AB_DeLane

Chapter 19: Not the Same as Me Note: In this chapter, a character uses offensive language about a person with disabilities. This is not an endorsement of that behavior. I shivered as I held the ice pack against my forehead, but I had no one to blame but myself for the situation I found myself in on Saturday morning. This morning, I had again kept up the pretense that the bedwetting pills had given me some annoying headaches. I had gotten out of bed just in time to snag the last of the pancakes that Dad had made for breakfast. From the look on Mom’s face as I entered the kitchen, it was clear that she had already noticed the sheets I had tossed into the washing machine last night. But with Jackson in the room, there wasn’t an opportunity to have a conversation about bedwetting again. I groaned and rubbed my forehead frequently while eating my breakfast. It must have been a stellar acting job because no sooner had I finished breakfast than Dad had come up to me with an ice pack in hand. The good thing was that my parents believed me. The bad thing was that they believed me and had offered me an ice pack to help dull the pain. I had no choice but to accept it, so now I was lying on my back on the couch, painfully watching the seconds pass by. I trembled a little as another shiver ran all the way through my body. A little bit longer, and perhaps I could pretend that I was cured for the time being. Mom had promised to not make me take the pills for more than a few more nights if they continued to prove ineffective. I was going to hold her to it. I didn’t want to have to keep faking a headache every morning. It wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as faking the bedwetting. My phone buzzed. With one hand still holding the ice pack to my forehead, I checked my most recent message. It was from Angie, who was bored out of her mind on the road trip her family was taking out to South Dakota. This morning, her family was at Mouth Rushmore, and she’d taken a selfie to share with Emma and me. I really hoped the vacation my parents had planned for later in the summer was going to have better destinations than that. “Since you’re not feeling well, I moved your sheets over to the dryer,” Mom said as she stepped into the living room. I groaned, this time from the fact that my bedwetting wasn’t exactly being treated like a secret rather than from faking a headache. With Grace fully aware of it, Mom and Dad weren’t showing any reservations about bringing up that topic with me while she was around. “Is your headache still pretty bad?” Mom asked. “Perhaps you should stay home today to rest up rather than going over to Emma’s place?” There was no way I was going to be spending the first day of summer stuck at home. Even with Angie gone, I still had plans to bike across the neighborhood to hang out with Emma for the afternoon. “I’m sure I’ll be feeling better by then,” I insisted. “I think the ice pack is really helping.” “We’ll see how you’re feeling later,” Mom conceded. “I can always drive you over instead.” I re-adjusted the ice pack on my forehead, trying to find a way to hold it in place that wasn’t so cold. All of us were in the living room except Jackson, who was playing with Legos in his bedroom. For the sake of all our feet, those evil bricks were now banned from being anywhere else in the house. After a few more minutes had passed, I set the ice pack down. Hopefully, that recovery time from the headache wasn’t too unbelievable. “There was something else your mom and I were wanting to talk to you girls about.” I looked over at my sister before looking up at Dad. Grace appeared just as confused about what this could mean as me. “Maddy,” Dad said. “Since you are going to be turning thirteen in a week, we’ve decided that you’re going to be able to stay home by yourself this summer.” “Oh, thank goodness,” Grace said. I glared at my sister. “No need to act that excited about it.” I did see where Grace was coming from, though. Having to be home with me had limited some of her opportunities for work and hanging out with her friends during previous summers. “Hey,” Grace said. “I’ve been asking Mom and Dad to let you do it for a while now.” “It’s a lot of responsibility,” Mom said. “And you need to understand that this is a privilege that can be taken away if you aren’t careful with it. There are some rules you need to follow. It’s similar to the rules we had for your sister when she was your age. No having any friends over while we are gone. No using the stove or the oven….” A picture of what those days at home might look like this summer came into focus in my head as Mom continued to go over all the things I’d need to do to be allowed to stay in the house by myself. I had already thought this summer was going to be the best one ever, but this, having the whole house to myself? The implications became immediately clear. With the whole house to myself, I would have so much more freedom to experiment with peeing my pants. What should I try first? I wanted to hold my bladder to the point of bursting before I let it out. I wanted to see what it would be like to wet my pants while sitting down. Maybe I could try peeing myself with different outfits on. “Maddy, Maddy.” Someone was snapping their fingers and saying my name. I blinked rapidly and returned my gaze back to Mom. “Madelyn,” Mom said, “We want to give you more responsibilities, but you need to pay attention.” “Sorry,” I said. I found myself beginning to subconsciously pick on my fingernails. I hoped that my sudden daydreaming hadn’t ruined this new opportunity before it had already begun. Grace laughed. “I bet she was thinking about how to sneak in a boyfriend while I’m gone.” “Eww,” I said. “No. Gross.” “Your sister is right, though,” Dad said. “No friends over when you’re by yourself means no boyfriends as well.” “Or girlfriends,” Mom said. I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have either of those.” “What, you want to grow up to be a crazy cat lady?” Grace asked. I looked over at Chester, who was napping in a sunspot on the carpet in front of the window. “That doesn’t seem like a bad idea.” <><><> I sat on my bed with the fourth Harry Potter book in my hands. I wasn’t as big a fan of the Triwizard Tournament story arc, but I always found the Quidditch World Cup to be fascinating. It would be enough just to have the opportunity to go to a soccer World Cup at some point. If only I could convince my parents to get tickets when the U.S. hosted it in several years. I had already breezed through the previous book earlier this morning after having finally discarded the ice pack. Once the conversation about being allowed to stay home alone this summer had ended, I had retreated up to my bedroom to read. It was too noisy downstairs to concentrate. My eyes flickered back and forth rapidly across the pages. My teachers always told me I read too fast. I didn’t see how that was supposed to be a bad thing. “Maddy. Maddy. Maddy!” My head snapped up as I finally caught wind that someone was calling my name. Mom was standing a few feet away, looking down at me. I hadn’t even heard her knock or open my bedroom door, which should have been enough to get my attention. “Can’t you pick out something else to read?” Mom asked as she looked down at the book in my hands. “There are plenty of other books to choose from in the basement.” That was another reason I had gone off to my bedroom to read. The Harry Potter series was pretty much the only books I’d read over the past two years outside of anything that had been required for school assignments. I hadn’t counted how many times I’d gone through the series, but it had to be a lot. Sometimes, I’d read through the books in order, but other times, I’d jump around to different ones depending on which one I felt like reading at the moment. My parents didn’t have anything against the Harry Potter books. They just were overly insistent that I try to expand my reading interests. None of the other series they’d thrown my way had caught my imagination in the same way, so I usually conducted my Harry Potter reading out of sight as to avoid any criticism. My parents had never explicitly banned me from reading them, but they had very much pressured me to not read them so often. “Your sheets are dry now,” Mom said. “Can you please go grab them from the laundry room? And make sure to fold them neatly and put them back in the closet. I don’t want to come back up and see them tossed in a pile in the corner.” “Can I at least finish this chapter?” “Right away, please,” Mom said. “It’s almost time for lunch.” “Can I at least not take those pills again tonight?” “Let’s just try it for two more nights,” Mom said. “That way, if it hasn’t worked by the time we take you to the doctor, then we can talk with them about what to do next.” I suppressed a sigh as I got off of the bed and headed toward the hallway. “And while you’re down there, don’t forget to clean the litter box,” Mom said, calling out after me as I reached the stairs. “You know you’re supposed to do that in the morning before going off to play.” “Stupid chores,” I muttered to myself. I let my feet fall just a little harder on the stairs as I trudged down the steps on the way to the main floor. We had sadly eaten all the pizza last night, which meant no leftovers for lunch. Instead, Dad was busy in the kitchen, with multiple pots and pans set out on the stovetop. I tried to avoid making eye contact with anyone as I made my way back upstairs with a bundle of laundry in my arms, enduring the walk of shame in silence as I carried the evidence of my presumed bedwetting back up to my bedroom. <><><> “I’ve got good news and bad news,” Emma said as she opened the front door to let me into her house. I had biked over to Emma’s house after lunch, though it had taken some work to convince Mom that my fake headaches had cleared up enough for me to leave the house after all. But she had still made me take a couple of Tylenol pills before I left. Even though Emma’s house was on the opposite side of the neighborhood, it was an easy trek, one that I had made countless times before. “What is it?” I asked. “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” I thought about that for a second. “Good news.” “The good news is I’m still free to go to the park.” That didn’t make much sense to me. Why would Emma not have been able to go to the park near her house, where we often hung out during the summer? “What’s the bad news?” Emma raised her eyebrows and looked over her shoulder. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Her.” I took another step into the house and looked over Emma’s shoulder. The girl in the distance bore a slight resemblance to Emma, enough so that I had to guess that they were related in some way. They both had curly brown hair, though the girl's hair was done up in braided pigtails while Emma had left her shoulder-length hair unbraided. But it was how they were dressed that differentiated them. Like me, Emma was wearing soccer shorts and a T-shirt. The girl was wearing long pink and white striped socks that came up to her knees. She had on a plaited, muted-pink skirt and a white shirt with a Hufflepuff emblem in the middle. There was a pink watch on her left hand and a half-dozen colorful bracelets in different styles on her right hand. But what stood out most was the set of earmuffs she was wearing. I settled for that word rather than headphones, because something just looked off about them. The girl hadn’t turned in our way yet. She was facing the other direction, staring off into space. I lowered my voice so the girl wouldn’t hear me. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, despite whatever misgivings Emma seemed to have. “Why is she bad news?” “She’s my cousin, Hannah. Her family has been staying with us for the weekend. She is bad news because I accidentally let her overhear that I was going to go to the park with you, and now she wants to come as well. She threw a tantrum when I told her she couldn’t, and then my mom said I had to let her tag along.” I looked over again at Emma’s cousin before turning back to face Emma. Setting aside the fact that a girl our age throwing a tantrum was a bit strange, I still didn’t get why Emma was concerned. “So?” Emma opened her mouth to respond, but Hannah ran over to greet me before Emma had a chance to say anything further. Emma grimaced as Hannah stood next to her. “Hi!” Hannah said, waving her hand at me. “Um, hi,” I said in return. I noticed that Hannah was looking down at my waist rather than up at my face. “OK,” Emma said after the long silence that followed that awkward introduction. “Hannah, this is my friend Maddy. Maddy, this is my cousin Hannah.” “What happened to your fingernails?” Hannah blurted out. “They look all chewed up.” Were my nails that bad? I hastily pulled my hands up in front of my face. I did have a habit of picking on them absentmindedly, but it was embarrassing to have a stranger call it out so bluntly. “I paint mine so I don’t bite on them,” Hannah said. She thrust her hands out in front of me, showing off nails painted in yellow and black. “I did them in Hufflepuff colors. Have you ever read-” Buzz. Buzz. The screen on a bright pink watch Hannah was wearing around her wrist went off. She paused what she was saying mid-sentence and dashed off around the corner. “Whatever you do, don’t mention that you like Harry Potter,” Emma said as soon as Hannah was out of sight. “Why? I like Harry Potter.” “I’ve had to listen to her yack about it for the past two days non-stop. It’s so annoying. She’s even more of a chatterbox than you. Can’t get her to stop for nothing, so don’t you dare get her started on it again.” “And she can hear us fine with those earmuffs?” “Yeah, as long as you