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I haven't. But now I certainly do have a new diaper to try! 

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https://nappydapper.com Never heard of them! Anyone?  I ordered a sample to try.

Thanks for the feedback. I try to write a s realistically as possible in my stories. I want to feel like this could really have happened. It is nice to hear that you, as readers, recognize and appreciate that in this story as well. What I also wanted to try with this story is to see if it is possible to do that with a slightly older character (and by slightly older, I mean someone my own age). Chapter 7 — The Dentist The fight started over the dentist and it was, I see now, the first time I really fought, as opposed to sulked, and I want some credit for it even though I lost, because losing a fight you actually fought is a different thing from caving, and I had done a great deal of caving and not much fighting up to that point. The appointment was for two o'clock on a Tuesday. A routine check, a clean, perhaps a look at a tooth on the lower left that had been complaining when I drank anything cold. Forty-five minutes at the outside, probably less. And I had decided, somewhere in the back of my mind across the preceding days, that this was going to be the appointment where I proved a point. The point was this. I was being managed like an invalid for a condition that, in the right circumstances, I could perfectly well stay ahead of. The accidents happened when I was absorbed, deep in work, not paying attention. Fine. But a dental appointment is the opposite of that. You sit in a chair, fully conscious, doing nothing, for half an hour. You are not absorbed in anything except your own discomfort. If I went to the toilet immediately before, emptied completely, and sat in that chair for three quarters of an hour, I would be fine, and walking out of there dry would prove that I was not, in fact, a man who needed wrapping up at all hours, that there were ordinary controlled situations a grown adult could simply handle. I had even, that day, prepared the ground in my own private way. At lunch I drank almost nothing, half a glass of water and no coffee, on the reasoning, which felt to me like cunning and was in fact the first link in a chain I was forging entirely by myself, that less in meant less out, and that a man going into an appointment dry on the inside was a man who could not possibly disgrace himself. I was rather pleased with this strategy. I have noticed that I am most pleased with my strategies in the exact moments before they betray me. And it was over that abstemious lunch, pushing the water away, that I first floated the plan aloud. "I'm not going to bother with anything for the dentist this afternoon," I said, as though it were nothing, as though I were mentioning the weather. "It's a quick one. I'll go before we leave, I'm not drinking much, I'll be fine." She put down her fork. "You're not going to bother with anything." "It's a checkup, Ellen. Half an hour. I think I can manage a checkup." "We'll discuss it before you leave," she said, which I took, idiot that I was, for the beginning of a negotiation I might win, and which was in fact merely Ellen declining to argue with a mouthful of lunch in the room. I should have heard the difference. I heard what I wanted to hear, which is a lifelong talent of mine. So when I came down at half past one, ready to go, I tried it on properly, the position I had decided on. "I don't need anything for this one. I'll go to the toilet right now, before we leave. It's a check and a clean, I'll be in and out in three quarters of an hour. And I've barely had anything to drink." She looked at me the way you look at a man who has said something he is going to regret. "You'll go before we leave," she repeated, "and." "And nothing. And that's it. I'll go, and I'll sit in the chair, and I'll be fine, and we'll come home. It's three quarters of an hour, Ellen. A check and a clean. I'm not going to flood a dentist's chair, that's absurd." "You flooded your office chair a fortnight ago." "Because I was nine hours deep in a live system fault and not thinking about my own body. This is the opposite of that. I'll be sitting there thinking about nothing else, because there's nothing else to think about in a dentist's chair except how much you'd like to be anywhere else. I'll be paying attention the entire time. That's exactly the situation where I don't need it." It was, I still maintain, not a stupid argument. There was logic in it. The trouble with making a logical argument to Ellen is that she has usually already run your logic, and a few branches you have not thought of, and arrived at the answer before you have finished your opening sentence. "No," she said. "You are not walking out of this house with nothing. I'll tell you why, and then we're done discussing it, because we'll be late. You don't get reliable warning. That's the whole condition, that's the thing the specialist said twice and