Trading Post

Yup, mine too.😁

Hi Zoey. Welcome to the DD

ive had a fascination with infantilism since i was like, 4 i also had very easy internet access to find a lot of diaper content the first abdl artist that i was ever a huge fan of was SDCharm on furaffinity, where i read "tails the babysitter". this is also when i learned the term and was like "wow i really resonate with this"

I just wait on whatever happens. When I have to pee, I do. When it's time to mess my diaper, I do. Nothing esoteric here.

Chapter 10 — Logistics of a Secret (That Doesn't Stay One) By the time the weeks I have just described had become the weeks after them, the whole apparatus of my condition had sunk below the waterline of daily notice, the way a new noise in a house becomes, within a month, simply the sound the house makes. The plain brown boxes arrived on Tuesdays, because everything arrives on Tuesdays, and Ellen broke them down and stacked the supplies into the cabinet that had once held guest towels, and the diaper pail in the en-suite was emptied and relined on a schedule I never saw operate but always found completed, and somewhere on the family laptop, in a folder I was not invited into but knew about the way you know about a draft in a room, there was a spreadsheet. I saw it once, over her shoulder, and wished I had not, only because it was so very Ellen that it undid me a little. Columns. Brands down one side, and across the top, the things you would track if you approached this the way she approached everything, which is to say as a logistics problem to be solved properly or not at all. Cost per unit. Hours of reliable wear before a change was prudent. A column, I swear to you, headed PERFORMANCE, in which she had recorded, in her clipped private shorthand, how each brand had actually done in the field, on me, the way I had once recorded the uptime of servers. She tracked my diapers the way I tracked other people's systems, with exactly the same unsentimental attention to what worked and what failed and what was worth the money, and I looked at that spreadsheet over her shoulder and felt the strangest cocktail of mortification and something I could not name then and would later understand was a kind of awe, because nobody, in fifty-four years, had ever paid that quality of attention to the simple fact of my body. "You can stop reading over my shoulder," she said, not looking up. "I'll tell you the conclusions. The thick daytime ones are worth the extra. The cheaper night brand leaks at the leg if you sleep on your side, so I've stopped buying it. And you're costing me roughly what the heating does, which is fine, we'll manage, but I'd thank you not to leave lights on." She closed the laptop. "There. Saved you the trouble of the spreadsheet." That was the texture of it. That was the new normal, administered with the brisk competence of a woman running a small efficient enterprise, and the enterprise was me. The medication arrived into all this with great fanfare and very little result, which I am told is typical. We had agreed to try it, in the car park, the day of the specialist, it's reversible, no sense not trying, and so a packet of small white pills joined the architecture of my days, one in the morning with breakfast, and we waited for the bladder to be calmed, the way the young calm doctor had said it might be, the contractions stilled, the urgency eased. Ellen marked the start date in the notebook. She marks everything in the notebook. The first thing the pills did was nothing, for two weeks, because that is what they do, they are slow, the doctor had warned us, several weeks to show, up to twelve for the full effect. So we waited. And the second thing they did, somewhere in the third week, was not the thing we wanted. I noticed it first at the desk, which is where I notice everything, because the desk is where I am most fully myself. I went to sink into a problem, the deep sink, the six-hour disappearing act that is the one real talent I have, and I could not get down. It was as though there were a floor in the water now, a few feet below the surface, and I kept bumping against it. The thoughts would not link up the way they link up. I would lose the end of a line of reasoning halfway along it, reach for the word and find a soft grey absence where the word should be, read the same block of someone else's code three times and retain none of it. A fog, the doctor had said, some people get a fog, and given what you do for a living it's worth thinking about. He had been right to flag it. For a man who is paid to think clearly for hours at a stretch, a fog is not a side effect. A fog is the disease. I said nothing for a week, because saying something meant admitting the experiment might fail, and I had developed, you will remember, a horror of tabling evidence against my own preferred conclusions. But Ellen, who misses nothing, noticed the work piling up, and the long blank stares at the screen, and the second and third coffees I was using to try to burn through the murk, and one evening she simply asked. "The pills are fogging you, aren't they." "A bit. It might settle." "It might. Or it might not, and in the meantime you can't do the one thing you're paid to do, and you're drinking coffee like it's going out of fashion to compensate, which is making the bladder worse, so the pills meant to help the bladder are, by a lovely circular route, making it worse." She does this. She closes a loop you had not noticed was a loop. "How much is it actually helping? Honestly. The leaking." I thought about it honestly, because she had asked honestly. "I don't know that it is. Not that I can tell. I still go without warning. I'm still in them all day. If it's doing anything I can't feel it." "So it's costing you your concentration and your living, and giving you nothing you can point to." "That's about the size of it." "Then we stop it," she said. "We tried it. It was reversible, that was the whole point, and now we reverse it. I'll tell the doctor. There's no virtue in poisoning your own head for a benefit that hasn't turned up." And that was that. She rang the surgery the next morning, in her clear flat voice, and reported the fog and the absence of benefit, and the doctor agreed without a fight that there was no sense continuing, and the small white pills left my mornings as quietly as they had entered them, and within