aren’t whispering,” Emma said. “They’re supposed to reduce noise or something since she’s supposedly sensitive to loud sounds.” “What’s the deal with her watch?” “It’s to help remind her to go use the toilet.” “But, like, why would she need to be reminded to do that?” Emma rubbed her face with her hand. “Yeah, I should have warned you. She has autism. She acts like a toddler more than a teenager a lot of the time. You have no idea what I’ve had to deal with since she got here two days ago. I was hoping to get away from that weirdo for the afternoon, but now I’m stuck with her.” I thought through all the details of my brief interaction with Hannah so far. That made sense. Something had felt obviously off about her. “I suppose she is a bit different.” “Oh, that’s not even the worst of it,” Emma said. “She still pees the bed every night. Can you believe that? She’s already thirteen, and her mom has to help her put on a diaper before tucking her into her sleeping bag. And, of course, she has to be sleeping on the floor in my room. I’ve been using a scented odor spray, but my bedroom still smells like piss.” I prayed fervently that I could keep a poker face and not give any hint of what I was thinking. It wasn’t as though I wasn’t aware of the fact that my friends had a poor view of kids our age who wet the bed. In the three years since I had learned about two of my own cousins being bedwetters, I hadn’t ever come across another kid who was a bedwetter. I had practically a million questions, not that I could ask Emma any of them directly. “She really, like, pees in a diaper? That’s so gross,” I said. That only encouraged Emma to continue her rant about her cousin. “Honestly, her parents should probably just make her wear diapers during the day. She pissed herself all over the couch last night when we were watching a movie. It was so gross. She didn’t even really seem to notice. Just sat there with her soaked clothes until my aunt said something about it.” I fidgeted and began picking at my nails again, even though there was hardly much left on the ends of my fingers. Like Hannah, I had also been wetting the bed and peeing my pants during the day. But I was different. I wasn’t some weirdo like her. I had full control over what I was doing. I just did it because it felt good. It wasn’t anything like Hannah did, basically behaving like a toddler who wasn’t fully toilet trained. Hannah came sprinting back around the corner with a smile on her face, nearly running into me as her feet slid on the wood floor. “Are we going to the park now?” she asked Emma. “Yes, we’re going to the park,” Emma said curtly. “Go get your shoes on.” Hannah walked over to the doorway and grabbed a pair of white and teal shoes off of the shoe rack. I noticed that instead of laces, they had Velcro straps. Emma leaned in toward my ear and whispered to me. “I know right, she wears those cause she can’t even tie her shoes properly.” We waited for Hannah to finish getting her shoes on and then followed her out the door. “Aren’t you going to grab your bike from the garage?” I asked Emma once we were in the driveway. “We’re going to walk since there isn’t a bike for Hannah, at least not one with training wheels,” Emma said. Hannah appeared oblivious to our conversation. I was wondering exactly how well those noise-reducing earmuffs worked. She was sitting on her knees in the grass next to the driveway, plucking dandelions. The weeds were still bright yellow, not close to the point where their seeds would be ready to blow away. The park, situated near the center of the neighborhood, was only a couple of blocks down. It was a massive complex. There was a large playground, a splash pad, a sand volleyball court, a couple of baseball diamonds, and, of course, some soccer fields. It would have been nicer to bike over to it, but walking along the sidewalk wasn’t that bad. This part of the neighborhood was fairly quiet, without much through traffic. Emma and I both had our soccer cleats and a soccer ball tucked inside matching drawstring bags on our backs. Emma shifted over to the left side of me, leaving me between her and her cousin. As we walked down the sidewalk, there was a sound coming from Hannah’s direction that brought back an old memory. Could that faint rustling sound be what I thought it was? I didn’t have long to consider it. When the park came into view after turning around the corner, Hannah darted out ahead of us, skipping energetically down the sidewalk with her arms swaying awkwardly out by her sides. Emma put both her hands on her face. “She’s such a fucking retard.” I bit my lip and stared down at my feet as I continued to walk alongside Emma. There had been one time five or six years back when Grace has used that word at me during an argument we had been having. The details of what had led up to that confrontation had been long forgotten, but the aftermath of it was still stuck in my mind. My parents had always been fully opposed to corporal punishment. They’d never once laid a hand on my bottom. As far as I was aware, that was the only time Grace had ever been given a spanking. Her face had been puffy, red, and wet with tears when my parents brought her back to apologize to me afterward. I still remembered how Grace had squirmed uncomfortably on the couch that evening. The message had been crystal clear. And that word had never been heard again in our house. I wouldn’t have ever considered using that word against someone else, no matter how angry I was or what I thought of them. Even years later, when I first discovered a word that rhymes with duck, the only thing my dad had told me was that unless I had just whacked my finger with a hammer or stubbed my toe, that I shouldn’t be using that type of language. As uncomfortable as I was with what Emma had just said, I found myself agreeing with the overall sentiment. I felt uncomfortable around Hannah in a way that I hadn’t felt about anyone else before. I cringed as I watched her prance around in the playground in a way more reminiscent of girls my brother’s age. Something about her rubbed me the wrong way, like a piece of chalk being slowly dragged across a blackboard. “How long is her family staying?” I asked. “Just through the weekend, but it might end up being forever. They are looking for a house in the area. There apparently is a school around here that her parents want to send her to, you know, one for special kids like her,” Emma said, making air quotes around the word “special” with her hands. “Emma, can you push me?” Hannah yelled in the distance. We looked over at the playground. Hannah was sitting stationary on a swing. Emma sighed again. “Better go do it. I’ll hear it from Mom if she finds out that Hannah didn’t have a good time at the park.” I followed Emma over to the swing set, watching as she stepped behind her cousin and took hold of the swing, pulling it back as far as she could before running forward and giving it a big push. Emma sprinted underneath Hannah as she flew in the air and then came to stand next to me. There wasn’t any mistaking it as Hannah flew up on the swing. The wind caught hold of her skirt and lifted it up, revealing that Hannah wasn’t wearing ordinary underwear. My suspicions about the sound I’d heard on our walk over to the park were confirmed. There was a short flash of pastel colors on a material far bulkier than normal underwear. I waited with bated breath as Hannah swung backward and then came up toward me again. This time, my eyes were locked in. When her skirt lifted up in the air again, I caught sight of a pattern I had only previously seen in magazine ads. What Hannah had on beneath her skirt was nothing other than the pull-ups I was so badly wanting for myself. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Oh, there's definitely something going on with Grace. My lips are sealed on that for now. Given everything else the parents were trying, along with their lengthy experience of dealing with Grace's bedwetting, the lack of pull-ups/diapers very much had to be an intentional decision. We'll get some more details about the reasons behind that decision later on. As for why the topic came up. Maddy's mom must have misread her daughter's expressions regarding the diaper references in the movie (thinking her daughter was upset/worried at the idea of wearing protection for her bedwetting), and she was seeking to re-assure her daughter that she wouldn't have to wear them. For sure, I would have considered 2012 as another option, if Jackson had been old enough to watch it. That was so bizarre watching it in the theater without a heads up about that product placement for Goodnites. There are lots of movies and shows with diaper references. It can be a good plot device to start conversations about diapers/bedwetting, etc. with other characters in the story. And yeah, there's a lot more going on in the story. There are several other additional storylines that have been briefly hinted at that will be expanding in some chapters that are coming up soon. I'm thinking this story ends up possibly reaching 100 chapters, so there's a lot still to come.

Chapter 18: Only One Step Remains Friday night was pizza night, and it sucked as I wasn’t even being allowed to have any pop. Mom, Dad, and Grace each had a full glass of ice-cold root beer to go along with their pizza dinner. Even Jackson got a small glass of pop, albeit with a bunch of ice, so there wasn’t actually that much for him to drink. Like I had been at his age, he could get a little too hyper if he had too many sugary drinks. Any time he was given pop, my parents made sure it was of the uncaffeinated variety. But I was the exception. I had a glass of water. Not even tea or juice. Both of those alternatives had been vetoed by Dad because they contained sugar. And it wasn’t even a big glass of water at that. I hoped this practice of limiting my fluids wouldn’t be so strict once my parents surrendered to buying me pull-ups. I took the tiniest of sips from the glass of water before taking another bite of my pizza. I was making as much of an effort as possible to ration out the sips of water as I tried to finish my two slices of pizza. The last thing I needed was to finish the water before I had finished eating my pizza. That would leave my mouth parched for the remainder of the evening, as Mom had strongly implied that I wasn’t going to be allowed to have any more refills. How many more times was I going to have to fake wetting the bed before they realized that this all was pointless? I stared down at my slice of sausage and pepperoni pizza as we sat in the living room and ate our meal on the couch. I didn’t feel all that hungry at the moment, even though I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch at school. Pizza just wasn’t as appetizing without a sugary, caffeinated drink to wash it down. We were about twenty minutes into the movie my parents had chosen for tonight. The only good thing was that Jackson was at least old enough to be allowed to watch some PG movies, so we had something on to watch during dinner that was at least entertaining. The movie of choice tonight was “Spy Kids.” I would have preferred to watch one of the Harry Potter movies, but Jackson still wasn’t old enough to start watching them, according to my parents, so that would have to wait for a time when he wasn’t around. It had been a lot easier in the few years when he had been too young to care about what was going on the TV. For now, I mostly had to stick with the books to get my magic fix. Now everything that came on during the day had to be vetted to ensure that it was age appropriate for him. I knew Grace had her own shows that she watched on her computer in her room, but I didn’t have access to my own Netflix account like she did. At least this was a movie I hadn’t seen before. We often got stuck watching a Pixar movie that I’d seen with Jackson a half-dozen times or more. A line of dialogue from one of the parents in the movie caught my attention. The two adults – who were secretly spies – were expressing concerns about how their two kids were holding up without them. “They can take care of themselves,” the mom said. “They are still in diapers,” the dad said. “Only one wears diapers. And only at night. It’s no big deal,” the mom said. Jackson burst out laughing at that line of dialogue. I did my best to continue focusing straight ahead at the TV. This was so embarrassing. Yes, having my parents see another reference to diapers being used for bedwetting could be helpful in my quest to get them to purchase those pull-ups, but it felt so awkward to have the possibility displayed right on the TV in front of everyone, especially as Grace was also aware of my bedwetting. “That’s silly,” Jackson said. “Why aren’t they potty trained already?” Grace, who was sitting closer to the TV on the same couch as me, turned back in my direction. From how red her face was, it was clear I wasn’t alone in being quite embarrassed by the scene in this movie. “We’ll, they are old enough to be potty trained during the day,” Mom said. “But not everyone is able to potty train quickly at night. Sometimes their bladders don’t want to listen to them when they are asleep, at least not until they get older.” My younger brother thankfully accepted the explanation without any other comments. I breathed a sigh of relief that Mom hadn’t decided to bring up the fact that everyone in our family, apart from him, was or had been a bedwetter at some point. I tried to guess which of the two characters were in diapers at night. The oldest girl, Carmen, was the same age as me. Her younger brother in the movie, Juni, was nine years old. It really hoped that it was the boy who was the bedwetter. Grace excused herself the moment she was finished with her