Diaper References

I was diagnosed at 5 with adhd, most recently with anxiety and depression, there was talk about aspergers when I was younger, I read at a highschool level in elementary school

Chapter 18 — The Conversation It began the next morning with a word Ellen had not used before, at least not herself, and a reaction I could not hide. The day after Geiranger was grey and wet, the ship sailing north through a sea the color of pewter, rain streaming down the balcony glass and everyone driven inside toward the lectures and the cafés and the bingo. Ellen was changing me after breakfast, the ordinary morning change, and I was looking past her at the weather when she slid the fresh diaper under me and said, in the same voice she might have used for clean socks, "Lift up. Let's get you into a nice clean Pampers." The heat reached my face before I had decided what I thought of the word. It was the doctor's careless word, the one he had apologized for and Ellen had forgiven, and it was also, though neither of us had said so, the word that had followed us home from his office and waited somewhere just outside the vocabulary of our marriage. Now she had brought it in deliberately, softly, with her hands on me, and whatever I thought of it my body had answered first. "You did that on purpose," I said. Ellen said yes, finished the tapes and pressed the front flat, studying my face with the calm attention of a scientist who has produced the expected reaction and is not yet prepared to publish. I asked what she had learned. "That something happened," she said, which was not an answer and therefore meant she had an answer she was not giving me yet. She gathered the used things into a bag, then sat on the edge of the bed beside my feet. "And before I decide what to do with it, we need to talk." I pointed out that we had talked. We had sat in the car eight weeks earlier and said what we wanted with our eyes open; I had handed her the keys; she had accepted them; there was not, I thought, much unoccupied ground left between us. "We talked about what we want," she said. "Not about the limits. You gave me the decisions at home, and I've been taking them. Clothes, changes, the shape of the day. But a ship isn't home. We're among strangers from breakfast until bedtime, and there are things I may want to say or do here that never arose in our bedroom. This morning I tried one without warning you. I liked it. You may have liked it. That doesn't mean I should keep going until I discover a boundary by crossing it." At first I mistook this for uncertainty, something I was not used to seeing in Ellen, but she was not uncertain. She had simply decided, with the same practical thoroughness she brought to excursion bags and airport transfers, that certainty required preparation. She counted the subjects off on her fingers: privacy, public checks, words, what was actually hers to decide, what happened if she was unavailable, how either of us stopped the whole thing. "I've made an agenda," she said. Of course she had. "Library at eleven. Fully dressed, neutral ground, and no changing mat under you while you answer." I asked whether this was finally the conversation she had postponed at the rail the night before. "No," she said. "We had the conversation in the car park. This is terms and conditions." That was Ellen. Other people might have called it a negotiation of identity or a journey into the hidden rooms of the self. Ellen scheduled terms and conditions between the morning change and lunch. The library was a small wood-paneled room high in the ship, lined with books nobody read and deep chairs nobody sat in, and on a wet sea day, with most of the passengers at bingo or a cooking demonstration, it was, as Ellen had predicted, completely empty. Ellen had brought a pen and a sheet of ship's notepaper, and the paper was not blank. Five headings ran down it in her square handwriting, with a ruled space beneath each one: PRIVACY AND PUBLIC. WORDS. DECISIONS. WHEN ONE OF US IS UNAVAILABLE. STOPPING. She laid it on the little table between our chairs and said, "We already know what we want. We decided that at home. What we haven't decided is what it means outside our bedroom." There it was, the distinction I had missed. We were not two people confessing for the first time. The doctor had offered me a way back toward my old life, and I had chosen this one; I had told Ellen what the changes and the checking had become to me; she had told me that taking care of me had become something she wanted in its own right; and none of that needed saying again simply because the scenery outside the window had changed. What remained was less romantic and, for that reason, more important. We had decided where we were going. We had not marked the edges of the road. "I gave you the right to decide," I said. "It feels a little late to arrive with a list of things you may not decide." Ellen turned the page so the headings faced me. "You gave me authority inside something we both want. You didn't give me the right to decide whether you still want it, or where your consent ends. I can choose what you wear. I cannot choose your boundaries for you. If I do, they're only my preferences." I told her, because it was true, that I did not know what my boundaries were. "I know," she said, and there was no triumph in it. "You've spent months learning not to argue with me. That is why you are not answering immediately. Read the headings. Imagine me getting each one wrong. I'll fetch tea." She left me there with the page, and my first answer to every heading was that whatever Ellen chose would be fine. It was the answer I had trained myself to give, the answer that had brought me more peace than any amount of managing myself ever had, and on most days it was true. It was also useless. She had not asked what I trusted her to do. She had asked what I needed her not to do, and the two questions, which I had been treating as opposites, turned out not to be