Sissy Room

Chapter 13 — What I Decided Ellen I am going to be honest in this chapter in a way I was not honest with Mark for some time, because this is mine and he is not reading it, and because someone in this story ought to say plainly what was happening, and it was never going to be him. He took months to say the simplest things. I have always been faster. So. Here it is. Somewhere in those weeks I stopped doing it only because it needed doing, and started doing it because I liked it. I want to be precise, because imprecision is how people lie to themselves and I have no patience for it. I did not like the leaking. I did not like that my husband had a condition, or that he had suffered, or any of the genuine difficulty of it. That part I would have lifted off him in a heartbeat if I could. What I had come to like was something else, something that had grown up quietly alongside the difficulty, like a plant you did not plant and then cannot imagine the garden without. I liked being in charge of him. I liked it enormously. And I had reached the point, in those weeks, where pretending otherwise to myself had become more effort than simply admitting it. It crept up on me through the small things, the way the truest changes do. I noticed I had started choosing his clothes for our outings, and that he had stopped objecting, and that I enjoyed the choosing more than the errand strictly required. I noticed I was deciding when he went to bed, on the nights we had been out, that's enough now, up you go, I'll be up to do you in a minute, and that the deciding gave me a small private satisfaction entirely disproportionate to the matter at hand. I noticed I had quietly moved him onto the premium diapers at home as well as out, telling him and myself it was to simplify the stock, one brand, less to track, which was true, and was also not the whole truth, the whole truth being that I liked him in the better ones, liked the substantial fact of them, liked knowing he was well kept whether we were going anywhere or not. None of these were medical decisions. I want that on the record in my own hand. The leaking did not require me to choose his trousers or rule his bedtime or keep him in premium padding around his own house. I did those things because I had discovered, at fifty-two, after thirty years of a marriage I had thought I knew the entire shape of, that I had a appetite I had never been given the chance to feel before, and that its name was authority, and that he, my proud difficult clever husband, had an answering appetite that was its perfect opposite and its perfect match, and that the two of them had been waiting in us the whole time for a reason to wake up. The reason, as it turned out, was a failing bladder. Life is not dignified about how it hands you things. I knew he had felt it too, long before either of us said so, because I am not blind and he is not subtle. I had felt the change in him under my hands for weeks. The first night with the tapes I had felt it, that stillness, that something, and I had taken my hand away and said nothing because it was far too early and I was not yet sure what it was, in him or in me. But it did not go away. It grew. I felt it in the way he stopped fighting the changes and started, though he would have died before admitting it, settling into them. I felt it the day I said good boy on my way out of his office, two words I barely thought about, and felt him go rigid behind me, felt the air change, and walked down the stairs with my own heart going faster than I let my face show. I am good at not letting my face show things. It is one of the few real advantages of being thought of as the practical one. So when it finally surfaced, that evening, the ordinary before-dinner change that became something else, I was less surprised than he was. I had felt him harden under my hand and I had gone still, and I had looked at his face, that mortified flushing face already reaching for the apology, and I had thought, with a clarity that startled even me, no. Not this time. This time we don't pretend. You still like my hands on you, I said. After everything I've been doing to you. You still want me. I meant it as the simple truth it was. But I heard, as I said it, the other thing folded inside it, the thing I had not quite let myself know until it was in the air between us, which was that the everything-I-had-been-doing-to-him and the wanting were not separate facts politely coexisting. They were the same fact. He did not want me in spite of the six months of management. Some part of him wanted me because of it, was drawn to me through it, had found in being kept and decided-for and taken care of by me a thing that lit him up in a way thirty years of ordinary marriage never quite had. And I, going still over him with my heart pounding, understood in the same instant that I was lit up by exactly the mirror of it, that his surrender did to me precisely what my authority did to him, and that we had stumbled, the pair of us, late and astonished, into the one room of the house we had never found the door to. I will not write down the rest of that evening. He didn't, and he's the one who likes words. I will only say that the dinner was ruined and I did not care, and that I lay in the dark afterward with my head on his chest and my hand on the fresh one I had taped on him without either of us quite noticing I'd done it, and I thought: there it