the doctor said before him. Your good plan depends on a warning you've been told, by professionals, that you do not get. And appointments run over. They always run over. You'll have a filling you didn't expect, or he'll be behind, or the hygienist will find something, and your three quarters of an hour becomes two, and you'll be lying back in a chair with your mouth full of equipment and no way on earth to get up and go." She folded her arms. "So no. For an appointment of unknown length, where you can't get up, I'd want you properly in a taped brief. The secure kind. The night kind. On, before we leave." "Absolutely not." The words were out of me before I'd thought, hot, reflexive. "A diaper. To the dentist. In the middle of the afternoon. No. That is not happening, Ellen, I am not lying back in that chair taped into a, no. Out of the question." "It's an unknown length of time and you can't excuse yourself once you're in the chair. A brief is the sensible thing, and you know it." "It's overkill is what it is. It's treating me like I'm bedridden. I am walking into a dentist's office on my own two feet for a checkup, El, I am not being wheeled in. If, if, you insist I wear something, then it's a pull-up. The pull-up. That's the most I'll do. I can put it on myself, take it off myself if I get the chance, it's under my own trousers, and nobody, including the dentist, is any the wiser. That's the line. The pull-up or I genuinely walk out of here and drive myself and wear what I like." She let the silence run for a moment, looking at me, weighing it, and then she gave a small put-upon sigh, the sigh of a woman conceding a hard-won point against her better judgment. "Fine," she said. "The pull-up. Not the brief. But you wear it, and that's not moving, and if your good plan works then it stays dry and you can tell me you told me so the whole way home." And I felt it, reader, the warm idiot glow of victory. I had come downstairs intending to wear nothing, and somewhere in ninety seconds of argument I had ended up agreeing to a pull-up and feeling, absurdly, that I had won, because I had fought off the diaper, I had held the line against the taped brief, I had negotiated my protection down to the minimum and made her give ground. It did not once occur to me, getting into the car still warm with my triumph, that a woman who runs my logic three branches ahead of me before I have finished speaking might have named the diaper precisely so that I would fight my way, gratefully, exactly to the pull-up she had wanted me in from the start. That the brief had never been the real demand. That I had not talked her down to the pull-up at all. She had talked me up to it, and let me keep the receipt and call it mine. I did not see any of that. I saw a man who had won an argument with Ellen, a rare and precious thing, and I intended to enjoy it. I emptied completely, twice, like a man checking a parachute. I got in the car in my resented pull-up with my point still very much to prove, and I sat there composing, all the way into town, the gracious little speech I would deliver on the way home, dry, vindicated. See? Forty-five minutes. Not a drop. I do know my own body, Ellen. I really did rehearse it. I am telling you this so that what happened lands with the full weight it deserves. The waiting room had a fish tank, a wall clock that ticked, a water cooler in the corner with a stack of little paper cups, and a receptionist behind a low counter who knew Ellen by sight because Ellen makes a point of being known by the people who run things. We checked in, and Ellen, the moment the receptionist had taken my name, turned to me and asked, lightly, "Do you want the toilet before you sit down? It's just there." "No," I said, and this time it was the truth, because I had emptied twice at home like a man checking a parachute and there was nothing in me to give. "I'm fine. I'm all set." What I was, was thirsty. The not-drinking at lunch, my cunning strategy, had left me with a dry mouth and a tickle at the back of my throat that I became aware of the moment I sat down, and there in the corner was the cooler, and the little cups, and I thought, a sip. Just a sip, to take the dryness off, it's barely a mouthful, it changes nothing. So I got up and took a paper cup and filled it and drank it, and it was cold and good and the dryness came straight back the way it does, the way one sip always summons the second, and I filled the cup again, and drank that too, and stood by the cooler a moment longer and very nearly had a third before I caught Ellen's eye across the waiting room and put the cup down. She did not say anything. She did not have to. I had spent my lunch carefully drinking nothing in order to go into that appointment dry, and then I had stood in the waiting room and poured two cups of cold water into myself to fix the thirst the strategy had caused, undoing the entire plan in ninety seconds at a cooler, and the only person in the building who fully understood what I had just done to myself was