opposites at all. I thought of the man at Geiranger saying no to the spare. Ellen had not treated his refusal as ingratitude or tried to save him harder; she had stopped, and his no had not rejected her kindness, had not made the offer less generous or the need less real. It had only given the kindness a limit. So I did what she had told me and imagined her getting the first heading wrong. I imagined our dinner table, Paul absorbed in a menu, Rita watching everything, and Ellen choosing one of our private words precisely because Rita might understand it. The thought did not produce the warm private shock of the changing mat. It made me feel exposed in a way I no longer wanted to pretend was pleasure. When Ellen returned with two teas, I had not written anything, because I am still myself and a blank page remains one of the most effective ways to empty my head. But I had an answer. "No deliberately revealing language where strangers could understand," I said. "Not as a game. Not to see whether they notice. Nothing that tells them what I'm wearing or what you do for me." Ellen put down both cups and sat. She did not bargain or ask whether I was sure; she only tested the edges, because a rule she could not apply was no use to either of us. "Pampers," she said. I told her private. "Diaper. Wet. Change." Private, I said, and anything younger than those, if there was anything younger in her head. There was the smallest movement at one corner of her mouth. "There is," she said. I told her I had suspected as much. She asked about good boy, which was more difficult, because on its own it could be nothing more than an ordinary endearment, the kind of thing a wife might say after her husband had volunteered for something foolish or managed a difficult day, and nobody could know the weight it carried in private. "Not while you're checking me in public," I said. "Not beside one of the private words. I'm not asking you to speak like a solicitor every time we're outside. I mean don't use a word deliberately because somebody might understand." Ellen considered that and said, "So the boundary is intention as well as vocabulary." Yes, I said. If something slipped out, it slipped out; we would not turn an accident into a catastrophe. But she could not spend my privacy for the thrill of nearly being caught. Ellen wrote beneath the first heading: PRIVATE LANGUAGE STAYS PRIVATE. ACCIDENTS ARE ACCIDENTS. Then she looked at me and said, simply, "Agreed. Your privacy isn't mine to spend." She accepted it so cleanly that for a moment I had nothing to push against. I had expected questions, perhaps disappointment, perhaps the small resistance of a woman finding a fence where she had imagined open ground, and there was none. The children, I said, were included. "Obviously," she said. No care-related jokes they could piece together, no hints, nothing that made them look back at an ordinary sentence and understand a private life we had not chosen to share. "They don't need to know," Ellen said. "Keeping something private isn't the same as being ashamed of it." Months earlier I could not have understood the distinction. Now it seemed as plain as the rain on the glass. We moved to public checks. The discreet ones could stay, I said, and Ellen made me define discreet, because she had not prepared five headings in order to leave the important words vague. A light hand at the back of my trousers, the ordinary affectionate pat that nobody would read twice, was fine; nothing at the front in a crowd; no looking inside unless there was a locked door between us and the world. "That is already how I do it," she said. I told her I knew, that I was saying yes to it rather than accusing her of doing it wrong, and she wrote: PUBLIC MEANS INVISIBLE. MORE THAN A PAT REQUIRES A PRIVATE ROOM. "And if I say not here?" I asked. "Then not there," she said. Even if she thought I was only embarrassed? She would take me somewhere private and ask again. "I don't overrule a no by deciding I understand it better than you do." I believed her, not because of the sentence, though it was the right sentence, but because I had watched her return the spare to our bag the day before when every practical instinct in her must have told her the old man would be better off wearing it. Words came next. Ellen wanted to know whether she had to ask permission before every new one, and I found that I did not want that either, because permission requested in advance would be safe but would remove the small shock of discovery that had gone through me on the changing mat. I told her she could try them in private, one at a time, and look at me the way she always looked at me; if I said no, the word went, and I did not have to build a case against it. She wrote: NEW WORDS MAY BE TRIED IN PRIVATE. NO ENDS THE EXPERIMENT. Then she asked whether Pampers stayed. "Privately," I said. "Yes." She made a small tick beside the line and did not reward the answer or repeat the word, which was more effective than either. Then we marked the size of the authority I had given her, and this was where the conversation might have become absurd if it had not mattered so much. The care was hers: what I wore, when I was checked or changed, and the practical planning that made it possible. My daily clothes and routine could be hers too, because we had been living that way for months and both preferred it; meals and bedtime could be included when they belonged to that same rhythm. My work was not hers, nor were our money, our children, our friendships, or any decision that properly belonged to both of us. Ellen looked faintly offended at the suggestion she might want my client passwords. "I've enough to manage," she said. I added one thing she had not put on the agenda: none of it could be used to win an unrelated argument. If we were angry about money, or one of the children, or something cruel or foolish I had said at breakfast, she could not invent a care rule because she had the power to