pizza – if she had been allowed to take it to her room to eat, she most certainly would have chosen to do so – and left the room, presumably on her way upstairs to the bedroom. The only movies she enjoyed watching with us were animated ones. Grace always had a bunch of different facts on hand about the behind-the-scene details of how the animations for those films had been done. I wondered if that was something she’d be studying more in college in the fall. Part of me wanted to get away from the movie as fast as possible. I had a sinking feeling that the topic of diapers was going to come up again at some point. There had to be a reveal as to which of the kids still needed them. At the same time, I was curious about how it would turn out, despite how embarrassing it would be to have to sit around and be in the room when that scene played out on the TV. I took one final sip of water and set the glass that was now only full of ice cubes to the side. With any luck, the ice cubs would melt enough by the end of the movie so I could get a few more sips of water. I still had half a slice of pizza left on my plate, but I didn’t feel like finishing it at the moment, not without something to drink to wash it down. Beside that one oblique reference to diapers, the topic had been dropped off. I hoped that the audience would be left in suspense. There hadn’t yet been any further conversations since this morning about the lack of effectiveness of the pill that was supposed to have prevented me from wetting the bed the night before I had allowed my pretending about having a headache from the pills to drop off before Mom and Dad got home from work. I didn’t want to risk going too far overboard with it. I felt that my acting job from this morning had been sufficient to make them think that I was dealing with the same symptoms that Grace had when she had previously taken those pills. Still, I wondered how many nights it would take for my parents to abandon the bedwetting pill as a solution to the nighttime accidents? I had to assume that as long as it wasn’t producing results, they would stop making me take it fairly soon. I pulled my feet up onto the couch – which I now had to myself with Grace’s absence – and stretched out my legs. Chester hopped up on top of me a few minutes later and nestled in around my knees. “Stop it, or I’ll call you names,” the younger brother, Juni, said, threatening his older sister during an argument. “Go ahead, warthog. You got nothing on me,” Carmen replied. I knew right away what was going to happen next. The writers had set Carmen up for a spectacular fall. Of course, it had to be the girl my age. “Sure I do, diaper lady.” “How long have you known?” “Since forever. Mom made me swear not to mention it.” Jackson was again laughing loudly at the scene. Why did everyone have to find the topic of older kids dealing with bedwetting to be so funny? I really wanted to see the expressions on my parents’ faces at this moment. What were they thinking? Was this sparking an idea of something they could try if the pills stopped working? But I couldn’t dare bring myself to look back. I was both too embarrassed and concerned that they might get the wrong idea. I couldn’t have them thinking that I was either too eager for some nighttime protection or too embarrassed to be willing to try it. I wasn’t confident that I could work my facial expressions into an appropriate middle ground. The movie continued for another half-hour or so, and it reached its conclusion without making any more references to the fact that the twelve-year-old girl still wore diapers to bed. Mom sent Jackson up to his room with instructions to tidy up his toys before it was time for his bath. Now that it was summer, I still had a couple of hours before I would need to go to sleep. But this also meant that I was alone with my parents for the first time today. The show had created a perfect opening for me to bring up the topic of pull-ups. But it was all too sudden. I hadn’t had enough time to figure out the proper way to word my request. And it was too important of a moment to try to do it impromptu. Instead, I grabbed the third Harry Potter book off of the shelf and flipped to where I had been last reading it. It was my favorite of the series. Mom preferred to read on her tablet while Dad was watching something on his phone with his earbuds in. It was probably a show that they didn’t think I was old enough to see yet. I normally found it easy to get lost in the world of Hogwarts while reading, but I wasn’t able to concentrate on that tonight. My mind began to wander, wondering about how bedwetting would be handled in a magical world. I imagined there probably was a spell that would automatically dry off a wet bed. Mom stepped out of the room for a few minutes. When she returned, she was again holding a small glass of water, and, like last night, I suspected she had those special pills in her other hand. “Maddy,” she said. “It’s time to take your medicine again before bed.” “Do I have to? It didn’t even work. And it gave me a really bad headache.” “Why don’t we give it a try for a few more nights?” Mom asked. “If it doesn’t work, I promise I won’t make you take the pills again, OK? Perhaps there might be some other options your pediatrician can recommend on Monday instead.” “Fine,” I mumbled. “A perfect way to ruin my first day off of school.” It seemed like Mom meant other medications. I just hoped the doctor was familiar with nighttime pull-ups. Pull-ups. Mom. Why couldn’t she mention pull-ups? That had just been a subplot in the movie. As if in reaction to my expression, Mom gave me a slight smile. “You don’t have to worry,” she said. “We never made your sister wear diapers to bed, and we aren’t going to do that for you.” I did my best to put on a happy face. Someone my age who was actually a bedwetter would have to find a statement like that from their parents to be a relief. But it was so hard to do so. With one single sentence, Mom had completely ruined all of my plans. I now realized that there wasn’t going to be any scenario where my parents were going to have me wear pull-ups of their own accord. “Here,” Mom said, handing me the glass of water and the pills. “Best to get these down at least a little bit before you actually get to sleep.” Still in a bit of shock from Mom’s pronouncement that she wouldn’t make me wear diapers, I downed the pills easily and then handed the empty glass of water back to her. “Since you’re going back upstairs,” she said. “Can you please tell your sister that she needs to come down and do the dishes before she goes to bed?” As I trudged up the stairs, my mind was in a state of complete shock as I tried to contemplate what I should do next. I had felt so confident over the past day that I was on a surefire route to success. My mind kept replaying what Mom had said to me, parsing her words to try to find any wiggle room. She had made a small but important distinction. She had said that they wouldn’t force me to wear diapers, not that they didn’t believe diapers shouldn’t be used for bedwetting. I breathed a sigh of relief as I reached the top of the stairs. There was still some hope for me, but I would have to somehow get it across to my parents that I would willingly accept wearing pull-ups at night and do so in a way that didn’t make it look like I was actually all that eager to wear them. I needed to spend some time tonight thinking about how I was supposed to begin that conversation so I could be better prepared the next time that it came up. I silently chided myself for my lack of preparation. I should have been ready for that conversation tonight. I was now standing at the end of the hallway. Like usual, Grace’s door was closed. I knocked on it a couple of times. Unlike usual, there was no response from her. Not even a grumpy request to leave her alone. Somehow, she always seemed to know whether it was me or my parents knocking on the door. She would never be that sassy toward them. I knocked on the door a second time. Still no response. Seriously, why was she not even bothering to answer? I knew very well that I wasn’t supposed to open the door without Grace’s permission. She was not going to be happy with me. But Mom had insisted that I pass along the message. Disobeying her was worse than bothering my sister. I reached out and twisted the handle of the doorknob. I peeked inside as I slowly inched the door open. Grace was seated in the corner in front of her large monitor with her fancy computer box flashing all sorts of neon lights next to her. I didn’t have a clear line of sight to what was on the screen, though it looked like she had one of her digital art programs open. Even from just inside the doorway, I could hear the faint sound of music coming from Grace’s headphones. The music had to be on crazy loud for me to be able to hear it from where I was standing. “Hey!” Still no response. I took another step forward. Still didn’t have a good view of what my older sister was drawing on her computer. “Hey! Grace!” There was a flurry of taps on the keyboard. The monitor flashed away to the home screen before I could get a good look at what she had been drawing. Grace removed her wireless headphones and turned around to look at me. Her eyes widened. She glanced back at her monitor one more time before returning her gaze to me. “What the heck, Madelyn. You’re supposed to knock.” “I did knock. Mom sent me to tell you to come downstairs and wash the dishes.” Grace rolled her eyes. “I haven’t forgotten. You’d think they wouldn’t care as long as I got it done before I went off to sleep. Just tell her I’ll be down in a bit.” “You can tell her,” I said. “I’m going to bed.” I left Grace with her secrets and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. With a mouth full of sudsy toothpaste, I considered my options for tonight, now that I had taken the bedwetting pill again. What I really wanted to do was pee in bed again while lying down, but there was no way I was going to be able to accomplish that until the morning. The pill was effective enough at limiting my body’s urine production to the point where there would be no way for me to pee at midnight while I was taking it before going to bed. One option was to wait until tomorrow. There would be no rush to get out of bed on a Saturday morning. By the time I woke up, my bladder would be full enough to pee in bed. And unless I slept in way too long, Mom and Dad wouldn’t be coming in to check on me. But that also meant that my bedwetting accident would be more obvious to everyone, as I would have to bring the bedding down to the laundry room while they were all awake. I didn’t care for that option. That meant faking a late-night bedwetting accident was better than faking an early-morning one. But without the ability to make myself pee, I had to resort to the trick that I had previously used of just tossing my dry bedding into the washing machine to create the appearance of having cleaned up after a nighttime accident. I waited for what seemed like forever, though probably less than an hour had passed, until I heard my parents finish getting ready for bed. I emptied out the remainder of my secret soccer water bottle onto the middle of the bed. May as well have the bedding appear wet while carrying it downstairs in case I ran into anyone on the way. I had the feeling that Grace was still awake, though, with any luck. She would be far too distracted without whatever secret project she was working doing on her computer. As I returned to my bedroom after getting the washing machine started, thought back again to what Mom had said regarding my sister. They hadn’t forced her to wear diapers. I wondered if they had suggested that option to her only for it to have been refused. Had she perhaps reacted in a way that was making them not want to broach the topic with me? I finished putting a new set of sheets onto my bed, which crinkled beneath me as I tucked myself under the covers. I tried to focus on the one bright spot from this evening. My parents were completely aware that there were diapers that could be used by bedwetters my age. I thought back to how much I had accomplished in the past week since I’d put this plan into action. I’d convinced my parents that my bedwetting was a real issue that wasn’t going away anytime soon. I’d managed to keep up the act despite their multiple attempts to find a solution. I’d discovered that they were informed about the possibility of diapers, even if it wasn’t something they were currently planning to have me use. I’d made so much progress, and now only one step remained. I needed to convince them that I would be OK with wearing diapers again. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

One of my stories, "The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers," is no longer shadow banned. It's showing in searches and tags again, but my other two stories are still delisted. I haven't added any ABDL tags back to the stories yet, though. I want to wait and see how everything plays out, since they did remove that tag listing. Other removed tags include diaper, DDLG, ageregression, little, littlespace, baby, and ageplay. You can still use those search terms, but it makes me not want to have those tags on my story, in case they decide to just move ahead with banning any stories with those tags in the future. Interestingly, tags like TBDL, diapers, CGL haven't been removed yet. See: https://www.wattpad.com/stories/abdl I recently expanded to posting on DA. I noticed something interesting when researching how the viewcount works there. What I found is that views are counted even if a post shows in a user's feed (regardless of whether it was clicked on or not). It seems to be the case that views on DA are highly inflated.

