Trading Post

My 7 year “nappy-versary” came and went without fanfare this week.  This wasn’t one of the lesser 7 year markers that have been passing by in the preceding months:  7 years since telling my beloved that henceforth I would be wearing nappies as I pleased instead of as she pleased, 7 years since going into nappies for days at a time, 7 years since trying out office work and corporate travel whilst nappy-clad, 7 years since going into nappies for nearly 3 months before (only briefly) coming out of them again. This was 7 years since I put a nappy on at LAX airport for my flight back home to Australia from the USA and stayed in them.  Permanently.  That was roughly 6,000 nappy changes ago.  I was disappointed to see that Hallmark have failed to create any kind of greeting card for this kind of occasion.  Perhaps I should design one and send it in to them.  Then I could buy it and send it to myself. My long-suffering beloved is still with me.  She still hates my nappies but at some level she seems to have resigned herself to them.  I also think that this is the year she’s begun to believe that by now I’m somewhat dependent on them anyway. At night that’s been a fair call for quite a while now.  My bedwetting is pretty frequent by now.  I still have “dry” nights here and there but to be honest, the whole “did I or did I not wet the bed?” thing has submerged (did you see what I did there?) from view.  I just assume that I will.  It seems a safe enough working assumption.  I’m never dry by morning and I rarely seem to need to pee at night that I can recall. At daytime, I’m probably more continent than she realises but possibly LESS continent than I realise. I can still choose to remain dry subject to the limits imposed by the urgency, frequency and incomplete-voiding issues that have manifested BUT I suspect there’s still a few daytime “accidents” happening here and there that I’m simply not noticing.  It’s not unusual anymore for me to find myself wet and then struggle to recall when this may have occurred.  On the other hand, maybe that’s dementia knocking. For long periods of time now I seem to need to “leak” nearly constantly during the day and whilst I feel I could slow this down to a less-abnormal cadence that seems like just such a burdensome thing to do.  So I don’t bother. I suspect that the odd incidents of “silent wetting” that I’ve mentioned before might be slowly creeping out of the shadows.  When these happen, I realise that I’m getting warm and wet in the relevant location but there’s no obvious sensation from my bladder that anything is going on.  These wettings seem to occur quite slowly and they tend to be not so big in volume so the leak risk remains low. They’re still not an everyday thing.  It remains to be seen if this consolidates and progresses or it’s just my imagination playing tricks.  If it’s real though, it would be actual incontinence.  These wetting events seem totally uncommanded and by the time I notice them occurring, it’s far too late and I can’t stop a pee that has started anymore anyway.  I’m still not sure they ARE real though.  There’s just so much conformational bias with this kind of thing that it can be hard to see through. The frequency of unplanned code-brown nappies remains reassuringly low but disturbingly above zero. They happen but are rare and invariably provoked by something I’ve eaten.  Mostly I can remain clean(ish) which is important to me.  I guess on the handful of occasions where I fail to achieve this objective well, at least I’m suitably dressed for them. Normalisation of nappies is very well progressed as you’d expect .For long tracts of time I often don’t notice I’m wearing them and as I’ve mentioned before this year, I’ve started to find myself forgetting that I’m wearing one which can be a little bit startling at first when you wet yourself. The sensation of being wet fades quickly (even in cloth) however and I forget them again although sagging and leaking remain annoying to me when those phenomena emerge.  Merely being in a wet nappy however is something I no longer notice unless I stop to think about it: its mobility/sagging/leaks that get all the attention. Despite this demise of novelty I find that I still have ZERO interest in coming out of them.  Of course, coming out of them by now would not be so simple.  I’d need to re-train myself to be dry at night (somehow) and I suspect there’d be quite a few “accidents” during the day now to boot.  It’s getting hard to remember what it’s like to NOT just automatically pee in my pants.  I could see myself in pull-ups for months trying to get things re-patterned. But I don’t want to do that.  Despite the expense, inconvenience and omnipresent risk of social sanction I *still* consider myself to be happier in nappies than out. So, we’ll see what year 8 brings.

Thank you for these sweet chapters!

Nice story, thank you for keeping it up!