make me follow it; the care could not become a punishment for being a bad husband. Ellen nodded once and added the other half: I could not invoke a boundary to escape apologizing for being a bad husband. We agreed, and she wrote the severest line on the page: NO NEW RULES IN ANGER. CARE IS NOT A WEAPON. It was the rule we needed least that morning, which was why it belonged there. Rules made only when they become urgent have a habit of arriving too late. The fourth heading was hers being unavailable, and I said the thing she had not expected, which was that she was allowed not to want to do it sometimes. She looked up sharply, and I had to explain that I believed her when she said she liked the care, but liking something did not make it an obligation every hour for the rest of her life. She could be ill, tired, angry, away for a day, or simply not in the mood to be responsible for me. She could say so, and it would not mean she had taken anything back. "And what do you do?" she asked. Whatever we agreed for that day, I told her. I could look after myself, follow instructions she had left, or ask only for the part I physically could not do. "I still arrange the system," she said. Naturally, I told her, and that satisfied her. ELLEN MAY BE OFF DUTY. THE AGREEMENT REMAINS. She read the page from the top, her lips moving slightly, and I watched her check the list against whatever list already existed in her head. It was not romantic writing. That made it, in its way, intensely ours. Other couples renew their promises with poetry. We drafted operating conditions on ship's stationery while rain crossed the Arctic sea. "Last item," Ellen said, touching the final heading. "A safeword." I knew the term in the vague way most people know it, from jokes and half-understood references, but I did not know what it meant in practice and said so. Ellen drew a line down the empty space beneath STOPPING and explained it with the patience she uses when she has researched something and knows I have not. If I said no to a word, she would stop using that word. If I said not here, she would take me somewhere private. If I said wait during a change, her hands would stop until she knew what was wrong. Those were specific limits; the rest of the arrangement remained standing. On the other side of the line she wrote one word: EVERYTHING. "The safeword means this side," she said. "Everything pauses. I stop touching you. I stop deciding. I stop using any of the private language. We're no longer inside the roles we've agreed. We're simply husband and wife, on equal ground, finding out what happened. Nothing starts again until we both say it can." I asked when I was supposed to use it, and she gave me the answer she had evidently prepared. If embarrassment stopped being part of what I wanted and became real fear; if something hurt; if I felt trapped in a way I had not chosen; if I was too overwhelmed to work out which smaller no I needed; if we were angry and I no longer trusted that the care was separate from the argument; or if I simply could not tell whether what I was feeling was still a yes. "You do not wait until it becomes an emergency," she said. "And when don't I use it?" It was not, she explained, a clever way to win an ordinary disagreement. If I preferred another shirt, I should say I preferred another shirt. If I disliked the bedtime she had chosen, I could tell her that without pulling the whole structure down around us. But, and she made me look at her for this part, I was always allowed to use it, for any reason, and she would always stop. If I used it over a shirt or a bedtime there would be no punishment, no accusation that I had done it wrong; afterward we would ask why an ordinary disagreement had not felt sufficient. The word was for clarity, not victory. We chose a word neither of us would say by accident. I will not put it here. There are very few things I have kept out of this account, as you have probably noticed, sometimes to your discomfort and often to mine, but that word belongs only to us. Then I told Ellen she could use it too, and surprised her for the first time that morning. If she was overwhelmed, I said, if I turned being looked after into a demand she could not carry, if she needed to step out of the thing we had chosen and speak to me simply as my wife, she had the same right to stop it. She considered this for a long moment and wrote the last line: THE PAUSE BELONGS TO BOTH OF US. Below it she signed her name and passed me the pen. I pointed out that the document was not legally binding. "Good," she said. "Your signature is dreadful." I signed anyway, and she folded the page twice and put it into her handbag, not because either of us needed proof, but because Ellen does not throw away a completed list. "Lunch soon," she said, standing. I reminded her that the before-lunch change came first. "Good," she said. "You have learned the timetable." In the cabin, Ellen locked the door, and the small click mattered now, because it marked the line we had drawn in the library. On one side were the corridors, our tablemates, our children at home, Ari coming and going, and the whole unknowing world. On this side were the words we had chosen and the privacy in which we had chosen to use them. She laid me down and checked me properly, then opened a fresh diaper and looked at me, giving me time enough to stop her. "Let's get you into a clean Pampers," she said, and the word went through me again, but differently now, not as a test and not as a surprise, carrying with it the locked door and the agreed boundary and my own dreadful signature folded in her bag. "Yes," I said. She smiled and did not say it again. Once was enough.

Amazing job 

Thank you for the kind words and for catching that mistake, WBdaddy—I really appreciate it. I've fixed the inconsistency with the computer in the story. I'm so glad you've been enjoying it!

I tried posting. ZERO replies! Sad...we'll get the other group going though!