a week the floor in the water was gone and I could sink again, all the way down, and I could have wept with relief at simply being able to think. What I took from it, and what mattered for everything after, was this. We had tried the cure, the actual medical cure, the thing that was supposed to fix me, and it had given me nothing and taken something I could not spare. The physiotherapy I kept up, dutifully, because Ellen made me and because it genuinely seemed to be doing slow quiet good, the exercises that you cannot feel working until one day you notice they have. But the pills, the great pharmaceutical answer, had been a dead end. And a dead end, explored and abandoned, does a quiet thing to a person. It closes a door you had been keeping open. It makes the thing you had told yourself was temporary look, for the first time, a little more like the way things simply are. I did not say that to Ellen. But I think we both felt the door close, the FOR LATER box in the attic grow one degree more theoretical, and neither of us remarked on it, and we carried on. And now I have to tell you the other thing that happened in those weeks, the private thing, the thing I told no one and would not tell Ellen for a long time yet, because it is the true beginning of the second half of this story and there is no honest way to skip it. It was not only the diapers anymore. It was her. I noticed it, the way you notice you have started to fall ill, as a change in the background temperature of things before any single symptom. The check, the ambient two-fingers-at-the-front check, had stopped making me flush with shame somewhere in those weeks and started doing something else, something I could not at first identify and then could not stop identifying, which was that I waited for it. I would be working, sunk in a problem, and some part of me would be listening for the door, for the knock, for the coffee, for the moment her hand would arrive at the front of me and make its brief proprietary inquiry and pronounce me fine, and when it came, that small grounding contact, that confirmation that I was held and noted and managed, something in my chest would settle the way it had settled in the fitting room when she said good, the way a house settles when the right person locks the door. And the changes. Four times a day she laid me down or stood me up and dealt with me, brisk, competent, her hands sure, and in the early days I had endured them as the price of the system, and somewhere in those weeks I had stopped enduring them and started, in a place I was deeply unwilling to examine, to anticipate them. The lift of her hands. The snugness when she pulled it up and pressed it flat. The "there." It was not the diaper. I want to be precise about this because it took me so long to be precise about it to myself. It was not the object, the padding, the material fact. It was the being attended to. It was lying still and letting her decide and do, the complete surrender of one small territory of myself into hands more competent and more certain than my own, and the way that surrender, far from diminishing me as I had spent half a year fearing it would, seemed instead to set something down that I had been carrying so long I had forgotten it had weight. My body had begun to answer her. There is no more delicate way to put it and I have tried. The calm command in her voice when she told me to lie down. The certainty of her hands. The good boy that had detonated in me at the desk and that I was now, God help me, hoping to hear again. My body had begun to respond to the dynamic itself, to being managed by this woman, with an interest that had nothing to do with continence and everything to do with thirty years of marriage arriving, late and astonishing, at a room neither of us had known the house contained. I was horrified. I want that recorded as clearly as the rest. The man I had been raised to be, the man I had spent fifty-four years performing, was appalled, scandalized, certain that this was a sickness on top of a sickness, that to find anything in this beyond grim endurance was a kind of perversion of the proper order, in which a husband leads and is not laid down and dealt with and called a good boy and made to feel, by it, more held and more peaceful and yes, if I am to be fully honest, more quietly and confusingly aroused than he has felt in fifteen years. I was horrified. And I was not. That is the whole of it, the contradiction I carried into the second half of this story like a stone in my shoe. Underneath the horror, steady and undeniable and growing, was the other thing, the thing that was not horrified at all, the thing that waited for the knock and the check and the good boy and felt, when they came, not shame but a deep and treacherous and unmistakable gladness. I told no one. I told least of all Ellen, who I was certain would be repelled to learn that her practical solution to a plumbing problem had become, in her husband, something stranger and warmer and far more complicated than a plumbing solution had any business becoming. I was wrong about that, as I was wrong about nearly everything in those months, but I did not know yet how wrong, and so I carried it alone, the horror and the not-horror, into the spring, toward a department store fitting room, and a cinema, and a long restaurant evening, and an ordinary domestic moment that was going to change everything, when one of her four daily changes stopped, without warning, being only a change. But that is the next part. For now it is enough to say that the secret I was keeping was no longer the diapers. The diapers, it kept turning out, were survivable, were shruggable, every stranger who stumbled on them met them with a tape measure or a roll of paper towel and a kindness that undid me. The secret I was keeping now was that I had started to love the hands that put them on me, and the woman those hands belonged to, in a way I had no name for and no precedent for and no idea, yet, what to do with. The coffee came at ten. The hand checked the front of me. You're fine. And I sat at my desk, padded and dry and quietly coming apart with a feeling I could not say, and said, "Thanks, El," in a perfectly ordinary voice, and she went out, and clicked the door shut, and did not yet know, or perhaps already knew, the way she always already knew everything, exactly what she was doing to me.