sitting eight feet away pretending to read about celebrity kitchens. I sat back down beside her, the water already somewhere inside me beginning the slow work it does, and told myself two cups was nothing. Two cups was a great deal. I knew it was a great deal. I sat on the knowledge the way I sat on all the others. We were early, because Ellen is always early. We sat. I watched the fish. The clock ticked toward two and I felt fine, genuinely fine, dry and in control and increasingly confident that I was about to win the only argument of this entire saga that I had so far been allowed to enter, and Ellen sat beside me with her magazine and let me stew in my own confidence, which should have warned me, because Ellen letting you enjoy a position is Ellen waiting for the position to collapse on its own. At two o'clock the receptionist said the dentist was running behind, ten minutes, perhaps closer to fifteen, so sorry, there'd been a complication with the morning's last patient. Ten to fifteen minutes, on top of the two o'clock, on top of the two cups of water now making their unhurried way through me. I felt the first faint announcement of it then, the distant early word from a department I had been pretending was closed, and I told myself there was time, there was loads of time, I'd go in before they called me and it would be fine. Twenty minutes passed. The word from the distant department grew less distant. And at the point where I judged it had become sensible, prudent, the responsible thing, to get up and visit the toilet down the corridor before I was called in, at that precise moment, as if she had been timing it, as if she could read the inside of my bladder through the side of my body, Ellen looked up from her magazine and said: "Do you want to nip to the toilet while we're waiting? You've a few minutes." And I want you to understand the exquisite stupidity of what happened next, because it is the hinge of the whole afternoon. I had been about to go. I had decided to go. I was, I think, within a second or two of actually rising from the chair to go. And because she asked, because she said it out loud, in the waiting room, where the receptionist might hear, the going was instantly poisoned. If I got up now, this second, it would look like I had got up because she told me to. It would look like a man being sent to the toilet by his wife. The receptionist would see a grown man dispatched to wee on his wife's instruction, and file it, the way the dental hygienist would later file the rinse, and I could not, I simply could not, hand that picture to the room. "I'm fine," I said. For the second time that afternoon. The second of the two great lies. "I went before we left. I'm fine." And I stayed in the chair. I stayed in the chair with a real and growing need and two cups of water behind it, out of nothing but the refusal to be seen obeying, and I crossed my legs, casually, as though settling, and waited for them to call my name, which they did, of course, at the worst possible moment, before the need had any chance of resolving itself, and I got up and went in. I was not fine, and I had known it even as I said it. A small honest voice somewhere below the pride had told me, plainly, that the sensible answer was yes, of course, it costs nothing, go. And I had overridden it, precisely because going would have meant conceding the point, conceding that I needed managing, that her question was correct and my whole thesis wrong. I would rather sit there with a growing need than walk down that corridor and prove her right in front of the receptionist. That is how stupid pride is. It will trade your actual comfort, your actual dignity, for the appearance of not having been corrected. And Ellen, when I refused, had only looked at me over her magazine, one look, heard the lie for what it was, and decided not to fight me on it. The not-fighting was its own small terrible thing. It meant she had calculated that the lesson would teach itself better than she ever could, and that she was content to let it. It was the toast "all right" all over again. It was "we'll see how it does." It was Ellen stepping back to let the world make her argument for her, because the world makes it so much more thoroughly than she ever could. The tooth on the lower left was not nothing. The tooth on the lower left was a filling, and then, while he was in there, a second smaller one beside it that he might as well do now while you're numb, no sense bringing you back. The check became a clean became two fillings, and the three quarters of an hour I had staked my entire argument on became, as Ellen had said it might, calmly, in our kitchen, while I told her she was being absurd, something a great deal longer. They had started late on top of it, the ten minutes the receptionist had warned about stretching to nearer twenty, so that by the time I was tipped back under the light I was already well past the moment I'd promised myself I would be walking out the door. I lay back in the chair with the light in my