Story and Art Forum

No, I always wear plastic pants or a lined diaper cover over my diaper. Some covers are lined with cloth, and if not, I’ll add a cloth diaper. The combination will help to keep disposables in their place and any leakage will be properly dealt with. During the night I always wear cloth diapers with plastic pants as to my personal opinion they do a better job absorbing urine.

In all honesty I do not remember. I’ve been wearing diapers for well over 57 years now but I can only  imagine it must have been wonderful as it still is today.  

Totally forgot about him being mentioned before (what chapter?), and there I was thinking I was a super fan of this story and knew it all!!!  

From personal experience and I’ve seen a number of people trying to abstain from diapers, it never worked out. To me it is a battle you can’t win. It is another thing to let it take over your entire life, but incorporating it in a reasonable manner, nothing wrong with that. It even might make you a better person feeling more comfortable and stable, I know it does for me.

Chapter 8 — The Experiment The client meeting was real, but I arranged it, and I want to be honest about the arranging, because for a long while afterward Ellen and I disagreed about whether the day that followed was bad luck or something I did to myself, and the truth, which I can admit now and could not admit then, is that I built it. I built it the way you build a trap, carefully, with intent, and then I walked into it, which is the only part the universe contributed. The logistics client had an invoicing problem that did not, strictly, require me to come in. It could have been a call, the way these things almost always are. But in the days after the dentist, lying awake with my pride dusting itself off, I had developed a need, an actual physical need, to prove a thing, and the thing was this: that every defeat of the past months had happened on Ellen's ground. Her cabinet. Her pull-ups. Her rules, her changes, her hands. I had never once been let out into the world to manage myself like a grown man, with no net, on my own terms, and some poisoned little voice was certain that if I only could, I would manage perfectly, and come home, and lay the proof on the table, and we could all stop this nonsense. So I emailed the client and said it would be easier to sort in person, and they agreed, pleased, because clients always prefer you to come to them, and I had my pretext. A real meeting, in the city, a train ride away. And in the days before it I made my plan, the secret act of rebellion that was going to set me free, and the plan was simple and cowardly and exactly suited to the particular shape of my pride. I would not defy Ellen at the door. I had tried defying Ellen to her face and it did not work; she sees through it, she always sees through it. No. I would pass her inspection honestly, in the pull-up she expected, like a good and cooperative man, and then, once I was out of the house and out of her sight, on the train, alone, behind a locked door, I would take it off, and bag it, and walk into that meeting wearing nothing, just a man, just myself, and come home dry and vindicated and none of it would ever have happened in front of her at all. It was, I see now, the plan of a man who wanted to rebel without the courage to be caught rebelling. But I did not see that then. I thought it was clever. The morning of the meeting I dressed in my good suit, and underneath it, the pull-up, on, correctly, as expected, and I came down to the front door where Ellen was waiting to see me off. She straightened my collar the way she does. And then she did a thing she had not done before, not at the door, not on the way out: she pressed two fingers to the front of me, low, through the trousers, a brief and casual press, the check she did at home now performed at the threshold, and felt the pull-up there where it should be, and held my eyes for one beat longer than the gesture needed. "Good," she said. But there was a question folded inside the word that had never been in it before, and we both heard it. She was checking me at the door because some part of her did not trust the day, did not trust me, and the check was her saying so without saying so. And then she did one more thing, the thing that would later sit in the backpack as its own small accusation: she went to the cabinet, took out a spare pull-up, folded it once, and pressed it into my backpack herself, on top of the laptop. "In case," she said. "A long day, two coffees on a train, you never know. You change if you need to. Don't sit in a wet one to save face." She looked at me. "Promise me you'll change if you need to." "I promise," I said, and meant it about as much as I meant most of what I said that morning, which is to say I meant the words and not the thing underneath them. I felt the suspicion in her check, and the care in the spare she packed, and instead of being shamed by either into honesty, which is what a wiser man would have allowed, I felt my rebellion harden, because now I had something to prove not only to the world but to that