is, then. That's what we are now. And I was not frightened of it. I have never been frightened of a true thing. It is the pretending that frightens me. The weekend put the practical question to me, and I am, before everything else, a practical woman, so I dealt with it practically, and what I learned from dealing with it I have kept to myself until now. Thomas was moving flats and wanted my help, two days of it, sorting and packing and telling him which of his furniture was actually rubbish, which is a job that falls to mothers. It meant a night away. And it meant, for the first time since I had taken charge of him, that Mark would be on his own, through a night and the better part of two days, with no one to change him. I considered a nurse. There are agencies; you can have someone come in, a professional, two or three times a day, perfectly discreet, perfectly competent. I looked into it properly, the way I look into everything, and then I decided against it, for one weekend, as overkill, and for another reason I did not examine too closely at the time, which was that I did not especially want another woman's hands doing what had become mine to do. I am being honest, I said. There it is. So instead I taught him. I sat him down the week before and I showed him, properly, the way I had taught three children to tie their shoes, patient and exact and only mildly despairing. How to get the fit right. How to angle the tapes. How to run a finger round the gathers at the leg so they sat out and not tucked, because a tucked gather is what leaks, I have said so a hundred times. He listened, and he tried, and he was, I will give him this, willing, more willing than he would have been six months earlier, the willingness itself a measure of how far we had come. And he could do it. Technically. He could get a diaper on himself that would hold, after a fashion, for a while. But not the way I do it. I want to say that without unkindness, because there is no unkindness in it, it is simply true. He has not got the hands for it, or the eye, or the thirty years of doing for others that teaches you how a thing should sit. His were always a little loose, or a little crooked, the tapes not quite even, the gathers not quite right however many times I reminded him. Good enough to get through a few hours. Not good enough for the long haul, and certainly not good enough for the night, when a man who sleeps like the dead and floods without waking needs the fit to be exactly right or it finds the gap. I went to Thomas's. I helped him sort his rubbish. And Mark, at home, managed. He managed in the way I had privately expected he would, which is to say imperfectly. He texted me on the first evening a photograph, of all things, of the supply stack in the bathroom, neat, faced, the way I keep it, his clumsy attempt to show me he was following the system, look, all present and correct, I'm being good. It touched me more than I let on in my reply. I looked at that photograph of a grown man showing his wife he had kept his diapers tidy in her absence, anxious for her approval, and I felt the whole of what we had become land on me at once, the tenderness of it and the strangeness of it and the simple fact that I loved him, this difficult man, more for the photograph than I would have for any number of competent silent weekends. I typed back two words. Good boy. And then I watched, because the little dots tell you when someone is typing, I watched him begin to reply and stop, and begin again and stop, three times, four, the dots appearing and vanishing for the better part of a minute while he tried and failed to find a way to answer two words that had clearly done to him through a screen exactly what they had done to him in his office, and in the end he sent nothing at all, and I put my phone face down on Thomas's terrible sofa and smiled to myself in a way I was glad no one was there to see. He had leaks, of course. He confessed them when I got home, sheepish. A daytime one that had got past a crooked fit, and another that was nothing to do with the fit at all, that was simply him forgetting to change when he should have, losing track of the hours the way he loses track of everything when he sinks into that work of his, sitting in one too long because no one was there to keep the schedule. That is the thing he never understood about why I do it four times a day on the clock. Left to himself he does not feel the warnings and does not watch the time, and a diaper worn too long fills and finds the edge no matter how well it is fitted. And then the night, the one night I was gone, he had got the fit wrong and his dead sleep had done the rest, and he had woken to a wet bed and stripped it himself and washed the sheets before I was even on the road home, and been, I could see, quietly wretched about all of it, a man who had tried his honest best to manage himself for two days and discovered that his best left him leaking and laundering and short of sleep. I did not scold him. There was nothing to scold. He had tried, and tried honestly, which a year ago he would not have, and the trying was the point. But I took the task back the moment I walked through the door, firmly, completely, and I felt him let it go, felt the relief come off him as I laid him down that first evening home and did it properly, snug and even and right, the gathers out, the tapes level, the way only I seemed able to do it, and