Chapter 17: Not a Baby Three Years Ago I didn’t let my failure to find pull-ups in my sister’s bedroom deter me. I scoured the rest of the house. Jackson’s bedroom seemed like a promising Plan B, but there were no pull-ups or even baby diapers to be found in there either. The same held true for the rest of the house. But just because I didn’t find any diapers didn’t mean that there weren’t other discoveries that were made. The basement was the final frontier of my search for diapers or pull-ups. It was where things that were no longer needed were tucked away forever, or at least until Mom decided it was time to pull them out for a garage sale or donate them to a thrift store. I had to tug hard at one of the doors in the closet that ran the length of the shortest wall in the unfinished area of the basement that was adjacent to the laundry room. The door finally opened with a rather large bang. I hoped that no one upstairs wondered what I was doing. It was Saturday afternoon, so everyone was home. It would perhaps have been wiser to hold off on the search until Monday, when it would just be Grace and me at home during the summer while our parents were off at work and Jackson was attending preschool. But I simply couldn’t bear to wait any longer. I was so convinced that there had to be diapers or pull-ups somewhere in the house. The fact that I hadn’t found them yet just had to mean that I hadn’t looked in the right places. But this first section of the closet didn’t yield the results I had been hoping for. There were a bunch of storage boxes, but the contents of the clear plastic bins were obvious. It was just a bunch of Christmas decorations, ornaments, lights, and an artificial Christmas tree that would need to be painfully reassembled next year. The door shut with a firm click. That was OK. There were still four more sections of the closet left for me to check. The next two were also disappointing, especially as they all contained cardboard boxes that I had to drag out and open before determining that the contents – old keepsakes, games, clothes, and other odds and ends – were not what I was looking for. My anticipation was turning to despair as I approached the second-to-last closet door. I tugged open the door. And there it was. For a moment, I thought I had hit the mother of all jackpots. The cardboard box of pull-ups was sitting at eye level with me on the shelf. I would have preferred to have discovered a box of my sister’s old pull-ups, but at this point, I was simply elated to have found anything at all. It didn’t matter one bit that they were pull-ups meant for boys. I was so eager to finally try one on that I was willing to overlook that detail. I pulled the box out of the closet and set it down carefully on the floor. I paused before opening it, listening for any sounds of movement upstairs. But no one was walking around at all, and there were definitely no sounds of anyone heading toward the stairs that led down to the basement. I was relieved that the cardboard diaper box wasn’t taped up. All I had to do to open it was to unfold the top of it. My hands were shaking as I reached down and pulled the cardboard flaps on top of the box apart. But it wasn’t diapers that I found inside. Instead, it was an assortment of all the baby items that my brother had outgrown. There were bibs, bottles, pacifiers, an old diaper bag, tiny baby utensils, and sippy cups. I closed my eyes and groaned. I had been so close. I hurriedly opened the last remaining closet door. Nothing. Just more clear plastic bins that very obviously did not contain any diapers or pull-ups. My mind felt numb. I had been so sure I’d at least find something. Every other option I had considered for getting my hands on those pull-ups seemed so far off and out of reach at the moment. I wanted them now. The realization that I was being denied that instant gratification stung deeply. I went back to look at the pull-up box that didn’t actually have any pull-ups in it. I no longer had any hope of finding what I was looking for, but I dug my hand into the box nonetheless. All I found was regular, hard plastic, not the soft, crinkly sensation of the pull-up I had held in my hands a little over a week ago. I again regretted that I hadn’t been able to work up the courage to sneak that pull-up home rather than toss it away in the bathroom garbage container. Then another thought took hold of me. If it felt that good to wear a pull-up, perhaps it might also feel good to try out some of my brother’s baby items. Perhaps this whole search wouldn’t end up being a waste of time after all. I looked down at the contents of the cardboard box. It was immediately apparent what my first experiment should be. I plucked out a pacifier from atop an assortment of other baby items. I held the blue pacifier in front of me. Mom had gotten Jackson to give up pacifiers about a year ago – shortly after his second birthday. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to have it in my mouth. I examined the pacifier carefully as I rotated it a couple of times in my hand. How in the world was I supposed to tell which side was up? The clear, silicone part of the pacifier wasn’t uniformly shaped, so there had to be a right way to insert it into my mouth, but I was at a loss to figure out which way it was supposed to go. I tried to recall how it had looked in Jackson’s mouth, but I had never paid close attention to how he has used his pacifiers before. But there was an incredibly obvious way to figure out an answer to that question. I flipped the pacifier over once more, opened my mouth, and brought the pacifier up to my lips. I learned an incredibly important lesson when I put the pacifier into my mouth. It was very important to wash something that had been sitting in storage for a year before you put it into your mouth. I spat the pacifier back out onto the floor. I had never in my life tasted something so gross. I felt as though I was going to puke if I didn’t immediately remedy the situation. Water. I needed water. The closest option was the laundry room sink. I raced around the corner to the laundry room, fumbling for the light switch so I could see the sink in the far corner next to the washing machine. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have taken a single sip of water from this sink or any other one in the house. I had never been able to stand the tap water ever since we had moved into the house when I was about five years old. No one else in our family had that problem, but after several days of me point-blank refusing to take even the smallest sip of water, my parents had finally relented and purchased a filtered water pitcher for me to use. The filtered water tasted so much better. I couldn’t understand how my family could claim that it didn’t taste different at all to them. I had the same problem with water at restaurants. There was about a fifty-fifty chance whether I would be able to drink more than a couple of sips before insisting that my parents let me order juice, ice-tea, or even soda. At this point, they usually just ordered bottled water for me, if that was an option. I looked down at the sink. Under normal circumstances, what I was about to do would have been unfathomable. But these were not normal circumstances. I turned the handle for the cold-water faucet and cupped my hands beneath the cold stream of water before bringing them repeatedly up to my face for quick sips. This was probably the first time in four years that I had actually swallowed any tap water at this house. I brought my cupped hands up to my mouth a half-dozen times before the awful taste left by the pacifier was gone. The tap water didn’t leave a good taste in my mouth, but in comparison to the aftertaste that had been left by the dusty pacifier, it was a massive relief. That didn’t mean that I was in any hurry to drink more of it. I paused at the sound of footsteps moving upstairs. It sounded as though someone was heading out of the living room, straight toward the kitchen. I sprinted out of the laundry room, not bothering to shut the light off. I reached for the box of pull-ups and was just about to lift it up to return it to its place in the closet when the footsteps came to a stop right above me in the kitchen. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was probably just Mom getting started on her dinner preparations. I’d be fine as long as she didn’t need to come and get anything out of the pantry. I realized as well that I had completely forgotten about the pacifier that had fallen to the floor. The second or so that it had been in my mouth hadn’t been nearly long enough for me to decide on whether I liked it, as that moment had been spoiled by its gross taste. My first thought was to wash the pacifier in the laundry room sink, but I immediately dismissed that idea. It was in bad enough shape that I was going to need soap. I tucked the pacifier into the pocket of my shorts. I would need to find a way to clean it later. I looked at the size description on the side of the pull-up box as I put it back into the closet. The weight range that these pull-ups were supposed to fit was thirty-two to forty pounds. I knew from the scale in the upstairs bathroom that I was a good twenty-five pounds above that. Even if there had been some of these pull-ups left over, there wasn’t any way they would have fit me. On the other hand, it was clear that the bedwetting pull-ups my cousins had worn must have had larger sizing requirements, as they had fit me without any issues. But that was a question I wasn’t going to be able to get an answer to. I didn’t have a smartphone. Grace, who was six years older than me, had just recently been allowed to have one for herself. Plus, Dad had made it very clear that he was capable of seeing what things I searched for when I used the family PC or tablet. That was a lesson I had found out the hard way while searching for information on what should have been an innocuous topic, only to have to immediately advert my eyes at what actually showed up on the screen. I had closed the web browser immediately, but somehow, I still ended up getting a lengthy lecture from my parents about internet safety, followed by being banned from using the tablet for several weeks. A few loud thumps caused me to turn my gaze toward the ceiling. There was no doubt about it now. Someone was headed toward the basement stairs. I hurried back over to the laundry room after shutting the closet door behind me, hoping that the pacifier would, in fact, be a good consolation prize. I got on my knees and started opening some cabinets on the floor, pretending to be searching for Chester. “Maddy, what are you doing?” I turned around to see Mom standing in the laundry room doorway. “I’m looking for Chester,” I said, giving the pre-made excuse I had prepared in case any questioned why I was spending time alone in the basement. We’d gotten the two-year-old orange cat several months ago. He was gradually becoming more friendly with us, but he still took to hiding in odd places around the house for hours at a time. “He’s upstairs napping behind the couch in the living room,” Mom said. “But you need to leave him alone if he is hiding away like that. You can play with him when he comes back out again.” “But, Mom.” “If he doesn’t want to be bothered, he doesn’t want to be bothered. He’ll let us know when he wants to be played with again.” Without any further excuse to stay in the basement, I watched as Mom grabbed a box of pasta noodles off of a shelf and then followed her back up the stairs toward the kitchen. I made my way upstairs to the bathroom on the second floor of the house. I did need to use the toilet anyway, and this would provide the perfect cover for getting the pacifier washed. I hoped that the hand soap I was using to clean off the pacifier wouldn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth. I made sure to rinse it off as thoroughly as possible before placing it back into my pocket for the short walk down the hallway to my bedroom. I took the pacifier out of my pocket and laid down on the bed. There was still plenty of time before dinner for me to see how using the pacifier would go. I cautiously slid the pacifier into my mouth. I had done a good job of washing it; there was no yucky taste of built-up dust or soap. I sucked on the pacifier awkwardly, trying to figure out exactly how I was supposed to use it. There wasn’t any real taste to it, just the bland sensation of semi-squishy silicone. I felt really silly. It wasn’t doing anything for me. It wasn’t anywhere close to as fun as wearing a pull-up. I used my tongue to rotate the pacifier in my mouth. Perhaps it had just been in the wrong position. Nope, it was still the same. It wasn’t as though I disliked sucking on the pacifier. It didn’t taste bad or feel uncomfortable. But it didn’t do anything for me. It was nothing like the euphoria I had felt when I had been wearing a pull-up. I tried, and failed, to imagine myself as a baby, sucking on a pacifier or drinking out of a bottle, but whatever had led me to be interested in wearing pull-ups again wasn’t in any way connected to other baby items. Having grown bored with this new toy already, I hid the pacifier in the bottom of my dresser, tucking it safely away until I would have the chance to return it to the closet. Later that week, when I returned the pacifier to its place in the pull-up box in the basement closet, I also tried drinking from a baby bottle, which required me to be incredibly stealthy to clean and fill, even with only my older sister around at the time. I managed to get away with it without being caught, but the result was the same, even though I had filled the baby bottle with my preferred filtered drinking water. Being a baby simply held no appeal to me. I couldn’t fathom wanting to suck on a pacifier or drink from a bottle for more than a minute or two. I certainly didn’t want to be a baby again. But that didn’t matter. As I had learned from my cousins, one didn’t have to be a baby to wear diapers. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Thanks! That certainly would be an interesting scenario. I don't think Maddy realizes yet that there are diapers her size, and not just pull-ups. I wouldn't think she would be disappointed with diapers instead if that were to happen. For sure, there are lots of different ways diapers might come into play for Maddy.

Looks like another site is coming down hard on ABDL content, which is incredibly annoying. Wattpad went and shadowbanned a bunch of stories based on AI flagging them for not meeting their standards. Apparently they will be doing a manual review of all those stories to determine if they will get deleted or not. There's more info about that on the Wattpad Reddit site: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wattpad/comments/1btcjsy/update_on_tag_issues/ In addition to that, the ABDL story tag is no longer visible on Wattpad. Searching for it yields no results. Seems likely they will be coming down hard on all of that content fairly soon. I'm making sure to remove my stories from any of those tags, but I think my days writing on that site are numbered.