one raised note in her voice. You think I'll take it off. You think I can't be trusted out of your sight. I could be trusted, I told myself. I would prove it. I would come home dry in the pull-up I was wearing right now and she would never know I had ever planned otherwise. That was the lie I left the house believing. I did not even keep faith with my own rebellion. I had planned to take it off and prove I needed nothing; now, stung by her doubt, I told myself I would keep it on and prove I was trustworthy; and somewhere on the cold platform, between those two contradictory points of pride, I lost track of which thing I was even trying to prove, which is the truest description of that entire day I can give you. "Have you got everything?" she said. "Yes," I said, and she let me go, and watched me down the path, and I did not look back, because I was afraid that if I looked back I would see that she already knew exactly how the day would end. The day undid itself slowly, and every thread of it was one I pulled myself. The train was delayed, which meant standing on a cold platform drinking the coffee I had bought to keep warm, because I am apparently incapable of learning that coffee is not my friend. And on the train, finally moving, twenty minutes behind, I did the thing I had come out of the house to do, the thing I had wavered on at the door under Ellen's two fingers and her folded question, and that wavering was gone now, because the train toilet was the moment of decision and I had never, underneath all the contradictions, truly intended to arrive in that meeting wearing what she'd put me in. I locked the little door. I took it off. I stood in the swaying toilet of an intercity train and stepped out of the pull-up, the protection Ellen had checked at the door not ninety minutes earlier, and I rolled it up and pushed it down into the bottom of my backpack under my laptop and my notes, and I pulled my own ordinary underwear up, the kind I had not worn out of the house in weeks, and my good suit trousers over them, and I looked at myself in the small smeared mirror, a man, just a man, no bulk, no crinkle, no secret, and I felt the thing I had been chasing since the coin in the night. I felt normal. I felt like myself. And under the normal, if I had been honest enough to feel for it, was the small cold knowledge that I had just defeated, in a locked room where she could not see, a precaution my wife had reached out and confirmed with her own hand while looking me in the eye, and that there is a word for doing a thing like that, and the word is not brave. I told myself I had emptied completely before I left. I told myself I would watch my fluids, find a toilet the moment I arrived and again before the meeting and again after, that I would simply pay attention, the way I had told Ellen I could pay attention, and that paying attention would be enough. The delay meant arriving flustered, with no time for the calm preliminary toilet visit I had built my entire plan around. I went straight up. The client's offices were on the fourth floor of a building they had recently and expensively renovated, all glass and pale wood and the smell of new carpet, and I was met and walked into a meeting room and given more coffee, which I drank, because refusing coffee in a meeting marks you as strange, and I sat down to trace their invoicing fault with two of their people and the back of my mind already filing a quiet complaint from the department I was pretending did not exist. The meeting ran long, the way meetings do, the way appointments do, the way everything in my life had started running long the moment I bet against it. And by the time we found the fault, an hour and a half in, the quiet complaint had become a steady insistent pressure, manageable still, but real, and I excused myself with the easy confidence of a man going to solve a small problem, and went to find the gentlemen's. It was closed. There was a sign, printed and laminated, the considerate sign of a considerate building. The renovation was not quite finished. The gentlemen's facilities on the fourth floor were temporarily out of service, with apologies, and would I please use the facilities on the third, or, the sign added helpfully, the ladies' on the fourth, which had been designated for shared use in the interim. I stood in the corridor and read that sign and I felt the whole plan begin, very quietly, to come apart, because here is the thing you have already guessed about me. I could not use the ladies'. I simply could not. A grown man, a stranger, a visitor, walking into the ladies' lavatory in a client's office, what if someone, what would they think, no. It was out of the question. It offended something deep and stupid in me, the same something that had refused the toilet in the dentist's waiting room rather than look obedient, the same something that had stood in a swaying train toilet that very morning taking off the pull-up my wife had checked with her own hand. I would not do it. I would go down to the third floor instead, where the gentlemen's was open and proper and mine to use, and it