2011

Tonight will be BBQ takeout again. This time ribs along with all the leftover sides from last night. 

I've never worn an undershirt before, not even during the winter time. The temperature of my body is also greatly influenced by my physical activity, if I'm sitting in front of the computer most of the day I could see myself wearing a onesie. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm not from Florida.  Still gets hot here in Virginia, but the temperature rapidly fluctuates throughout the day. Especially around March, one day it could be snowing the next it could be 80°F Wearing one at work is definitely outside the question for me, I have to wear fire retardant clothing due to the nature of my job

Chapter 2 — Denial Is a River The coin became a habit before I admitted there was anything to have a habit about. It went like this, over the weeks that followed that Saturday. I would stand up from my desk after a long stretch and feel a small warmth I had not authorized. I would laugh at something on a call, properly laugh, and feel a hot little jump that I had to clench against. Once, carrying a crate of old paperwork down to the recycling, I felt the whole system lurch toward open rebellion on the stairs, and I stood very still on the half landing with the crate against the wall and my eyes shut until it passed, and then I went and changed my underwear and told no one, because there was no one to tell, because Ellen was at the shops. That is the thing about working from home. You have a great deal of privacy in which to lie to yourself. And I lied with real craftsmanship. I want to be honest about the lying, because the lying is the part I am least proud of, more than any wet trouser leg. I told myself it was the sitting. I told myself it was the coffee, which is a bladder irritant, I had read that somewhere, so really this was a coffee problem and not a me problem. I told myself it was a phase, the way you tell yourself a strange noise in the car is a phase. I switched to dark trousers, navy and charcoal and black, and folded a few sheets of toilet paper into the front of my underwear before long calls, and timed my bathroom trips like a man defusing a bomb, going whether I needed to or not, on a schedule, so that the bomb would never go off while anyone was watching. For a while it even worked. That is the cruel part. A small problem, well hidden, feels like no problem at all. It feels like control. The washing was the worst of it. I started doing my own, in secret, which in a house Ellen has run for thirty years is roughly as easy as smuggling. I would wait until she was out, or asleep, and rinse things in the bathroom sink with the tap running at a whisper so the pipes would not sing and give me away, and wring them out, and hang them over the rail of the heated towel rack at an angle I hoped looked accidental, and lie awake calculating whether they would be dry before she noticed. Twice I stood at two in the morning in the cold bathroom, in the dark, washing my own underwear like a teenager with a secret, a fifty-four year old man, a father of three, and I remember catching my own eye in the mirror over the sink and looking away fast, because I did not want to see what was looking back. I told myself she had not noticed. I want that sentence to sit there for a moment, because it is the most foolish thing I believed in the whole of this story, and I believed a great many foolish things. I told myself that Ellen, who can tell from the next room whether I have salted the pasta water, who knew our children were lying before the children had finished forming the lie, who has done every load of laundry this family has produced since before some of you were born, had simply failed to notice that her husband had started behaving like a man with something to hide. She had noticed. Of course she had noticed. But that comes later, and it comes in her own words, and they are better than mine. What I will tell you, because she cannot, is what it did to us at night. After thirty years you do not so much decide to make love as drift toward it on a current you both recognize. A certain quality to the evening. A hand that stays a beat longer than it needs to. And in those weeks, for the first time in our marriage, I started steering us off that current, quietly, before it could carry us anywhere. The first time, I pleaded the deadline, which was true enough that it did not feel like a lie, and turned onto my side, and felt her lie still behind me for a long moment before she turned off her light. The second time I did not even have a reason ready. She put her hand flat on my chest the way she does, the old signal, thirty years old, and I caught it and held it and pressed it and said, "I'm shattered, El," and rolled away, and the truth, the actual truth that I could not say, was that I was terrified. I was terrified that I would let go at exactly the wrong moment, that the most undignified thing my body had started doing would happen there, of all places, in the one part of our life that had survived the children and the mortgage and middle age completely intact, and that her face would change, and that I would have to watch it change. So I protected the thing by starving it. That is the logic of shame. It tells you that you are guarding what you love when in fact you are the one putting it out in the cold. She did not push. Ellen never pushes on the things that matter most; she watches, and she waits, and she files. But I felt the temperature of the bed change. I felt her stop drifting toward me in the evenings, because a person can only reach for a closed door so many times. And I told myself that was fine, that was temporary, that I would fix the small problem and then everything would come back, when the truth was that I was letting one fear quietly eat the best room in the house. I would give a great deal to go back and simply tell her. It would have cost me one bad evening. Instead I spent six weeks paying for it in installments. The accident that ended the lying happened on a Thursday, on the ring road, in stopped traffic, with