan of the zip. The garment held the diaper close and smooth and put every tape beyond my reach. "There," Ellen said. "Test concluded." I asked what, exactly, she had put me in. "Monique made two. Plain, invisible under a shirt, and removable only by somebody standing behind you." Somebody meaning her. She let me test it once more before her expression became serious. "Now you know what it does. If the surprise was more than you meant, say so." I could have turned around. She would have opened it, fitted something more reasonable and allowed the joke to end there, and I knew this because she waited without touching me and without making either answer easier for her. "Still playing?" she asked. Yes, I told her. Leave it on. Her smile returned. "Good. Then the result is that you can undo exactly as much as I allow you to reach." She was enjoying herself. The line I had crossed had not produced anger or a solemn punishment; it had produced a deliberately excessive answer, practical, affectionate and impossible to wriggle out of. The surprise itself gave me a small jolt. Ellen helped me into the dress trousers, the good pair Monique had cut to fall cleanly over the shape beneath, and buttoned my shirt over the white cotton. The bodysuit did exactly what it had been made to do. It smoothed everything, held the diaper's high waistband flat and safely covered beneath my shirt, and left no line in the trousers at all. I stood before the mirror in a dinner jacket, properly turned out, and saw not a patient disguised for an evening but a handsome enough man going to dinner with his wife. "Satisfied?" Ellen asked. I told her I looked good. "You do." She turned her back to me and lifted her hair. "Now zip mine." I drew the zip of her dark blue dress up between her shoulder blades, following almost exactly the path her hand had taken on me a few minutes earlier. The action was the same; the result was not. Hers completed an evening dress. Mine had placed what I wore entirely in her hands. The gala was worth dressing for. The dining room had been made brighter and more absurd with flowers and polished silver, the waiters wore their formal jackets, and a photographer moved among the tables arranging couples against a painted Arctic sunset while the real Arctic evening shone stubbornly through the windows behind him. Paul had a bow tie that rotated gradually off-center during dinner. Rita corrected it twice and then abandoned him to the consequences. Ellen ordered for me, as she had begun to do aboard, soup and lamb and no second bread roll, and did it without one private word or gesture that anyone at the table could have understood. Rita noticed the shape of our evening because Rita noticed everything, but she asked no question. She only told us, when the photographer came, that we both looked very smart and made Paul move his chair because he was blocking the light. The photograph was taken with Ellen's hand on my arm. I knew what was beneath the dinner jacket and the clean fall of the trousers; I could feel the close cotton of the bodysuit and the unreachable zip when I moved, and the knowledge did not make me less handsome. Being in her charge did not require me to look managed. It only meant that the management was good enough to disappear into the cut of a suit. We ate four courses, went to the show, and danced once, which is the contractual minimum Ellen has enforced at every formal event since our wedding. The bodysuit stayed smooth. The diaper did its work. I did not test the zip in a toilet or attempt some feat of shoulder flexibility to reach it, because the point had never been escape. Near eleven, when the band began its second set in the lounge, I told Ellen I had reached the end of my social usefulness. She had not. Rita and Paul were going to the bar for one last drink, and Ellen wanted to join them, and there was no reason her evening should end because mine had. This was one of the things we had put on the page that morning, though neither of us had expected to use it within twelve hours: Ellen could be off duty without the agreement disappearing. "Come down with me," she said. "I'll get you settled, then I'll come back up." I told her she did not have to put me to bed. "I know. I want to. Then I want a glass of wine." There was no useful answer to such clarity, so I said goodnight to Paul and Rita and went with her. In the cabin she unzipped the bodysuit, and the relief of the zip travelling down was not relief at being freed from it so much as the simple bodily relief of being able to bend properly after a formal evening. She undressed me and opened the thick protection she had put me in before dinner. "Let's get this Pampers off you and put you into a fresh one for bed," she said. The first had been more than equal to the evening. She checked me in the thorough private way the library rules allowed and then fitted the night one, all of it ordinary and unhurried. Then she picked up the back-zip bodysuit from the chair. I asked whether it was going on again. "That was my intention." She looked at me. "Still yes?" The question did not weaken what she was doing. It strengthened it. I told her it was still yes. She dressed me in it again and closed the zip, the same slow travel up my back, the same unreachable finish at my neck. Before putting me into bed she turned me once more and gave the smooth cotton at my bottom a small, satisfied pat. "There. Snug as a bug." I asked whether the bug could reach its own zip. "Not a well-managed one." Then she put me into bed and drew the covers over me. On her way out she closed the heavy balcony curtains, reducing the midnight sun to a narrow pale line around their edges. "You've seen enough Arctic daylight for one day," she said. "I'll be back after one drink." I told her Rita would make it two. "Then I will bravely endure." She kissed me, checked once through the smooth cotton with a hand at the front, switched off the bedside lamp and went back to the gala. The door clicked shut. Music reached me faintly from above when somebody opened another door in the corridor, then disappeared, and I was alone in the darkened cabin, clean, tired, fastened into something I had explicitly chosen and could not remove. I had expected the first back-zip night to feel more dramatic than it did. That is the truth of many lines once you cross them: from a distance they look like borders; under your feet they are only a mark on the ground. The garment held me as Ellen had left me. She was two decks above, drinking wine with friends because care had not consumed her separate life, and I had nothing to manage until she returned. I fell asleep behind the closed curtains before she came back. Sometime later I half-woke to the scent of wine and cold air, her hand checking me through the cotton, and her voice close to my ear saying, "All as I left you. Good boy. Go back to sleep." So I did, and the ship carried us north toward my birthday, the first back-zip bodysuit still closed between my shoulders and Ellen beside me again, exactly where both of us had chosen to be.

ive never really explored being a middle, but im open to the idea. either way i prefer pullups. i love the concept of being still in potty training yet never making it to underwear. of course, a little diaper punishment for too many accidents wouldnt hurt ;3. undies with cute lil designs can be fun too.  honestly tho, i dont like big bulky diapers. i see a lot of people who like it where its bulky and impossible to hide as is, then get even bigger when they wet it a few times and its super obvious. im more of a discreet guy. ive never really done it, but the idea of discreetly wetting my pullup in public is so exhilarating. 

I walk In Public with My Tie Shirt and Plastic Bibs and Diaper and Several Plastic Pants and Shoes and Socks and I am Not NAKED AT ALL. I Gone into Stores and Food Place Like This Had No Problems . I think person Attitude when you are out there. Don't be Rude to People and You will not have a Problem . We Have the right walk in Public as Adult Baby longs we Do Nothing Wrong . Be Smart out There . I walk out there a lot in passed years and had No Problems . Don't be Naked Period . Be Safe Out There . Thank You For Reading . 

Just joined this site but not new to being little. Im also in fresno

There's a lot about how to fold nappies on the Nappy Lady's site here in the UK. It's mainly a site for real babies, but she caters for ABs too. Here are her instructions for the kite fold: 'Lay the terry flat, so that a corner is nearest to you.  Fold the left and right corners into the middle to create a kite shape. Fold the top point down so you have a flat horizontal back edge. Fold the bottom corner up as far as needed, adjust to suit your baby's size. Add the baby. Fold up the bottom, bring each side wing around the baby and fasten with a nippa. Tuck up any excess fabric on the legs.' There are simple diagrams as well, which are easy enough to follow, unless you're visually impaired of course. Personally I use the bat/Chinese/butterfly/origami fold. No idea why it goes by so many different names, but it works perfectly for me.  Good luck.