Chapter 16: As Anticipated It was amazing how many things could get lost all year in a locker. I stood in front of my locker with a backpack and a garbage bag in front of me on the floor, sorting out the contents of my locker one-by-one. Some of it got tossed in my backpack to keep. Most things went into the trash bag. The locker was now about halfway empty. By the end of the school year, the locker had reached its maximum capacity. I had already tossed more than a dozen long-lost pens and pencils into my backpack. I was sure I’d find another couple dozen by the time I was through with emptying the locker. There were a number of overdue library books I needed to bring to the school library before heading out on the bus, an inside-out, balled up jacket I had left once it had become too warm outside to need it. There were half-empty plastic water bottles, crumpled up papers from homework assignments, and textbooks that I thankfully would never need to ever open again. “You’re not finished yet?” Emma asked as she walked up next to me and stared into the abyss that was my locker. I shrugged as I tossed out a Spanish workbook that I wasn’t going to need again. It was true that my locker was fuller than most, but that hadn’t been the main reason for how long it was taking me to get it all emptied out. The conversation about bedwetting with my parents and sister yesterday evening had given me a lot to think about. The pills had proved to not be much of a problem. Yes, they had made it impossible to wet the bed in the middle of the night, as I would have preferred, but I didn’t have any difficulty peeing in bed once my alarm had woken me up in the morning. I was rather proud of how I had figured out a way to wake up early without disturbing the rest of my family. Waking up to an alarm blaring from an earbud wasn’t the ideal way to start the morning, but it gave me time to wet the bed and relax before getting ready for school. However, despite needing to pee in the morning, the puddle that had formed on the bed around my bottom was a lot smaller than any of the other times I had peed in the bed previously, proof that the medication had done its job of limiting my overnight urine output. Mom, of course, had been a bit disappointed when she woke me up. She made sure to clarify that she wasn’t unhappy with me in any way, but it was clear she had higher expectations for how the medicine would perform. She had very much been expecting to see dry sheets and pajamas in the morning. “Eww, is that what I think it is?” Emma pointed to a discolored plastic baggie that had been revealed when I had taken the book out of the locker. I grimaced as I looked down at what was likely the remnants of an unfinished lunch from months ago. That was one of the problems with my locker. I always intended to get stuff out again right away, but as soon as it became buried, it would slip completely out of my mind. Emma held her nose in disgust as I pinched the corner of the baggie and quickly deposited it into the garbage bag. I hoped there weren’t any additional baggies like that in the locker, but I was beginning to dread what I might end up discovering closer to the bottom. “So, about the all-nighter? What did your mom say about the sleepover?” Emma asked. I sighed and rolled my eyes. It was apparent that my friends were going to keep interrogating me until they got an answer. I answered the first half of that question truthfully. “Doing an all-nighter is a no-go. My parents don’t want us drinking all that caffeine and going crazy.” “That’s silly,” Emma said as she watched me continue to empty the locker. “We wouldn’t have any problem getting away with that at my place. My parents wouldn’t care one bit as long as we didn’t wake them up.” “Then we can go that later in the summer. Just don’t mention it to my mom.” “But, like, we’re still good for a regular sleepover next Friday on your birthday?” I paused a second before answering her question. I didn’t want to say that Mom hadn’t decided yet. That would just be an open invitation to unwelcome questions about what could have changed to make it so I couldn’t have sleepovers anymore. Besides, I was sure that I’d have access to pull-ups next week, which would allow Mom to say yes to my friends spending the night. “Of course.” “That’s good,” Emma said. “I’ll go let Angie know. She’s a lot closer to getting her locker cleaned up than you are. I’ll see you at lunch.” I watched as Emma darted off around the corner, weaving through all the other students who were busy getting their hallway lockers cleaned out for the year as well. Well, I was committed to the sleepover now, which meant I was going to need to get my parents to get me the pull-ups or risk an even more awkward conversation with my friends about how we weren’t actually going to have a sleepover next week. But it wasn’t time to ask my parents about pull-ups yet. There was still the doctor’s appointment to consider on Monday. That appointment had me worried. I didn’t like going to the doctor, even for normal yearly checkups. There was that weird thing they squeezed around my arm to take my pulse, which nearly sent me into a panic attack every time they did it. But apart from the normal poking and prodding, the worst of it was always the needles. At least this time, I could be confident that I wouldn’t need to get any new vaccinations. But what would the doctor make of my bedwetting? I felt confident that I had fooled my entire family so far. They hadn’t expressed a single inkling of doubt that my bedwetting was anything other than genuine. The idea of someone wetting the bed on purpose had to be so far out there that it probably wasn’t ever a scenario they had considered. But what would happen when I was examined by an actual doctor? What if there was something I had missed during my times of faking bedwetting, something I had gotten wrong that would indicate to them that something was not as it seemed? What if they ran all of their tests and determined that they couldn’t find anything wrong with me at all? Would they chalk it up to just a random fluke of genetics? Or would they begin to think something was amiss? On the other hand, the doctor’s appointment could prove useful to my quest to get pull-ups. Surely, they would be aware of that being an option for dealing with bedwetting. Perhaps they might even recommend it as a solution. That would be ideal. That way, I could still at least pretend that I wasn’t all that happy about wearing pull-ups. I had to keep in mind that I was supposed to be behaving like someone who wasn’t happy at all about having to suddenly deal with bedwetting. I resumed my inspection of the contents of my locker. To my great relief, I didn’t find any additional bags of moldy sandwiches. <><><> Despite my older sister’s warning about the side effects she had experienced when she had previously been taking this medication for her own bedwetting, I had felt perfectly fine all day long. I was tired after coming home from school, but that was just because I hadn’t gotten my usual amount of sleep. I hadn’t woken up at weird times in the middle of the night at all. Grace’s main complaint about the medication was that it had given her some extremely painful headaches. My head hadn’t hurt, and as far as I could tell, nothing else seemed to be off about my body. That hadn’t stopped me from constantly wincing and rubbing my head all morning – especially when Mom and Grace were around. I needed to give them as many reasons as possible to stop with the pills and try to move on to another solution. I continued with the act as Grace unlocked the front door to let me in. I groaned and rubbed my head as I eased my overly full backpack down onto the floor. “You feeling alright?” Grace asked. “How did it go last night?” I groaned again. “No, your stupid pills didn’t even work. The only thing they gave me was this lousy headache.” “That’s too bad,” Grace said. “Maybe you’ll have better luck tonight. Oh, and Mom left a note for you in the kitchen. She wanted to make sure you got your laundry done.” That was just great. Nothing like being reminded of additional chores the minute I was finally free from school and homework for the summer. Still, I knew better than to disobey, and this request suddenly gave me a good idea. There were still about twenty minutes until Jackson got home from school, enough time to try out something new I had been wanting to experience. I followed Grace as she walked up the stairs ahead of me. She’d be secluded in her bedroom again until it was time to walk over to the bus stop to collect my younger brother when he was dropped off later this afternoon. I grabbed my full laundry hamper and hauled it all the way to the laundry room in the basement. Yes, this was going to be perfect. Ever since I had discovered how much I had enjoyed wetting myself in bed earlier this week, I had been desperately curious to see what it would be like to do that in different situations. But there were a couple of challenges with trying out this new desire. The first was that there were very few places where I could easily pee my pants without causing a massive mess. Most of our house was carpeted. I didn’t even want to think about how much of a pain it would be to try to clean up that much urine out of the carpet. That left me with a few options. My bed, of course, worked perfectly because of the waterproof mattress. I considered peeing my pants with my clothes on in the bathtub but couldn’t bring myself to find that to be an acceptable option. It just felt too weird to urinate in a spot where I and the rest of my family would later be standing. That left the laundry room in the basement. Its cement floor would make clean-up easy. Plus, there was even a drain on the floor, so if I were to pee myself over that, clean-up would be even easier. That was far and away the best location, especially as I was not as likely to be interrupted, and it would be able to easily hear someone approaching from upstairs. Having decided on a location, there was still another major obstacle, which was that I was rarely left at home by myself. I was hoping that would change this summer now that I would be turning thirteen in a week. In previous summers, Mom had put Jackson in a daycare-like summer camp that he would go to most days for the entirety of summer break. As for me, my schedule had varied. There were day and overnight camps that I would get signed up for. When I wasn’t doing that, I was often spending the day at one of my friend’s places if a parent or older sibling happened to be home. But be allowed to stay at home all on my own? Absolutely not. I wasn’t sure how many good opportunities I would get to experiment with peeing my pants during the day, so I had to be ready to make the most of them when they did show up. The benefit of being in the basement was that I could easily tell where everyone else was in the house. I would be able to hear Grace’s footsteps the moment she started walking down the stairs to the main floor. I had to guess that she wasn’t going to be coming to the basement, but if she was, I would have ample warning to straighten things up quickly. I had worked extra hard to stay hydrated the last couple of hours at school in preparation for this possibility, but now I was wondering if I would be able to pull it off. I ran through the scenario once more in my head. I would change into an old pair of leggings from my hamper. I would stand in the corner of the laundry room where there was a drain in the floor. I would wet my pants there, where it would be easiest to clean up afterward. I would allow myself some time to enjoy the experience before using some of my other dirty clothes to dry off and mop up everything from the floor. Then, everything could be tossed in the washing machine, and no one else would have a clue what had happened once I had changed back into my regular clothes for the day. All so complicated. It would be a lot easier if I simply had a pull-up. I took off my leggings and replaced them with another pair from the laundry hamper. That was one of the strange things about this new interest. I didn’t have any desire to pee myself without any clothes on. I wondered why that was? With this new pair of leggings on, I positioned myself right over the small drain set into the cement floor. I listened carefully. There was no sound from my sister moving around upstairs. This would be another first for me. I had never peed myself while standing before. I assumed that it would be easier to do than while lying down. I spread my legs apart slightly and focused on trying to get my bladder to release. The bottom of my pants began to get warm, and then a warm, wet sensation began to run down both of my legs. It was exhilarating in a way I couldn’t define. Part of it was tied to the physical sensation of what I was doing, but there was something else as well. Was there a certain amount of excitement that came from doing something so socially forbidden? Like always, once I started, there was no stopping it at all. Not that I in any way wanted it to stop. I wished that this feeling could go on forever rather than just the thirty seconds that it would take for my bladder to fully empty. It had been every bit as enjoyable as I had anticipated all day long. The only problem was that it was over far too soon. I looked down at my feet. I knew I had forgotten something. I hadn’t taken off my socks, which were now soaked. For some reason, I had figured that the urine would just go straight through the bottom of my pants and stream onto the floor. I hadn’t considered that it my might run down my legs to my feet. Even then, the drain had proven to be quite effective, as there was only a small puddle remaining beneath me despite how much I had peed. With the sound of urine dripping onto the floor now over, I listened intently again for any movement upstairs. There was complete silence. At any moment now, Grace should head down to the front door to wait for Jackson. I looked back down at the puddle beneath my feet. Again, this would have been so much easier if I had been wearing a pull-up. I wouldn’t have even had to sneak downstairs. I could have done this in the comfort of my own bedroom. I thought back to that girl I had seen at the mall, the one who had been about Jackson’s age, getting her pull-up changed in the restroom. For a moment, I wished that was me. Faking bedwetting was one thing. Pulling that off was easy, given my sister’s history of bedwetting. And wearing pull-ups at night would be an easy secret to keep, even from my friends. But to have accidents during the day was something entirely else. That would call for a much more thorough investigation into what was going on with my body. Besides, I didn’t think I could survive the shame of having my parents, Grace, or Jackson, witness me wetting my pants during the day. And that would make my task of hiding pull-ups from my friends nearly impossible, not to mention what I would have to do at school. No, that wasn’t an option, despite how much I would enjoy being able to wet my pants at any moment whenever I wanted to. But I consoled myself with the possibility that once I got my hands on some pull-ups to wear at night, I could get away with wearing them occasionally during the day. The worst part of it was that I had to clean up right away, rather than continuing to stand in the corner in my wet clothes. The only good thing was that the mess was relatively easy to clean up. I wet some of my clothes in the sink next to the washing machine and used them to mop up the small puddle of urine that surrounded the drain. Satisfied that I’d managed to get everything cleaned up, I tossed the rest of my clothes in the washing machine – along with a large amount of detergent – and got it started before changing back into the leggings I had worn to school. The pounding of distant footsteps told me that Grace was now coming down the stairs to the main floor. I waited until I’d heard the front door slam shut before I made my way back upstairs. My heart was still racing as I shut the door to my bedroom behind me. With all of these new things to explore, this was going to be the best summer ever. I retrieved an old magazine from the bottom of the drawer beneath my bed and flipped instantly to the right page, my eyes fixated on a pair of special undergarments. If everything went right, in less than a week they would be mine. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

I think it is fair to say that Maddy hasn't quite thought through all of the long-term implications for what happens after she has established herself as a bedwetter. We'll get a good look at how it plays out, it's safe to say that it could lead to a lot of interesting situations. That's certainly what the pills are supposed to do. But, like most medications, it doesn't mean they work 100 percent of the time or work the same for everyone who takes it. That would be one option for Maddy to get away from using the pills.