would cost me only one flight of stairs and two minutes. The stairwell was a cold concrete service stair that smelled of fresh paint, and I let the heavy fire door swing shut behind me and started down, one hand on the rail, the need now loud and insistent but the third floor only a flight away, close enough that I had almost convinced myself I would make it. I was perhaps six steps down when the door above me banged open. It came without warning, a heavy fire door on a sprung hinge flung wide and crashing back against the concrete wall, a flat enormous metal boom in that hard echoing shaft of a stairwell, and the whole of me jumped, the startle going through me head to foot the way a loud noise does, and in the half second of that jump, before I had even turned to see what it was, my body, already at the very end of its patience, simply let go. The fright did what the fright does to a bladder like mine. The contraction came with the flinch, involuntary, total, and I was wetting myself helplessly on the stairs before I had finished flinching, into my own ordinary underwear and my good suit trousers, the warm spread of it down both legs, no pull-up to catch it because I had taken the pull-up off in a train toilet that morning to prove a point, and there was no stopping it now that it had started, there never is. And the person who had come through the door, the person whose ordinary push of an ordinary door had frightened the last of my control out of me, was standing on the landing above, one hand still on the door, watching it happen. I stood on the half landing of a client's service stairwell in a soaked suit and I did not, this time, feel defiant. I felt the bottom drop out of the entire enterprise. There was nowhere to go. The gentlemen's on the third would not help me now, there was nothing left to protect, the damage was complete and visible and running into my socks, and I was a forty minute train ride from home in a suit I could not walk through a public building in, let alone a train, and I had done it to myself, every step, starting with the pull-up I had peeled off on the train and ending here, startled into the last of it on a stranger's stairs, and there was not one single person in the world I could blame for any of it. And she had seen all of it. Her name was Carmen, and she managed the office, and I would learn all of this in the next twenty minutes, which were among the most instructive of my entire life. She was perhaps forty, brisk, in the way of people who run things. She had come through the door already half into a remark about the state of the floor, the words dying as she took in what was in front of her, a visiting consultant frozen on the half landing below her, soaked and scarlet, the thing still visibly happening. And she stopped. I waited for it. You know what I was waiting for by now. The recoil. The flicker of disgust quickly hidden. The terrible kind voice. The story that would be all over that office by Monday, the visiting consultant who, you'll never guess. I stood there in the ruins of my pride and waited to be confirmed, finally, as the humiliation I had always known I was. "Right," said Carmen. "Okay. Don't worry. Stay there a second." That was all. Don't worry. Stay there a second. The tone of a woman who has found a problem and is already three steps into solving it, which, I would learn, is exactly what she was. She went back through the door and came back in under a minute with a roll of blue paper towel and a key, and she said, "The ladies' on four is the only one open up here, the gents is still closed for the refit, half this floor is still closed if I'm honest. Come up, it's just here, there's nobody in it, I'll mind the door." And when I hesitated, because even then, even soaked, the stupid something in me balked at the ladies', she looked at me with a brisk kindness that brooked no nonsense and said, "It's a room with a lock on the door, love. That's all it is. Come on. Nobody's going to say a word, and if they do they'll say it to me." So I went into the ladies', the place my pride had refused only a few minutes and one catastrophe earlier, and she was right, it was a room with a lock on the door, and she put me in the larger stall at the end with the roll of paper and said, "Get yourself cleaned up as best you can. Don't rush. I'm going to nip out, there's a shop two minutes away, a proper menswear, not far. I'll get you some trousers, plain dark ones, near enough to those by the look of them, and the rest, and you can sort yourself out properly. What size?" "You don't have to do that," I said, through the door, my voice not quite working. "Please, I can." "I know I don't have to," she said. "What size?" I told her my size. I stood in a stranger's borrowed stall and told a woman I had met ninety seconds earlier my trouser size and, when she asked, the other size too, the underwear, and she said "back in ten minutes, lock the outer door behind me if it makes you feel better, there's a bolt," and she went, and I heard the outer door close, and I was alone in the quiet of the ladies' on the fourth