nowhere on earth to go. I had driven out to a client, an actual in-person meeting, rare for me, forty minutes each way. It had gone well. I had drunk two coffees because that is what you do at a client, and I had not wanted to ask to use their bathroom a second time because the second time is when people start to wonder about you, and I had got back in the car for the drive home already aware that I was carrying more than I was comfortable with. Then the ring road stopped. There had been an accident, a real one, the metal kind, somewhere ahead, and four lanes of traffic simply ceased to be a thing that moved. Engines off. People out of their cars up ahead, standing around in that helpless motorway way. And me, in lane three, boxed front and back and side, with the pressure climbing from discomfort into something with a countdown attached to it. I did everything you do. I turned the radio up as if that would help. I tried to think about other things, about anything, about the invoicing system, about whether we should fly out the day before the cruise to be safe. I gripped the wheel. I did the breathing. I calculated, the way you do, the distance to the hard shoulder, the embankment beyond it, whether a man could plausibly get out of a car in stopped traffic on a ring road and relieve himself against the central barrier in full view of a thousand stationary commuters, and concluded that he could not, that there are humiliations and then there are humiliations, and that I would rather burst. I want to tell you it was close. It was not close. I lost. It happened the way it was going to keep happening to me, again and again in the months ahead, not as a slow betraying trickle but as a sudden decision the body makes without consulting management. One moment I was holding on. The next moment holding on was simply no longer one of the options on the menu, and it was warm, and it was a great deal, and it would not stop, and I sat there in lane three of a stationary ring road at fifty-four years of age and wet myself completely, the seat, the trousers, all of it, while a traffic helicopter I could hear but not see clattered somewhere overhead. Then the traffic moved. That is the detail I have never forgotten. Less than two minutes after the catastrophe was complete and irreversible, the brake lights ahead went off, and the man behind me, who had no idea, who would never know, tapped his horn because I was slow off the mark. I drove the rest of the way home soaked to the knee, sitting in it, the cloth seat of the car drinking it up beneath me, and I was not even crying. I was past crying. I was doing arithmetic. How to get from the car into the house. When Ellen left for book club. Whether the seat would dry. What I would tell her if she asked why I was carrying my own trousers. I got lucky, which is to say I got a worse kind of unlucky that only looked like luck. Her car was gone when I pulled in. Book club. I had a clear ninety minutes. I sat in the cooling car in our garage in the dark for the first few minutes, because I could not immediately make myself move. Then I did what the newly ashamed do. I cleaned. I have never cleaned anything so thoroughly in my life as I cleaned that car seat, on my knees in the garage with a bucket and the upholstery spray and a torch held in my teeth, scrubbing at the cloth and then drying it with the hairdryer on its longest extension lead, sniffing at it like an animal, telling myself that nobody would ever know, that this was the bottom, that from here it could only get better. I showered. I put the clothes through a wash on a cycle I started and stood guard over. By the time Ellen came home, smelling of someone else's wine and a good evening, I was at my desk in clean clothes pretending to work, and I said the meeting went well, and she said good, and kissed the top of my head on her way past, and did not appear to notice anything at all. I lay awake that night, rigid, listening to her breathe, and I thought: I got away with it. I had not got away with anything. But I want to be fair to the man I was. He genuinely believed, that night, that the worst was behind him. The worst was on Sunday, and it was coming to dinner. Sunday was Ellen's roast and the boys. Thomas came in from the city by train, and Daniel drove over from his new flat where everything is still in boxes, and the kitchen filled up the way it used to, loud and warm, two grown men who still open the fridge the second they arrive as if checking that their childhood is where they left it. Ellen had done the lamb again, because the lamb had been good, and there was wine, properly this time, a couple of bottles of white breathing on the counter, and for the first time in weeks I forgot. That is what I want you to understand about that evening. I forgot. I was happy. I had my family around a table and a glass in my hand and my sons were ribbing each other about something, and Thomas was telling a long ridiculous story about his upstairs neighbor and a delivery of forty kilos of cat litter, and Ellen was pretending to be above it and laughing anyway, and the lamb was on the table, and the rain was coming down the dark window against the early winter night outside, and I had stopped, for one whole hour, doing the arithmetic of fear. I had not gone before we sat down. That is the thing. I had not gone, because I had forgotten to be afraid, and a man who has forgotten to be afraid forgets to manage, and I had three glasses of wine in me, which we now know is not a neutral substance for a bladder like mine, and I was laughing, really laughing, head back, at the image of forty kilos of cat litter, when it happened. There was no warning. There is never any warning, that is the whole nature of the thing, but I had let myself forget that too. One second I was laughing. The next second my body simply opened, the way it had on the ring road, the way it would go on doing, left to itself, for as long as nothing was done about it, and I was wetting myself, helplessly, at my own dinner table, with my two grown sons an arm's length away and my wife across from