It does seem a little extreme, but there is a certain line of thought in the parenting world that pull-ups/diapers are best avoided for bedwetting, and there could be a bunch of other reasons why they didn't do it for Grace and are avoiding it for Maddy. I think that if they had used pull-ups successfully at any point for Grace, that this might have been brought up as a solution for the sleepover, but we'll have to see when we learn more about the motives they have for those decisions. For sure, it will be interesting to see their thought process for why diapers/pull-ups are being avoided. That would be quite the conspiracy. For sure, there are lots of ways Maddy could play things with the pills to show that they aren't a good idea (apart from making sure the bedwetting continues despite taking them). We'll get more info on the pills later (there's a doctor's appointment scheduled now). But as far as the expiration date of the pills, you have to recall that Grace was still using them up through early high school as an insurance policy when away from home. And the Mom did clear it with Maddy's pediatrician, so it's safe to assume that it's OK in this instance (meds can have a shelf life of up to five years, and that's not a true expiration anyways, that's just how long the FDA has tested) It's clear that the medicine still works, as it is making it more difficult for Maddy to pee so it is stopping urine production as intended. We'll have to see what may or may not happen with the side effects.

Chapter 15: A Hard Pill to Swallow I stumbled through the front door after being dropped off by the bus on Thursday afternoon. I let my backpack fall to the floor with a loud bang as soon as I had shut the front door behind me. I was exhausted. It had been another seven hours of struggling to stay awake and focused through what had seemed to be an endless day of end-of-year exams. The only relief was that I was finished with taking my last test for this school year. Now I had about a week of bliss before my end-of-year grades became available online. Yes, I still had to go into school tomorrow, but that was just to wrap things up, clean out lockers, and have end-of-year pizza parties. I’d be free from homework, studying, tests, and early morning bus rides for the next three months. Now, all I wanted to do was sleep. Grace wasn’t anywhere to be seen. But I knew my older sister was home because the minivan she drove had been in the driveway when the school bus had dropped me off. I didn’t get what she did while she was shut away in her room all the time. I took advantage of her absence to drink a glass of water in the kitchen. But with my recently discovered sports water bottle – tucked away in the deepest recesses of the bottom drawer of my dresser – sneaking around to stay hydrated enough to make myself wet the bed wasn’t going to be an issue ever again. Angie and Emma had grilled me about the sleepover again during the ride home from school. That was annoying because I’d already told them yesterday that Mom had said she needed to think about the proposed all-nighter on my birthday a little over a week from now. I was hoping to get an answer about that from her tonight. Neither of my friends were coming over after school. Angie was busy tonight with preparations for the vacation her family was heading out for as soon as school was out tomorrow. I would have had Emma over this evening, except that she had somewhere to be with her family. I quickly cleaned the glass I’d gotten a drink from and then dried it off before putting it back in the sink, leaving no evidence behind. Once in the living room, I kicked off my shoes and collapsed onto the couch. <><><> I woke up to Grace furiously shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes and looked up. She was standing over me with a panicked look on her face. “Leave me alone,” I mumbled, rolling over to not be facing my sister. “I was just taking a nap.” “What in the world are you thinking?” Grace said, her voice sounding rather agitated. “What do you think? I was taking a nap ’cause I was tired.” “And how do you think Mom would feel about you peeing all over the couch? That’s a lot harder to clean up than your mattress?” I turned back over to look up at Grace. “I wouldn’t do that during a nap.” “Well, that’s what I thought once, too. Just go to your bedroom if you want to sleep.” I yawned and looked at my phone. It was about twenty minutes since I had arrived home from school, but I felt a lot better even after that quick nap. “I think I’m fine, now.” That did raise another interesting question. Was it common for bedwetters to have accidents if they fell asleep for a brief nap during the day? And then there was another thought, one I would have to consider later. If being a bedwetter meant sometimes having an accident during a nap, that could create an excuse for me to experiment with peeing my pants more during the day. “Actually, since you are awake,” Grace said. “You should probably get the cat litter taken care of before Mom gets home. It was really stinky when I was putting clothes in the washing machine before you got home. And you can get your laundry out of the dryer while you're down there because I’m going to need to use it soon for my stuff.” It didn’t matter that Grace was saving me a potential lecture from my parents about not doing my chores. It still was annoying that she was telling me to do it. I stomped noisily down the stairs on the way to the basement. This evening couldn’t come quickly enough. <><><> Mom had apparently talked through the proposal for the all-nighter with Dad, and neither of them was enthusiastic about it. “It’s simply too risky, Maddy,” Mom said. She was sitting next to Dad on the couch. It was just me and my parents in the living room. Jackson was playing with Legos in his bedroom. Grace was off in the kitchen with her after-dinner chore of washing the dishes. “What if you fall asleep on the couch or on the floor by accident? I’m sure you don’t want to have a bedwetting accident around your friends.” I tried to get them to see my side, to no avail. “But that is why we’ll have a bunch of energy drinks. There’s no way I’m going to fall asleep.” “Maddy,” Dad said. “I don’t think you realize how much more caffeine is in those drinks. Even one drink could have four to five times as much caffeine as a can of pop.” “What’s this about energy drinks?” Grace asked as she walked into the living room. There was a splatter of wet spots across her shirt from when she had been washing dishes. “Maddy wants to do an all-nighter for a sleepover on her birthday to avoid the issues she’s been having at night. I was explaining that having a bunch of energy to stay awake the whole night isn’t going to be a good idea.” “There is absolutely no way I would want to deal with three girls all drugged up on caffeine and who knows what else in energy drinks,” Grace said. “Seriously, Maddy. You get shakes just when you have more than one glass of Mountain Dew.” “But,” I said, trying to protest. “It’s not going to work,” Mom said. “An all-nighter is simply not a good idea.” But this left me in a bind. If I couldn’t have a sleepover, what was I supposed to say to my friends? “But I can’t tell Angie and Emma that I can’t do any more sleepovers.” “I don’t think you’ll have to,” Mom said. “There’s something else we can do – something we did with your sister – to make it so you can have a sleepover, so long as it is a normal one without energy drinks.” Pull-ups. Please let it be pull-ups. Perhaps the advertisement in the magazine had been enough to remind Mom of what she may have done for my sister. “Guys,” Grace whined. “Do you have to keep mentioning my own bedwetting?” “It’s just to help your sister out,” Dad said. “We learned a lot about how to handle it with you, so of course, we’re going to try some of the same things with your sister.” “When your sister was around ten years old,” Mom said, “our pediatrician, Dr. Mathorn, recommended trying a pill that would make it so she wouldn’t wet the bed, and it worked quite well.” Seriously? It was as though my parents were doing everything possible to avoid the solution that seemed most obvious to me. But why did it take so long to get Grace the solution that apparently solved all her problems? “Why didn’t she have Grace take those pills earlier?” “I think she said it wasn’t as effective with younger kids and that bedwetting was fairly normal for younger, elementary-age kids, so there wasn’t any need to be concerned about it. We had Grace take the pill whenever she wasn’t going to be at home. It was very effective, so long as she also made sure to limit fluid intake and use the toilet before bed.” Grace groaned softly off to the side. Her hands were covering her face. Obviously, this wasn’t a memory she wanted to be forced to re-live in front of her younger sister. Mom continued her explanation. “Even after her bedwetting phased out, we will had her take the pill for sleepovers for the next couple of years, just as an insurance measure. We still have some, so we figured we’d have you try them the next few nights. Assuming they work as well for you as they did for Grace, then you’ll be able to have the sleepover without any issues. “You really kept those pills?” Grace asked incredulously. “I mean, it wasn’t really intentional. We didn’t think it was likely you’d need them again. They just got tucked away at the back of the medicine cabinet and were forgotten about. It’s probably about time to take them tonight. I’m going to go grab them now.” Mom left to get the pills. Dad excused himself to go off and get Jackson started on his own bedtime routine, leaving me alone with Grace for the moment. My older sister still looked a little irked that Mom had kept her bedwetting medication long after that issue had stopped. For all the ways my parents had allowed my older sister to be independent, bedwetting hadn’t been one of them, not when she had also been forced to continue to sleep on the waterproof mattress until a couple of nights ago. I turned to Grace. “Was there a reason you didn’t take the pills every night?” “I never slept well, and I often had really bad headaches afterward for the next day. It made school impossible.” “Is that supposed to make me want to take them?” “I mean, they do work. I never wet the bed once after taking them. And a terrible headache in the morning beats being known as the girl who still wets the bed at school. But there wasn’t any way I was going to take them every night; that would have been way too much.” “But, like, how does it work?” “I’m trying to remember exactly how the doctor put it,” Grace said. “Basically, it makes it so your body doesn’t produce as much urine while you sleep so that your bladder doesn’t fill up so quickly and make you need to pee.” This revelation about the bedwetting pills was another nail in the coffin to the idea that my older sister had ever worn pull-ups to manage her nighttime condition. I was fairly certain at this point that Grace had never worn pull-ups at home, not with how frequently the laundry was being done when she had been a bedwetter. And the pills meant that she wouldn’t have needed a pull-up any time she had been sleeping overnight somewhere else after she had turned ten. Still, if she had started using the pills around when she was ten, there would have been a time before that when her bedwetting would have to have been managed somehow when she wasn’t at home. I tried to think back to the trips we had taken, but I would have been a baby for nearly all of them, so I didn’t have the slightest recollection of what would have happened with my sister’s bedwetting. Had pull-ups perhaps been used only for those occasions? Or had we picked places to stay that had given my parents the ability to do the necessary amount of extra laundry that would have been required? I’d held off on asking further questions about my sister’s bedwetting because I hadn’t been able to think of a way to ask about pull-ups that would work. I couldn’t have her thinking that I was at all interested in wearing them. But this new revelation gave me an opening to ask a question that could lead to the same answer without revealing exactly what information I was seeking. “So, like, what did you do on trips before you had the bedwetting pills?” I felt quite proud of myself for how sneakily discreet the question was. Without even mentioning pull-ups, there was the possibility that she could give an answer on the subject. “Why does it matter?” “I don’t know. I just realized that I’d never noticed you wet the bed before.” Grace glared at me. Before my sister could say anything further, Mom arrived and answered the question for her. “Oh, we used a special, disposable, absorbent bedwetting pad on top of the mattress.” “Mom, did you have to tell her that?” “What? We’ve already discussed other stuff from your bedwetting.” “It sucked,” Grace said. “It was like sleeping on a massive puppy pee pad. It crinkled worse than my mattress. I could hardly sleep.” “Well, it did at least keep the bed dry while we were at hotels or staying with relatives,” Mom said. “Though it would have been pretty wasteful to use it at home when we had the ability to just toss everything in the washing machine easily.” I finally noticed that Mom was holding a glass with a couple of ounces of water in it. “We should give the pill a try tonight. We need to know if it is going to work before we can OK the sleepover,” Mom said. “Are you sure it is fine to use without talking to a doctor?” Grace asked. “Of course not,” Mom said. “I gave Dr. Mathorn a call this morning, and she gave the OK to have Maddy try the pills this weekend, and depending on how that goes, we can