17. My Suspicious Nature Tess was as good as her word. When the timer on her food started beeping, she went to get it herself. Ffrances called through telling her to put the remains of a jug of cheese sauce in the microwave for thirty seconds before pouring it over, and suggested that she could add some bacon or chop veggies if she wanted. She’d set the timer on the oven to allow a few minutes for preparing fillings, and there were plenty of options for the little girl to choose from. Tess decided against a glass of wine in the end, although I think she poured herself a little taster before making that decision. When she came back, we had almost finished ours. But I ate slowly, taking plenty of time for conversation so that she wouldn’t be left sitting alone at the table. She told us a little about her day, although there was little enough that I could understand. It seemed that it had just been girls chatting about typical girl stuff, whatever that meant for this particular group of friends. The story was pretty vague once the details of what and who they talked about had been redacted, but I could feel safer knowing that Tess had a good time. After that we moved on to sharing a little backstory about how I’d met Ffrances, although the version we told between us included a few funny details that I was sure I didn’t remember happening. It was fun to return to old memories, and amusing to see which parts my love wanted to subject to a little artistic license. “The real question,” she said, as I returned from the kitchen after filling up our glasses, “is who’s the weird retro dude with purple hair?” “You haven’t heard of Captain Kairo?” I raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps we need to educate you. What do you think, Tess?” “I don’t know either,” she answered with a shrug. “I know you were obsessed with him, but I never got into it myself. I think I was too young to understand it back then, and after we left the country…” “Okay, then you both need to be shown. Just put your critical brain on hold for a while. It can be cheesy, but he bears it with pride.” Nobody got the joke, which just made me more determined to show them the jewel in the crown of turn-of-the-century, intentionally cliché nostalgia fuel. We had a dozen streaming services set up on the TV, so it took quite some time to determine that none of them had Captain Kairo. When that failed, I searched on my phone to find out how best to watch it now. It turned up a niche service that would allow us to watch a hundred different ‘vintage’ Asian shows, none of which I had heard of. Still, I thought that revisiting one of my childhood addictions was worth the price of a free trial, and quickly signed us up. “So what’s the deal here?” Ffrances asked. “It’s just a TV show? Or is there like a movie and a game franchise to go with it? And what language is that?” “I’m not sure. The language, I mean. It’s a comedy drama cartoon thing, it just seemed to perfectly capture how I was feeling at the time. Half parody, and then that just makes it hit harder when they do a serious one. Maybe it’s not as good as I remember, I just… it’s kind of special to me. I hope that if you watch it, you might be able to see why it hooked me so much. I got into it because I got a gift from a friend, but when I started watching it it just… felt like the writers really understood me, in a way.” They asked more questions, of course. I realised as I was answering that a lot of what made Captain Kairo significant to me was more about my worldview than the show itself, and the place I’d been at mentally. But I was desperate to see now if it would still have all the feels that I remembered. Finally, managing to navigate the confusing menus and find an option for English subtitles, I pressed play. We all laughed. That was the most important thing. And there was never a time that something didn’t make sense after being a decade separated from the show, not remembering most of the details. From slapstick violence to the emotional sucker punch of Valkyrie’s dog dying, everything was just as crisp as I remembered. The animation wasn’t good, and the subtitles weren’t perfect, but it was easy to give it a pass on those due to its age, and the fact that the characters would casually refer to the problems as if it was an inside joke they were sharing with us. Three episodes in, taken from different points in a three-year run, none of us considered not watching just one more. I’d felt the same when I started to get into it when I was younger; and had occasionally faced some strict criticism from my parents as a result. But tonight wasn’t a school night, there was nothing important that any of us needed to be awake for in the morning, and I decided that it might be a valuable bonding experience for us to keep on going until we were too tired to continue. Of course, there were frequent breaks for drinks and snacks. At some point, I decided that it would make more sense to fetch a bowl of rice crackers instead of the corn chips I would normally have considered, and Ffrances suggested digging out a bottle of sake from the cupboard to match what the Captain was drinking on-screen. Unfortunately, a bottle I’d received from a coworker didn’t show up after a casual search; but we had plenty of wine to keep us going. “Sure you don’t want something?” Ffrances asked Tess, as I returned with two freshly-refilled glasses. “I’ll get it,” Tess smiled, and took her own almost-empty glass of diet cola to the other room. “I think most girls her age would jump at a chance to drink something stronger,” Ffrances said with a shrug. “Especially watching something like this. I think being just a little tipsy puts an edge on it. That must have been intentional.” “Yeah. Almost like it was never really aimed at kids, But Tess is a little too