floor, cleaning myself up with blue paper towel, and something happened to me there that I was completely unprepared for. I nearly wept. Not from shame. I had arrived fully stocked with shame, I had brought it on the train, I had been carrying it for months. What undid me, standing there, was the complete absence of the thing I had been braced for. Carmen had looked at the worst, most humiliating, most exposing moment of my adult life, a grown man soaked to the socks on a service stair, and she had seen, simply, a person with a problem, and she had reached for paper towel and her own purse and her own lunch hour, and there had not been one flicker of the disgust I had spent half a year certain I deserved. The world, given the very worst of me, the thing I had hidden and washed at two in the morning and lied to my wife about and refused the dentist's toilet to avoid, had answered with a roll of blue paper and the word love and a trip to the menswear shop. I sat down on the closed lid in the stall, in the quiet, and put my face in my clean hand for a moment, because it was all, suddenly, too much, the kindness most of all. She came back in nine minutes. She passed the bag under the door, trousers and underwear and, she'd thought of it, a packet of wet wipes, far better than paper towel, "should've got these first, sorry." The trousers were plain, dark, an ordinary cut, close enough to my own that across a room you would never have looked twice, which I was grateful for in the moment and would have cause to reflect on later. She would not take money. I tried, properly tried, had my wallet out, and she waved it away. "Honestly, don't, it's nothing, you'd do the same," and the awful thing, the wonderful thing, is that I am not sure I would have, before. I am not sure the man I had been six months earlier would have known how. She was teaching me something in that stairwell and that stall that Ellen had been trying to teach me for months, and that I would spend the rest of the book finally learning, which is that the help is not the humiliation. The refusing of the help is the humiliation. The help is just kindness, and the world has more of it in it than shame will ever let you believe. "My dad had this," she said, while I changed, talking through the door, easy, to give me something to listen to that was not my own heartbeat. "After his prostate, last year. Mortified, he was, wouldn't leave the house for a month, thought his life was over. And then my mum got hold of it, got him sorted, the proper stuff, the pads and that, and honestly within a few months you'd never have known, he's back at his bowls and everything. It's nothing to be ashamed of, you know. It's so common. You'd be amazed. You just have to let people help you with it, that's the only hard part, and that's only hard because of pride, and pride's no use to you on a service stair, is it." A pause. "Sorry. None of my business. You all right in there?" "Yes," I said, and to my surprise it was nearly true. "Thank you, Carmen. I mean it. I don't, I don't have the words for it, but thank you." "Come on," she said. "I'll walk you back. And don't worry about the room." She held the outer door for me, brisk and easy, as if escorting a soaked stranger back to a meeting were simply one more item on her morning. At the door of the glass meeting room she went in ahead of me, breezy, entirely in command. "Sorry to steal him, everyone, the lift got stuck again, he was trapped in it a good ten minutes, I've told facilities they need to sort it before someone loses a whole afternoon in there." A ripple of sympathy round the table, a joke about the renovation from one of the client's people, and then another of them, grinning, said, "Better on the way back from the gents than on the way there, eh? Trapped in a box for ten minutes, that could've been a proper emergency," and the table laughed, and I laughed too, I made myself laugh, the only person in the room who knew that the emergency had not been avoided at all, that it had already happened, that I was standing there in a stranger's trousers because of the precise disaster he was joking could have occurred. Dramatic irony is a great deal less amusing when you are the irony. But I laughed, and the laugh sealed it, the story given to the room by the one person in the building with the authority to make it true and gilded by a joke at my expense that nobody knew was true, and not a soul looked twice at me or my different trousers. She caught my eye on the way out and gave the smallest nod, you're fine, go, and was gone. I finished the meeting. That is the absurd coda to the whole thing. I went back into that glass room in plain dark trousers near enough to my own that no one glanced twice, and I finished tracing the fault and explained the fix and shook hands and accepted their thanks, and not one of them knew, because Carmen had said the lift, and everyone believes the lift. And before I left, in the quiet of the ladies' on the fourth floor, I did the thing that finished my rebellion off completely, the thing that proved it had never had any spine in it at all. I