figure out the next steps during her appointment on Monday.” Mom had already signed me up to go to the doctor? My brain started to get fuzzy at the thought of being poked and prodded in an uncannily sterile room. “But… but…” “Dr. Mathorn helped us a bunch with your sister’s bedwetting. It’s not as though she is unfamiliar with the topic.” Mom handed me the pill and the glass of water. “I know you don’t like taking pills. But this one is nice and small, so let’s just get it over with.” I recalled that if I had been an actual bedwetter, I would have been eager about this new solution. I forced what I thought was a natural happy face as I tucked the pill under my tongue and rinsed it down with a swig of water. This was going to be a major problem. “And this is really important, Maddy,” Mom said. “Grace’s doctor was very clear that once the pill is taken right away before bed, you aren’t to have any liquids until the morning. He said that is necessary to avoid some other harmful side effects.” That sucked. I had only gotten half of the way through my water bottle full of disgusting tap water tonight. And the way Mom had phrased this request made it clear that disobeying it would be unwise. I assured Mom that I would avoid drinking any more water and excused myself to head back to my bedroom. I needed time to think through what I was supposed to do next. There were a number of things that I wanted. I wanted pull-ups to wear. I wanted to continue peeing myself. I wanted my parents to think I was a bedwetter. I wanted to have the sleepover with my friends. I wanted to keep the bedwetting a secret from them. I wanted Mom to think that the new bedwetting pills she was giving me were ineffective. I couldn’t think of a path forward that would allow me to accomplish all of that. There was no way I could stop wetting the bed, even temporarily, not when that would convince Mom that the pills were the solution to that problem. But if the bedwetting continued, there wasn’t any way Mom and Dad would sign off on a sleepover. Succeeding in convincing them that I was a bedwetter would only result in them stopping sleepovers unless I could somehow get them to consider pull-ups as a solution. At least with the latest information about my sister’s bedwetting, I was able to understand how she had avoided being made to wear pull-ups. My parents had found a way to handle her nighttime condition in a way that mostly worked without needing disposable undergarments, though in my opinion a pull-up would have worked better than a disposable, absorbent sheet on top of a mattress. Did they not know pull-ups were an option? Had Grace simply outright refused to wear them? Or perhaps they just considered it too expensive or wasteful compared to washing sheets every night? But the exact reason didn’t really seem to matter. What seemed clear to me was that there was no way my parents were going to get me pull-ups of their own volition. I realized now that unless something changed before the sleepover, I was going to need to do the unthinkable. I was going to have to directly ask my parents to purchase pull-ups for me. <><><> A few hours later, I found myself lying awake under the covers. I’d gotten better at staying up past my parents’ bedtime without feeling tired. I had been trying to pee for the past thirty minutes, but it was no use. I didn’t have the slightest urge to urinate. That little pill had worked extremely well. I should have at least felt a decent need to pee at this point, as I’d managed to drink half the bottle before Mom had instructed me very sternly to not have any more water. It was so not fair. The only thing that cheered me up was that it shouldn’t take more than three or four days to convince Mom that these pills weren’t worth the effort. I set an early alarm on my phone, putting in a single earbud so that I’d be the only person to hear the alarm in the morning. No matter how good the pill was, I’d surely have a need to pee in another six hours. I would let Mom wake me up to discover a wet bed again. And in a few days, with every other solution having failed, perhaps it would be possible to convince them that pull-ups were a palatable option. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

There is certainly no question that she is going to get pull-ups, but yes, we aren't quite to that point just yet, outside of the flashback to her first pull-up experience. I think it is safe to say the water bottle is tucked out of sight in her room. Had to have a way to put some limitations on her (having a dad in IT who is careful with where his kids go on the internet), especially with how thorough she has been in trying to get information about pull-ups and diapers. If it weren't for her concerns about being caught looking it up, she certainly would have been eager to look up information which I would rather not have her knowing at this point in the story. Yeah, I was online (I hope secretly) as early as 11 and finding all kinds of stuff, but that changes the dynamic for Maddy too much. I think it's a more interesting story with her having more limited information, at least in this stage of her explorations.

Something like that, lol. That's the danger of posting around midnight and getting a little mixed up on what the date is. I think things will be a little awkward when the report card arrives. Not sure how much gets tied to the bedwetting, it's pretty clear that Maddy hasn't ever been that good of a student in the first place. There are a number of reasons a doctor hasn't been involved yet. It's important to remember that not much time has passed in the story. Maddy first wets the bed early Saturday morning. The last chapter ends Wednesday evening, meaning it's been less than a week since the first bedwetting accident happened. And they would have viewed the first couple of accidents as a random fluke occurrence. Also, this is in the U.S., doctor's appointments aren't something that can easily be set up the next day, especially for something that, while concerning, is in any way an emergency. And this finals week for Maddy. It wouldn't make any sense for her parents to hold her out of school and cause her to miss her exams to go to a doctor's appointment that could be much more easily scheduled for when school is out. Plus, one of the parents will need to arrange time off of work themselves to get her to a doctor as well. Finally, the parents are familiar with bedwetting from their own experience and their experience with Grace; the initial steps they are taking, limiting liquids and making sure she goes to the toilet before bed, are some pieces of advice that would be given anyway at a doctor's appointment. I think it is fair to say that the parents are quite knowledgeable about bedwetting.

Chapter 14: Let It All Soak In I couldn’t fully blame my lack of sleep for how distracted I was from the standardized test I was taking. I suppressed yet another yawn as I tried to recall all the advice Grace had given me about multiple-choice tests. There was the obvious – when in doubt, choose “C.” Then, there were other pieces of advice, such as working to eliminate wrong answers to make it easier when I still needed to guess. On the geometry question I was staring at, I was fairly certain that “C” was incorrect, and I was skeptical of “D” as well. That’s what made the whole thing suck even more. If I just had more time to work things through on a sheet of paper, perhaps I’d arrive at the answer, but I had a little over a minute for each question, meaning I had to just mark an answer and move on to the next one or risk not completely finishing the test. I took hold of my pencil and filled in the “B” circle. At least I had narrowed that question down to having a fifty percent chance of getting it right. Nine months of learning all boiled down to two days of filling in circles for hours and hours on end. I hated that this was supposed to somehow serve as proof that I had managed to learn anything over the course of the school year. Then again, it wasn’t as though my performance throughout the rest of the school year could have been regarded as spectacular. If I had considered how tired the bedwetting was going to make me, I might have been able to exercise enough self-control to delay this experiment until after the school year had ended, but now I was stuck with the consequences of those decisions. Still, I should have been able to do better on the test. It was true that I was tired. It was also true that I had gotten significantly less sleep than normal since Friday evening. But it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Even on nights when I didn’t get that much sleep, I usually was capable of summoning the willpower to stay on task for the first couple hours of school. That wasn’t the case today. That’s because something else was on my mind. Something that challenged everything I had thought I had known about my pursuit of pull-ups over the past few years. Despite my best efforts, my thoughts kept attempting to drift back to that scene in bed earlier this morning when I had peed in my pajamas while lying down on the bed. I had finally succeeded in coaxing my body to allow my bladder to release in a more natural sleeping position. The result had been a rush of exhilarating physical sensations and emotions that had taken me completely by surprise, especially as that hadn’t been the case the two other times I had peed while kneeling over my sheets. There were a couple of things I knew were true about my interest in pull-ups. There was something about the overall presence and feeling of wearing a pull-up that I found comforting, from the way the sides hugged around my waist to the softness of the interior absorbent padding to the way the bulky padding fit between my legs. I could still recall the mesmerizing way the pull-up had crinkled as I had held it in my hands and slid it up my legs. It had brought a sense of calm and assurance that shouldn’t have been possible for just a change in undergarments. I had always assumed that I would wet a pull-up when I got a chance to wear one next. That was what one did when they wore a pull-up. I had no idea whether that was something I was going to enjoy, but I was desperate to discover what it felt like. With the way my wetting experiment had gone this morning, I felt it was safe to assume that this was something I was going to enjoy. What I had never expected was that I would now be desperately wanting to wet my pants again, not because doing so was part of a scheme to get my parents to purchase pull-ups for me, but because I enjoyed doing it in and of itself. I looked up at the clock near the doorway to the classroom. How long had I been staring blankly at the next question? Five minutes. I hurried through the new few questions, skimming them briefly before hastily filling in my first guess. Grace had told me a horror story about college prep tests where one would actually lose points if they got an answer wrong, meaning that guessing was risky business, as it was better for your grade to leave a question blank than to be incorrect. At least that wasn’t the case with this test. I took a deep breath. I was still on track to finish the test on time. Just had to stay focused, remind myself that I would have all summer to experiment with these new desires. There were only twenty minutes left before it would be time to break for lunch. I managed to get through three more questions before I once again succumbed to my daydreams, drawn in by other questions that I felt more strongly compelled to answer. There were so many things I wanted to know now. What would it feel like to wet my wants while I was standing, with the urine trickling down my legs and onto the floor? What about when sitting down on a chair, where it would cause my bottom to get soaked rather than my front? The best part of all was that I didn’t need any special undergarments to explore any of these newly desired experiences. But none of this meant that my longing for pull-ups was, in any way, lessened. I hadn’t thought that it would be possible for my desire for pull-ups to grow any more intense than it had already done in the past three years. But the revelation that I enjoyed peeing myself meant that there was even more to look forward to when I finally got the pull-ups. But in the meantime, I was eagerly looking forward to when I would be alone in bed this evening, and I was already working out ways I could circumvent my family’s attempts to limit my hydration. <><><> The worst part about the standardized tests was that they were done in long sections. They made us sit at our desks for seventy-minute test sections. That was far too long to be sitting on an uncomfortable wood desk. Angie and Emma weren’t even in the same room for me for the testing, not that it mattered, as we wouldn’t have had any chance to communicate, anyway. I joined my friends at a table in the cafeteria. Angie was already halfway through her lunch, and Emma had gotten a few bites into hers. “Took you long enough,” Angie said as I took a seat across the table from her. “I was done fifteen minutes early.” My face burned. I had used up every last second, filling in circles right up until the moment we were directed to immediately set our pencils down. I hadn’t done well at all. The worst of it was I’d left a handful of questions unanswered at the end. “What did your mom say about the sleepover?” Emma asked between bites of her ham and cheese sandwich. I had put off asking Mom about the sleepover. I had still been working on the best way to convince her that an all-nighter would not only be OK, but would be a good way to circumvent her concerns about bedwetting. I gave an excuse that, under most