I understood something then that I have built the rest of our life on. His needing me was not only the bladder. The bladder a nurse could have handled, or a clumsy self-change, or any number of arrangements. What he needed, what the weekend had proved by its absence, was me, my hands specifically, my management, my taking it from him so he did not have to carry it. The leaks were almost beside the point. The point was the look on his face when I took over again, the particular ease that came into him, the going-quiet of a man who has been doing a job badly and is grateful past words to hand it back to the person who does it well. He had not just failed to keep himself dry. He had been homesick, for two days, for being kept. And I had been homesick for the keeping. That is the part I would not have admitted to him then, and admit here only because it is true. The weekend at Thomas's, useful as it was, I had spent with a low constant awareness of him forty minutes away, managing badly, and a quiet impatience to be home and put it right, to have him back under my hands where I could keep him properly. I did not like him being looked after by no one. I did not like the job being done badly. I wanted it back. I wanted him back, in the specific sense of him being mine to take care of, and the wanting was not duty and was not even only love as I had understood love for thirty years. It was the new thing. The appetite. The one whose name is authority and whose object, it turns out, is him. So I made my decision on the drive home from Thomas's, somewhere on the motorway with the radio low, and I made it the way I make all my decisions, completely, and some time before I told anyone it had been made. The cruise was eight weeks off. The fjords, the North Cape, the eight days we had booked a lifetime ago for an anniversary, back when it was going to be an ordinary holiday for an ordinary couple. It would not be that now. It could not be. And I had been, I realized, treating it as a problem to be managed, eight days of supplies, the logistics of disposal, the excursions with no toilets, a thing to get him through. Somewhere on that motorway I stopped treating it as a problem and started seeing it as what it actually was, which was an opportunity, and a turning point, and the place where the thing we had become in secret could become the thing we simply were. Eight days. Away from the house, away from the children who might call or visit, away from every reason to keep pretending. Eight days at sea where I would be in complete charge of him, where the diapers and the changes and the management were not going to be a shameful secret worked around but simply the shape of our days, in front of strangers we would never see again, in a setting so far outside our ordinary life that the ordinary rules need not apply. I was done, I decided, on that motorway, pretending this was only about a bladder. It had not been only about a bladder for some time. He knew it and I knew it and we had both been waiting, in our different ways, for one of us to be brave enough to say so out loud, and it was going to be me, because it is always going to be me, because that is who we are now and who, I am increasingly sure, we were always meant to be. But not yet. Not at home, where the walls knew us as the people we used to be. I would say it on the ship, or in the cold bright north, somewhere new enough to hold a new truth. I would prepare the way the next eight weeks. I would order what we needed. I would stop, quietly, choosing his protection only in response to his accidents, and start choosing it the way I chose everything else now, because I wanted to, because I liked him a certain way, because it pleased me, and I would see whether he noticed the shift, and whether he minded, and I was fairly sure I already knew the answer to both. And then, somewhere at the top of the world, with the sun refusing to set, I would tell him what I had decided, and ask him the one thing I would ever ask rather than simply decide, and I would find out whether he was as ready as I had become to stop pretending and start living, on purpose, as what we were. I turned up the radio. I drove home to my husband, who had missed me, and whom I had missed, and whom I could not wait to take properly back in hand. The day does not organize itself. But that particular drive, I was not organizing the day. I was organizing the rest of our lives, and enjoying it, and only a little afraid, and not at all sorry.

Egg fried rice and something with chicken. Though, I would be more likely to order from the Japanese place in town. I adore their food!

“Yes mom.” I said in a low embarrassed tone. Looking at the clothes on her phone.

Bourbon for me. 

I'd be ecstatic if I had one night where i didn't wake up to wet during the night. Last fall I started to wear to bed a lot but was interrupted by life at least once a week. Then in late November things slowed down and I had almost a month of nighttime wearing. Family Christmas had us staying overnight at my daughters so that broke that string. I started back up the very next night and wore for 89 straight nights until the wife and I took a vacation. In total I wore to bed 117 of 118 nights and my brain will still not let me wet in my sleep. I'm a little off topic so I guess I'm just venting. Very happy for those who do get to their goal and those who get there and find their way back.