fished my own pull-up out of my backpack, the original, the one I had peeled off in the train toilet that morning, clean and dry because I had taken it off before any of this happened, and I put it back on, and then the new trousers over it. I changed myself back into exactly what I had left the house wearing, because I could not face the train home, could not face her, with nothing on, the experiment naked and ongoing. My great proof that I needed no protection ended with me, alone in a borrowed bathroom, putting the protection back on so that I could go home and pretend I had worn it all along. My ruined suit trousers and my ruined underwear I had already sealed into the menswear shop's plastic bag and pushed down into the bottom of my backpack, beside the laptop, before walking back into that meeting room; they were now the only wet things I had to hide. The clean underwear Carmen had bought I never even used, the pull-up making it unnecessary, and rather than carry one more thing that would need explaining I pushed it down into the bin in the corner of the ladies', under the paper towels, getting rid of it the way I was getting rid of everything that did not fit the story I was already building. Only later, on the train, did it occur to me what I had done, thrown away a kindness, a brand new thing a stranger had bought me with her own money, into a bin, to keep my wife from finding it. The spare pull-up Ellen had packed I left where it was, in the pack, untouched and dry, because that one I would need to produce. I caught the train home, dry now, in my own dry pull-up and Carmen's trousers, the backpack on my knees, and I had a long quiet ride to think about what had happened to me and what it meant. And here is what I did with all that thinking, all that hard-won lesson, all of Carmen's kindness and her dad and her the refusing of the help is the only hard part. I went home to be praised for it. I got home in the early evening. Ellen was in the kitchen. I came in with the backpack in my hand, dry, in the pull-up I had left in and the trousers near enough to my own that I let myself believe she would not look closely, and I kissed the top of her head and said the meeting went well, they were pleased, all sorted. And she checked me. Of course she checked me, at the door, the way she had checked me leaving, two fingers pressed to the front, and she found the pull-up there, dry, in place, exactly as it should have been. And then, because I wanted the proof to be complete, because a guilty man overdoes it, I took the spare out of the backpack and held it up, still folded, still dry. "Didn't even need it," I said. "Told you. A whole day, no trouble." And something in her face eased, and she said the words I had gone out into the world and ruined a suit and wept in a stranger's bathroom in order to hear. "Good," she said. "Well done. A whole day out and back, your first proper one since this started. I did wonder how you'd get on." And she held my eyes a moment, and there was something underneath the warmth, an opening, a space left deliberately for me to fill, and then she squeezed my arm, pleased with me, pleased with the day, and turned back to her pot. I had what I wanted. I want you to sit with how hollow it was, because I had to. I had set out that morning to prove I could manage a day in the world, and I had come home to my wife's genuine, warm, unguarded praise for having managed a day in the world, and every word of it was built on a lie. I had even held up the dry spare like a trophy. The day had not been managed, it had been a catastrophe rescued by a stranger, and I was standing in my own kitchen accepting a well done for the precise opposite of what had actually happened to me, waving the evidence of my innocence in the air to sell it. The praise I had wanted my whole sick proud quest turned to ash the moment I had it, because you cannot be praised for a lie and feel anything but smaller, and I felt very small indeed, and I said thank you, and I sat down to dinner. "You were gone a long time, though," she said, stirring, her back half to me. "The trains," I said. "You know how they are." "Mm," said Ellen, and did not turn around, and I took that for luck. It was not luck. I know now exactly what it was, because she told me later, much later, when we could laugh about it. She had clocked the trousers the moment I walked in. Not because they were obviously wrong, they were not, Carmen had chosen too well for that, plain and dark and near enough. She had clocked them because she is Ellen, because she has bought and folded and pressed every pair of trousers I have owned for thirty years, and a near-enough pair is still not the pair I had left the house in that morning, and the difference, invisible to anyone else alive, was as plain to her as a stain. So she had stood in her own kitchen and praised me, warmly, for managing a day, while looking at the proof on my own legs that the day had not gone the way I was selling it, and she had let me have the praise anyway, and watched what I did with it, and what I did with it was take it, and hold