eyes and the dam, the bib, clipped round my neck, and my mouth held open and full of his hands and his instruments and the little sucking tube, and somewhere around the start of the second filling I became aware that the faint beginnings I had overridden in the waiting room had matured, in the way these things do, into a serious and growing situation, and that I was now in precisely the position Ellen had described to me word for word an hour and a half earlier. Flat on my back. Mouth full of equipment. A drill going. No way on earth to raise a hand and say, around all of it, that I needed to get up and leave the room, and even if I could, what would I say, and where would I go, and how would I explain it, and the whole time the pressure climbing and the pull-up, my resented backstop, my proof of nothing, waiting underneath me to find out whether it had been worth bringing after all. I held on for a long time. I held on through the check and the first filling, gripping the arms of the chair, doing the breathing, thinking about anything else, and I want it recorded that I fought it the way I had once fought it in stopped traffic, with everything I had, and that it made, in the end, exactly as much difference. It was somewhere in the second filling, the one he was doing while he was in there anyway, no sense bringing me back, that the fighting stopped being a thing I had any say in. It went the way it goes. Not a small leak, nothing so modest. A decision, made by my body without me, while I lay flat in a dentist's chair with a man's hands in my mouth. It was warm and it was sudden and it was a great deal, and the pull-up took what a pull-up takes, which is a lot, far more than the pad would have, and I lay there feeling it spread and soak and fill while the dentist, eighteen inches away, said "rinse and spit for me," utterly unaware that anything was happening below the bib at all. I rinsed. I spat. I sat up when he raised the chair, slowly, carefully, and the pull-up was past full, heavy, and as I came upright I felt the one thing I had been dreading beyond the rest, the warm escape at the leg where the gather could hold no more, a spread of wet down the inside of my right thigh and into the fabric of my trousers, dark, visible, mine. The hygienist saw it. She was tidying the tray as I stood, and her eyes went to the wet patch on my trouser leg the way anyone's eyes go to a wet patch, before you can stop them, and I saw her see it, and I felt the floor of the world drop away. And then she did the kindest, most ordinary thing, and it was worse than cruelty. "Oh, mind the splashes," she said, with a little laugh, nodding at my leg, already reaching for a paper towel from the dispenser. "The rinse cup gets everyone, that spray bounces right off and you don't feel it. Here. It dries in a few minutes, honestly, you'd think we'd have solved it by now, soaking everybody." She held the paper towel out to me, friendly, completely certain that what she was looking at was water from the little rinsing cup, because that is the explanation that exists in her world, the explanation that fits a dental surgery, and the true explanation simply was not available to her because why on earth would it be. "Thanks," I heard myself say. "The rinse, yeah. Gets you every time." And I took the paper towel and dabbed at the evidence of my own flooded body and agreed with her that the rinse cup was a menace, and she moved on, satisfied, and I stood there having been handed, by a kind stranger, the perfect alibi, and feeling not relief but a deep and specific shame, because I had not earned the alibi, I had earned the opposite, and being let off by someone who had no idea what they were letting me off for is its own particular humiliation. She thought she was being nice to a man splashed by a cup. She had no idea she was being nice to a man who had wet himself in her chair after telling his wife, in the waiting room, that he was fine. I walked out to reception with my coat held casually in front of me, the oldest trick, and Ellen was already standing, already had her card out to pay, and she took one look at the coat held in front of me and the careful way I was walking and she knew the entire story without a word, the way she always knew the entire story. She paid. She made pleasant conversation with the receptionist about the weather and the next appointment. She was, in public, completely normal. It was in the car that the temperature dropped. She did not start the engine. She sat with her hands in her lap and looked through the windscreen at the car park and let the silence do the opening, and when she spoke her voice was quiet and level and colder than I had heard it in this entire business, colder than the laundry basket, colder than anything. "Don't," she said, "tell me about the rinse." "Ellen." "I heard her. I was standing right there. She thinks the cup splashed you. That's a kind woman doing you a kindness she doesn't know she's doing, and you took it, and I understand why you took it, and