mature for her own good, at times. I think she overcompensates, feels like she has to constantly show how adult she is. There’s always guilt there if she doesn’t try, or something. She wants to be young again so that pretending to be an adult isn’t on the cards. Like… she knows what she wants, but she can only enjoy it if she can feel like it’s something she has no choice in.” “Hence the room,” she said. “All set up before she arrived, so she doesn’t see it as something she’s chosen. No way to change her mind now.” “Right. And we’ve changed a few details, so we know now that she likes it as it is. If she’d started with a blank canvas, it would have been so serious. Booze is something she’s conflicted on, I think. She likes it, because it makes it easier to let her inhibitions down. But she feels like she shouldn’t, and of course it’s not something a child would do.” “Think she’ll try some before bedtime?” “Maybe just one. If she does, we might have an extra laundry day in the morning.” “She drinks that much?” “No. But like I said before, I think she’s started mixing it with sleeping pills. I know she needs the sleep, she gets really frustrated when she can’t sleep well. But if I didn’t know better, I’d think she’s deliberately making it harder for herself to… to act like an adult. If you know what I mean.” She nodded, but didn’t answer as Tess came back, a glass of wine in her hand. However much she was worried about the child’s actions, she knew that confronting her about something that should have been secret would only have made it worse. Two more episodes, and by then all of our glasses were empty. Ffrances looked around, and quickly dashed into the kitchen. “Looks like we all need a refill,” she said, indicating a new bottle and a corkscrew in her hands. “I figured it would be easier to bring it through, we can pour our own.” “It’s okay,” Tess said, with a shake of her head. “I should be getting to bed soon. Don’t want to overdo it, I’ve not tried red wine before so I should be careful until I know how I’m going to feel in the morning.” “You sure? You can go back to soda if you prefer.” “No, I better sleep. I want to check in with my friends anyway. Let Spike know I loved the sunflower. You keep going if you want. You’ll probably have more fun if it’s just the two of you.” I could understand her feelings, but I also didn’t want Tess to feel like a spare wheel. I wanted us all to spend time together, and get to know each other. And I knew Ffrances would understand, which is why I was surprised when she nodded and wished Tess a good night. On the other hand, she was a professional psychologist, so there was a chance her guess of the girl’s emotional state was a little better than mine. “It’s a bit early for bed, isn’t it?” I asked, after Tess picked up her evening flask of tea from the fridge and made her way upstairs. “On a saturday, anyway.” “I think she’s not comfortable being a child when there’s other people around. Even if she knows you’ll understand, she doesn’t trust herself enough to admit it yet.” “Think she wants to chill with pink and toys all around?” I raised an eyebrow. That wasn’t  the interpretation I would have come to, having seen how reluctant Tess was to admit her desires even to herself. “I cut the foil off the bottle before I came through. And guess what I saw in the top of the bin?” This time I was genuinely confused and didn’t know where she going, but Ffrances never left me confused for too long: “A foil blister pack, off medication. She was the last person in the kitchen, helping herself to a single glass again. There was a pack of eight tablets, and the outer coating of a gel cap. To me that says someone who has difficulty taking their meds, and I know you never had that problem. Open the capsule and tip the contents out, maybe break up a tablet so it’ll dissolve in the wine. The actions of someone who’s embarrassed and wants to hide it, perhaps. Or wants to imagine they’re not really taking drugs.” “You mean…?” I hazarded. I wasn’t sure what else to say. “I compared with the packets in your disorganised first aid kit. Which, by the way, you need to sort out. Sleep aids and water tablets. She’s added something to the wine to make it more likely she’ll wet the bed again.” “So she can feel like she’s really a child,” I said with a nod. “Or like she doesn’t have the choice.” “Right. Just like you suspected.” “I don’t really know how I’m supposed to feel about this. If it’s how she wants to feel, I have to support that. Her parents gave me all the responsibility, you know? To make sure she’s okay. But I didn’t want to believe she was really going this far. I mean, maybe there’s some legitimate medical reason she might need some common household meds, and I never really kept track of what was left, so I couldn’t be sure if she’d really taken some. But…” “I would have confronted her,” she said. “Well, I might have done. I would have found a moment to ask you first, what you think we should say. But her glass is already empty. She’s so small, those pills will hit her like a truck. She must be falling asleep on her feet by now. And talking to her in that state isn’t fair, it would seem like an interrogation. Better to let her sleep, if she’s already taken it. And see if our suspicions are proved right in the morning. For now, we can just enjoy the wine and your strange nostalgia trip.” I could only agree with that. Tess hadn’t actually looked that sleepy to me. Certainly not like someone close to a medication-induced deep sleep. But that was only natural, as I was sure the wine was unadulterated. As was starting to become a tradition now, I’d added the sleeping pills and diuretics to the flask of ice tea that she always took up to her room with her.

Oh this excellent! Can’t wait to see where you take things going forward!