up a dry spare to gild the lie, and say thank you, and sit down. She knew the whole shape of it inside three seconds. She just wanted to see whether I would tell her. The praise was the last open door, the widest and the kindest of them, well done, that wasn't so hard, and all I had to do to walk through it was say, Ellen, it was. It was very hard. Let me tell you. And I did not. I held up a folded pull-up and lied to her face instead. And she said nothing. She stirred her pot and asked if I was hungry and let me sit down at the table in the trousers that were not quite mine and tell her the safe true half of the day, the meeting, the fix, the grateful client, and she waited. That was the thing she did, and it was the kindest and the hardest thing she could have done, and I understood neither at the time. She waited. She gave me the whole evening. She gave me dinner, and the washing up, and the television, and the walk up the stairs, and the long quiet ritual of bed, and at every single point along the way there was a door standing open that I had only to walk through, four words, I have to tell you, and she was waiting on the other side of it, not with anger, with open hands, ready to take the whole day from me the way she had taken every other weight, if only I would hand it over. I did not hand it over. I had been shown the lesson twice in one day, by Carmen on a stairwell and by my own wife at a kitchen table, the same lesson, the only lesson, let people help you, the hiding is the only hard part, and I lay down beside her that night having learned, apparently, nothing at all, the ruined evidence of my pride locked in the boot of the car, my mouth shut, my secret kept, my experiment buried. She let me keep it. For two days she let me keep it, waiting, giving me every morning and every evening and every easy opening to come to her on my own. And I said nothing, every time, and went on saying nothing, until it became clear, even to her, even to patient her, that the waiting was not going to work, that I would carry this lie until it rotted rather than simply set it down, because some wall in me would not come down on its own and was going to have to be taken down, brick by brick, by her. I did not see her face when she decided that. I was at my desk, pretending to work, keeping my secret. But I have imagined it many times since. I think it was not angry. I think it was something quieter and more final than anger. I think it was the face of a woman who loves a man enough to stop waiting for him to save himself, and who has just understood, fully, that if the wall is ever going to come down, she is the one who is going to have to do it, and that she is going to have to do it without his permission, because his permission is precisely the thing the wall exists to withhold. She found the bag, of course. Two days later, in the boot of the car, under the things, where I had hidden it and then, in the way of these things, half forgotten it, the way you half forget the tell-tale heart under the floor. The ruined suit trousers, the ruined underwear, the wet of the day gone cold and sour in a sealed plastic bag. But by then the bag was almost beside the point. The bag only confirmed what she had known since the moment I walked in wearing trousers that were not quite mine and held up a dry spare and told her I hadn't even needed it. That was the part that damned me, and it was not in the boot. A man can have an accident, that is no one's fault, she had told me so a dozen times. But a man who comes home from an accident and stands in his own kitchen holding up an unused pull-up like a trophy, lying to his wife's face to be praised for the opposite of what happened, that man has chosen something, and Ellen had watched me choose it, and given me two days of open doors to unchoose it, and I had not. The lie was never in the boot. The lie was in the dry spare I had waved in the air, and the two days of open doors I had walked past since. And on the evening of the second day, she came and stood in the doorway of my office with the menswear shop's plastic bag in her hand, and the soaked ruined suit trousers in it, and she did not raise her voice, and she said my name, and I turned around, and I saw that the time for waiting was over. "We need to talk," she said, "about what you're going to wear from now on. And it isn't going to be up to you anymore. You've shown me what happens when it's up to you." And that, reader, is how I lost the last of it. Not to the bladder. The bladder I could have lived with, managed, the way the doctor said, the way Carmen's dad learned to. I lost the last of my say in the matter to my own pride, which would not let me speak four words to a kind stranger, or four words to my own wife, and which therefore left her no choice, in the end, but to take the words, and the choice, and the management of the whole thing, entirely out of my hands. I had wanted, that morning, to prove that I could manage myself in the world with no one's help. I had proved the precise opposite, twice over, and handed her the evidence, and she was about to act on it.