we will never embarrass that woman by correcting her. But you will not sit in this car and tell me about the rinse. Not me. I'll have the truth in this car if nowhere else." I said nothing. The truth did not need saying. It was soaking, cooling, down my right leg. "I asked you," she said, "in the waiting room, in front of no stakes at all, one simple question. Did you want the toilet. And you looked at me, and you decided that being seen to be managed mattered more to you than not wetting yourself in a public chair, and you lied to me. Not about the bladder. The bladder I have made my peace with, the bladder is not your fault. The lie is your fault. You looked at me and you chose your pride over the truth, in front of a stranger, and the stranger nearly had to mop you up for it." She turned in her seat then and looked at me, and there was no triumph in it, none, which was the worst part. I could have borne triumph. I could have fought I told you so. What was in her face was not triumph. It was a decision being made. "Here is what is going to happen," she said. "We are going to drive home. And when we get home, you are not going to clean yourself up and put on a fresh pull-up and have us both pretend this was an unlucky afternoon. When we get home I am going to put you in the brief. The taped one. The one I said, this morning, that I wanted you in for exactly this, an appointment of unknown length where you couldn't get up, and that you argued me out of, and felt clever for arguing me out of. You won that argument. This is what winning it cost you. So you'll wear the thing now that you wouldn't wear then, for the rest of the day, and you'll see the difference, because that brief would have held everything you spilled in that chair and you would have walked out of there dry and none of this would have happened, and I want you to spend the afternoon knowing it." She let that sit. It was worse than anger, the calm of it, the simple laying-out of a thing I could not argue with because it was exactly, provably true. "And one rule," she said. "You don't touch the tapes. Not to check them, not to adjust them, and not to take it off. If you need the toilet, you come and find me, and you tell me, and I'll untape you and you can go, and if it's still dry I'll simply tape you back into the same one, carefully, good as new. That's the only way it comes off, through me. You've spent today proving you can't be trusted to manage your own protection out in the world, so today you don't manage it at all. You come to me. That's all you have to do. Come and ask." It sounded almost gentle, put that way. Come and ask. I'll deal with it. It did not sound, in the car, like a trap. It sounded like the easiest thing in the world. I did not yet know my own pride well enough to hear the trap in it. She did. She knew exactly what she was setting, and exactly who I was, and she set it anyway, and let me drive home thinking I'd been let off lightly. I want to tell you I accepted this. I did not accept this. This is the chapter where I fought, remember, and I was not done fighting, even now, even soaked, even wrong. "That's not happening," I said. "I'm not, Ellen, I'm a grown man, I'm not going to come and ask you for permission every time I need the toilet like I'm, no. I'm not." "Like you're what?" "You know what. It's humiliating. I can untape a diaper, El, it's not a safe with a combination, I don't need to be undressed by my wife every single time." "You don't need to be," she agreed. "You're choosing the alternative, which is to come and ask, because you can't be trusted with the alternative to the alternative, which is doing it yourself and lying to me about how it went. You've done that twice today. So no, you don't manage the tapes today. You come and ask. It's the simplest thing in the world. It costs you nothing but the asking." "And if I just say no? If I just deal with it myself?" She held my eyes. "Then you'll have proved my point a third time," she said, "and we'll both know it, and I'd really rather you didn't, because three times in one day is a lot even for you." Not a threat. Simply information, delivered with absolute certainty. "But you won't do it yourself. And you won't come and ask either, not at first, because your pride won't let you walk into the kitchen and say the words. I know exactly what you'll do instead. You'll put it off. You'll tell yourself you'll go in a minute, you'll wait until you can't avoid it, and somewhere in there your bladder will make the decision for you the way it always does, and then you'll have done it in the brief and you'll come to me embarrassed about that instead. Either way it ends in the same place. The only thing you get to choose is how much you torture yourself getting there." I said nothing, because there was nothing to say to a prophecy that detailed except to go and fulfil it, which, God help me, is exactly what I then did. I will not pretend the rest of the afternoon was comfortable, because it was not, and it was not meant to