me. I froze. Everything in me froze except the one thing that would not stop. I felt it spread, hot, soaking through to the chair, and I heard it before I could think to stop it, the small obscene sound of the first of it finding the floor under the table, a drip, and then another. And across the table, in the middle of Thomas's sentence, Ellen heard it too. I know now what went through her in that half second, because she told me, and because it is in the chapter that is hers. At the time I knew nothing except that her eyes came to mine for the briefest instant, less than an instant, and then her hand, which had been resting near her glass, moved. She knocked the wine into my lap. A full glass of white, the better part of it, straight across the table and into my lap, and she was already up and out of her chair, already loud, already in motion. "Oh, Mark. Oh, for heaven's sake, look at that, I'm so sorry, that's gone everywhere, that's all over you, go and change before it sets, go on, I'll get a cloth." And to the boys, over her shoulder, in the exact tone of a woman who has been clumsy at her own table and is cross about it, "Don't just sit there, one of you, the kitchen roll, it's by the sink." And the boys moved, laughing, because their mother had thrown wine across the table like a sitcom, because clumsy Mum was funny, because there is nothing in the world less suspicious than spilled wine at a family dinner. Daniel got the kitchen roll. Thomas refilled the glass she had sacrificed and made a joke about cutting her off. And I stood up, in the commotion, in the wet, and the dark stain of the wine sat exactly over the darker truth of it, an alibi soaked into the cloth, and I walked out of that kitchen and up the stairs on legs that did not feel like mine, and nobody, nobody, looked at me twice. I changed in the bathroom with the door locked. I put the trousers in the sink to soak, wine and all, and I stood with both hands on the edge of the basin and I shook. When I came back down, dry, in different trousers, the table had been wiped and the story had moved on and there was a fresh glass at my place that I did not touch. Ellen was serving the crumble. She looked up at me as I sat, one quick look, and her face told me absolutely nothing, which from Ellen is itself a kind of message, and then she asked Daniel whether he had hung his shelves yet, and the evening closed back over the moment like water over a stone. The boys left around ten, full and happy, with foil parcels of leftovers and a photograph taken for Sophie of the two of them eating like civilized people. We waved them off from the door. We did the dishes, mostly in silence, a comfortable enough silence, the radio low. She washed, I dried. At one point our hands met over a serving dish and she did not pull hers away and neither did I, and that was the only thing either of us said about it, and we did not say it out loud. Then we went up, and she went to sleep the way she does, decisively, and I lay there in the dark beside her and did not sleep at all. Because here is what I could not work out, and what kept me staring at the ceiling until the birds started. The glass. The timing of the glass. Half a second, from the first drip to the wine in my lap. Half a second. A clumsy woman does not move that fast. A clumsy woman knocks her glass over reaching for the salt and is embarrassed about it for the rest of the meal. This had not been clumsy. This had been aimed. This had been a decision, made and executed in less time than it takes to gasp, and the more I lay there turning it over the more certain I became, and the certainty was the most frightening thing that had happened to me in the whole of that frightening week. She had not knocked the wine over. She had seen. She had seen, and in half a second she had understood the entire situation, and she had spent a full glass of good wine and a small piece of her own dignity to throw a blanket over me in front of our children, and she had done it so smoothly that two grown men and her own husband had very nearly believed it was an accident. Very nearly. I lay there beside her in the dark, my heart going, and I understood that the secret I had been guarding for six weeks like the last man on a wall was not a secret at all, had perhaps never been a secret, and that the person I had been hiding it from had not only known but had already, silently, without being asked, without my permission, begun to handle it. I did not know yet whether to feel caught or saved. It would turn out, in time, to be the same feeling, but I did not know that yet either. I only knew that she was lying eighteen inches away in the dark, breathing slow and even, and that tomorrow, or the next day, or at some moment of her own choosing, she was going to say something, and that when she did, everything was going to change. I was right about that, at least.

Your mom has already been keyed in to watch for any changes in the shape of your clothing. At this point, it's probably too late to make her not notice. Though it could help for you to stop switching back and fourth so often. If you stay in diapers aroundnher all the time, it may eventually become normal enough for her to not notice it any more. But that would take time. If you really don't want her toc notice then your only other real option is to just avoid your mom for a month. Either that or accept that like with most moms, she is going to know. What you really need to do is sit down with her and have an actual conversation about your wearing diapers. You're an adult now, and part of that is standing up for your own decisions. Tell her this is what you want, what you need. There's nothing medically wrong so she doesn't need to worry. And anything else that needs to be said for you both to be comfortable around each other.

For years I used the Chubs that came in the "lego" boes.   I had a whole collection of the boxes. These days I use one of two wipes (both adult sized).   My favorite is the NSC ones.   However, I have some Seni ones that fit nice in the "wipe dispensor" compartment of my FP diaper bag.