be. She took me upstairs the moment we were through the door, before I could retreat into the office and the work and the pretending, and she stripped the wet trousers and the failed pull-up off me with the brisk impersonal efficiency of a woman who has decided something, and she laid me down on the towel on our bed in the broad afternoon daylight, which was its own strangeness, all of this in daylight, the curtains open, the ordinary world going past the window, and she taped me into the night diaper with the same ninety competent seconds she used in the dark, except that in the dark it had felt like care and in the daylight, today, it felt like exactly what it was, which was a consequence, snug and total and not to be argued with. "There," she said, when it was done. Pressed flat to check the seal. "That's how it's done." But the warmth that usually lived in those words was banked today, held back, deliberately withheld, and its absence told me more than the diaper did. "You remember the rule," she said, standing. "You don't touch the tapes. If you need to go, you come down and find me and say so, and I'll sort you out. That's all. Now put your tracksuit bottoms on and come down, or work if you can, I don't care which. But the tapes stay shut until I open them." And she went downstairs. I sat on the edge of the bed for a while in the daylight, in the thing, furious and ashamed and very far from defeated in my own mind, still composing arguments, still hunting for the loophole. And then I went through to my office, the old box bedroom at the end of the landing, and sat at my desk and tried to work, in my tracksuit bottoms, in the diaper, telling myself the afternoon would pass and the evening would come and this would be over. Around four o'clock the need came. The ordinary need. And here is where Ellen's prophecy began, with awful precision, to come true. All I had to do was go downstairs and find her and say the words. I need the toilet. Four words. She would untape me, and I would go, and she would tape me back into the same dry one, and the brief would have served only as the precaution it was, never called upon, and the afternoon would have cost me only a little dignity and a great deal of being right. That was the whole of it. That was the simple, almost gentle way out she had given me in the car. I could not take it. I sat at my desk with the need growing and I could not make myself stand up, go down the stairs, walk into the kitchen where she was, and say I need the toilet, will you take it off me. My pride, the same pride that had lied in the waiting room rather than be seen to be managed, simply would not let me present myself to my wife and ask to be undone like a parcel. It was too much. It was the one concession too far. So I told myself I'd go in a minute. I told myself I'd finish this one thing first. I told myself she was busy, I'd wait until she came up, I'd catch her on the landing and it would be less of a production. I built, in the space of twenty minutes, an entire architecture of postponement, every beam of it made of pride, and the need climbed the whole time, and I did the thing I had done at the dentist and done in the car and done in my office chair, which is the only thing I ever seemed to do, which is wait too long. It went the way it goes. While I sat there negotiating with myself over whether asking was beneath me, my body closed the negotiation in its usual fashion, without me, and I wet the diaper at my desk, fully, exactly as she had said I would, having tortured myself for half an hour to arrive at precisely the destination she had named in the car. And then I did the truly stupid thing, the thing that turned a lesson into the lesson. I hid it. I did not go and tell her. Ashamed of the wet trousers I had not managed to avoid, ashamed of having proved her right yet again, I decided she did not need to know, that I could sit in it quietly until she came to change me anyway, that this small additional failure could stay mine. I stayed at my desk in the wet diaper and I said nothing, and when I heard her on the stairs around five I angled myself at the screen and made my voice normal and said the work was going fine, and I let her think the brief was still dry, because admitting it was not meant admitting that her entire prophecy, word for word, had come true inside of an hour. She knew within about four seconds of entering the room. I do not know how. The way I sat, perhaps, or some register of the air only she can read, or simply thirty years of knowing when I am performing normality. She crossed the room and, without ceremony, slipped her hand inside the waistband of my tracksuit bottoms and pressed her fingers flat against the front of the diaper, feeling it through the outside, the swell and the warmth gone cool of a thing that had been used and not mentioned, and drew her hand back out, and looked at me, and I looked at the screen and pretended to read. "You didn't come and ask," she said. Quietly. "I was going to. I got caught up. I lost track." "Mark." Just my name. It stopped me. "You wet it a while ago. It's gone cold. You've been sitting up here in it, lying to me about how the work's going, rather than walk downstairs and say four words to me. After the day you've had." She was not angry. She sounded, if anything, tired, and underneath the tired, sad, and the sad was so much worse than anger. "That's the thing, you see. That's the actual thing. Not the bladder. The hiding. You'd genuinely rather sit cold and wet and alone in a lie than let me help you, even now, even after I've taken every bit of the shame out of it that I know how to take. What is it going to take, before you just come to me?" I had no answer. I have thought about that question for a long time since, and on that particular afternoon I had no answer at all. And then she did a thing I had not expected, which taught me more, in its quiet way, than any change or scolding could have. She did not change me. She straightened up, and considered me for a moment, and said, "Well. You clearly aren't bothered enough by a wet one to come and tell me, or you'd have come. So we'll leave it. That brief holds a great deal more than the little you've put in it, and there's no sense wasting it. I'll change you before dinner." And she smoothed the front of my tracksuit bottoms back down over it, a small proprietary pat, and went back downstairs, and left me sitting at my desk in the cold wet diaper I had hidden, now permitted, now scheduled, mine to sit in until she decided otherwise, because I had demonstrated so thoroughly that I did not mind. I minded. I discovered, over the next hour, that I minded a great deal, and that minding it now, after the fact, with the change deferred to a time of her choosing, was its own particular and instructive discomfort, and that I had brought it entirely on myself by not walking down one flight of stairs and saying four words. She changed me before dinner, as promised, brisk and kind, and the brief had indeed taken the one wetting with room to spare, barely past damp by then in the way of those big night ones. And here is the part that finished the lesson off. After dinner we sat down to a television programme I had been waiting all week to see, and somewhere in the last quarter of it, the good part, the part I had been waiting for, I felt the need arrive and I did not get up, did not pause it, did not want to miss the ending, and I simply let it go where it now went, into the brief, sitting on my own sofa beside my wife, on purpose, because getting up seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Ellen noticed. Of course she noticed. She said nothing, only glanced over once, a small unreadable glance, and went back to the programme. And the fresh brief, the one she'd changed me into before dinner, took that single wetting easily, because they are made to, and at bedtime she checked it, found it had taken the one without complaint or leak and was barely past damp, and decided it would see out the night, and left it on rather than change me again. The afternoon's lesson simply carried on into the night and became the night's, as if the line I had always drawn between the daytime and the nighttime, between the man in charge of himself and the man asleep, had never really been there at all, and had only ever been something I'd painted on the floor and stepped carefully around. I lay in the dark, in it, and I did not feel defeated, exactly. I felt outmaneuvered. There is a difference. A defeated man stops fighting because he's broken. I was not broken. I was simply, finally, out of ground to fight on, because every position I had defended that day had collapsed under me exactly as she had said it would, and a man can only watch his own logic flood a dentist's chair so many times before he starts to wonder whether the woman who keeps being right might be worth listening to before the flood instead of after. But I was not there yet. Not quite. Because lying in that bed, outmaneuvered, ashamed, and against all sense a little bit at peace, I felt the old pride pick itself up off the floor one more time and dust itself off and start, quietly, to plan. She'd won the dentist. Fine. She'd won the afternoon. Fine. But all of these defeats, every one, had happened on her ground, with her safety nets, her pull-ups and her diapers and her cabinet, and a small poisonous voice at the back of my skull pointed out that I had never once been allowed to try, really try, with nothing, no net, no backstop, out there in the world on my own terms. I'll show her, the voice said. Not here. Not on her ground. Out there. On mine. I had a client meeting coming up. In the city. In person. I went to sleep thinking about it, and that, reader, is how the worst day of the whole story got itself arranged, by a man who had just been taught his lesson so thoroughly that he decided, lying in the dark in a diaper he'd been put in for exactly this kind of thinking, to go out and get taught it again, bigger.

Yes! I'm a total foot fdigeter