circumstances, would have been the honest truth. “Uh, I forgot.” Emma tilted her head back and rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Maddy, do I need to like text you a reminder to make sure you do it?” <><><> The copy of Reader’s Digest was still on the entryway table when I got home from school. Mom probably hadn’t had time yet to take a look at it before she went off to work. I left it untouched. I’d just have to wait for her to read it after dinner. Grace was already home. Mom and Dad still didn’t allow me to have the house to myself for more than five to ten minutes at a time. That had been different with Grace. By the time she was turning thirteen, they had not only entrusted her to stay alone by herself, but they had allowed her to be home with Jackson and me. I, on the other hand, apparently still required constant supervision. It would likely be another year or two before they finally moved on from that time when I had accidentally left the stovetop burners on. I had the next few evenings planned out for if, when, and how I was going to continue the bedwetting. Tonight, Wednesday night, I was going to wet the bed for real again, but do it in the middle of the night, rather than early in the morning. On Thursday, I would give the bedwetting a break, figuring that the occasional dry night would make the rest of the wet nights appear more natural. On Friday night, or really Saturday morning, I would again wet the bed for real once I woke up in the morning. Tonight was the trickiest, with all of my family members save Jackson paying close attention to my hydration and bathroom habits. My phone buzzed. Emma had just texted me a reminder to ask Mom about the sleepover. I texted back to inform her that Mom was at work and that I would be asking her after dinner. I headed off to the restroom at the urging of my bladder. I tugged down my pants to the disappointing sight of my underwear. Using the toilet had never felt so completely unsatisfying as it did right now. If only I could be going potty in my pants instead. As I sat on the toilet, I tried to make sense of why this new desire had appeared. I’d struggled throughout the day to understand the why of what had happened earlier. Was this tied to my desire to wear the pull-up again? Was it something altogether different, a new spark? <><><> Mom made me wait thirty minutes after dinner before she finally picked up the Reader’s Digest magazine. I hadn’t been able to witness the moment of truth, so I was left to guess whether the pull-up ad had caught her gaze when she had first grabbed the magazine. She looked up from the magazine as I walked into the living room. “Can I ask you a question?” “Sure, what do you need?” “My friends were wanting to do a sleepover for my birthday party.” “Maddy,” Mom said. “Are we really sure that is a good idea right now?” At least Mom had the courtesy not to mention bedwetting, as Jackson was still in the room. “They suggested that we could pull an all-nighter. So, that way there won’t be any issues since I won’t be falling asleep until we leave.” Mom frowned. “I’m going to need to talk with your father about that.” That wasn’t usually a promising sign, as Mom tended to be more lenient than Dad when it came to giving me permission to do new things. However, the fact that I hadn’t gotten an outright no was at least encouraging. My biggest problem would be trying to explain to my friends why I suddenly wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers anymore if my parents were to reject the all-nighter plan and not offer pull-ups as a solution. I texted Emma to let her know that I had asked Mom and that I hadn’t gotten an immediate decision. Now, it was time to put my plan to get hydrated for tonight into motion. I went upstairs to my bedroom and scoured through my closet, digging through boxes of old soccer equipment until I came across exactly what I was looking for. It was a water bottle I had been given at a camp a year or two back, one of the annoying ones with one of those spouts that almost made it feel as though I was drinking out of a toddler sippy cup. With the rest of my soccer cups in the cupboard downstairs – Mom had insisted they be thoroughly washed with the soccer season over – this was the perfect find, as no one would have a clue that I was using it. I waited until Gace had started her evening task of washing dishes. Yes, I could have done this while she was secluded in her bedroom, but I wasn’t going to take the slight risk of her coming out at an inopportune time and catching me in the process of filling up the bottle. It was a twenty-four-ounce bottle. More than enough to get sufficiently hydrated to allow me to easily pee. A few minutes later, it was full of yucky tap water from the upstairs bedroom, but it wouldn’t make any difference. My body would work to convert it to urine just the same as if it had been fancy filtered water. In the end, it all came out the same way. <><><> I squirmed underneath the covers as the clock moved ever closer to midnight. This was partly due to the physical need to urinate. I had downed the whole water bottle in the hour before I had gotten ready for bed. But it was also in anticipation of what I was about to do. In my head, I kept replaying the moment I had wet the bed last night. Thirty minutes to midnight. The sounds now coming from the bedroom told me that Mom and Dad were in the final stages of getting ready for bed. They always fell asleep quickly. There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t wet myself now rather than wait until midnight. It wasn’t as though I was going to want to get up and get cleaned up right away. I wanted time to savor the moment I had been looking forward to all day long, let it all soak in. I made a short and futile attempt to pee while lying on my back, but that was completely hopeless. It didn’t even feel as though I’d come close to getting my bladder to release. That changed when I rolled over to my stomach, the mattress loudly protesting beneath me as I did so. I didn’t bother with any more experimentation. I knew now what worked, so I followed the same exact routine. I slid my hands under my chest, raising myself up ever so slightly off of the mattress. My bladder emptied at the slightest urging. I dropped down onto the mattress the moment I began to pee. The urine was streaming out of me so fast I could hear the sound of it as it came out. I hadn’t noticed how I’d been holding my breath. I breathed out slowly as my bladder emptied. The expectations that had built up throughout the course of the day were more than exceeded. This was even better than last night, as the amount of water I had chugged before going to bed meant that I peed a lot longer. My sheets were soaked all the way past my knees. The mental exhilaration of peeing myself like an actual bedwetter combined with the physical sensation of the intense warmth from the urine left me in a state of euphoria. There was no sense of shame or embarrassment. It felt so good. It couldn’t possibly be wrong. My only regret was that it had taken me three years to realize that this was an option. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Thanks, and that's why i like having the flashback chapters as well, showing how much of a buildup there has been to this point. Thanks, I've never come across one that old in real life, just scene those older ads on the internet. It's been a while since I've watched that movie. Trying ti think of what scene you're referring to. And yes, Maddy would be quite mad at that.

Chapter 13: It Feels Good I winced as I pulled the blaring earbud out of my ear. The left side of my head ached terribly. Perhaps that was the result of sleeping with an earbud all night long. Or maybe that was because of how unexpectedly loud my alarm had sounded when it had gone off like that. With my earbuds now laying harmlessly on the bed, the blaring alarm coming from them was only barely audible. It certainly wasn’t anywhere near loud enough to be heard from outside of my bedroom. I was almost stunned that my plan to wake up early had actually worked. And, with my alarm tied to my earbuds, I hadn’t woken up my family either. I yawned several times. It was another early morning for me. But, unlike when Chester had woken me up early yesterday, this time, it had at least been intentional. That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to feel the effects of less sleep, though. I had another long day of end-of-year tests, which I wasn’t looking forward to in the least. Well, it wasn’t so much the tests that I wasn’t looking forward to, but what my report card would be saying when my parents checked my grades online later. The hard part was over, at least. I was awake. I had plenty of time until I was actually supposed to be up for school. All I had to do now was to wet the bed intentionally. The one good thing was that I did need to pee. It didn’t matter that I’d had less to drink yesterday or that I’d used the toilet right before getting into bed. A nearly full night of sleep was still enough for my bladder to fill up again. The need to go wasn’t super urgent. I likely wouldn’t have had an issue with going back to sleep and waiting to use the toilet when getting up for school at a normal time. I remained under my covers as I rolled over to lie flat on my stomach. The noise of the bed crinkling beneath me served as a reminder of last night’s conversation with my parents and the mattress swap afterward. For a few brief, wonderful moments last night, I had thought that I had managed to convince my parents to get pull-ups, but for whatever reason, they seemed to think this was a better way to manage my bedwetting, at least for now. I had to remind myself that I had only begun the bedwetting plan on Friday evening, and it was now Wednesday morning. Not even a week had passed. I had to admit that it wasn’t reasonable to expect pull-ups that quickly. This new mattress had come as a complete surprise. That didn’t mean there weren’t some obvious benefits to the waterproof mattress. I wouldn’t have to work so hard to clean things up after an accident. No need to go and grab paper towels, cleaning sprays, and baking soda. I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about possibly ruining my mattress. It also meant that it wouldn’t matter if the accident wasn’t cleaned up immediately. There wouldn’t be any worries about the urine soaking into the mattress, to the point of being impossible to get rid of the smell and stains. I suspected that it wouldn’t be likely that I’d be able to fall back to sleep afterward, but I could at least feign sleep until Mom came to wake me up. I wasn’t looking forward to her seeing the result of the bedwetting – I had at least avoided having her witness my wet pajamas since that first fake bedwetting accident on Friday evening. I had to make sure the accident looked natural. It was one thing for Mom or Grace to see my wet bed in the middle of the night, when they were probably groggy and their faculties may not be fully working. It was something else in the bright morning light. The easiest way to do that would be to actually pee myself while lying down this time, rather than while lying down in bed, but to do that, I would need to get past whatever mental block had been making it difficult for me to urinate while my bottom wasn’t hovering over a toilet. I still had plenty of time. There were another forty minutes until I was supposed to be up. And, if I pretended that I had slept past my alarm, that probably gave me another five to ten minutes past that before Mom would come in and check on me. I rotated through a couple of different mental exercises as I attempted to convince my bladder that it was OK to pee. I tried thinking about rain, rivers, and dripping faucets, but unlike the two nights when I had been kneeling over the bed, that wasn’t enough, though I did feel my bladder getting closer to the point of release. Next, I tried to picture myself seated on the toilet, thinking about the sensation of sitting on the cold plastic toilet seat, but I didn’t think my bladder found that mental image to be all that convincing while I was lying on my stomach. I strained my muscles as much as I could. I came so close, but it still wasn’t enough to get the floodgates to open. Ten minutes had already passed by. I knew that in the worst-case scenario I would simply emulate how I had wet the bed those first to nights, but I wanted more than anything to do it the right way for once. There was more to that desire than wanting to make sure my mom was convinced it was a legitimate bedwetting accident. I wanted to know what it felt like to wet the bed. Perhaps the problem was with how I was lying on my stomach, with how my bladder was pressed up against the bed. But instead of sitting up completely, I slid my arms under my chest so that my waist was just an inch or two off of my sheets. It was a small difference, but it proved to be exactly what I needed. I put all my concentration into getting my bladder to release, and a minute later, I began to pee. The warm urine quickly began to stream through my underwear and cotton shorts. A few seconds later, I lowered myself back onto the bed as my bladder continued to empty. Like the other two times I had peed the bed, once I had started, there was no stopping it, not even after adjusting into a position where I had previously not been able to get my bladder to release. It was a vastly different experience to wet myself while lying down rather than doing it while kneeling over my bed. My shorts and even my shirt got significantly wetter as the urine pooled beneath me. This is where the difference of having a waterproof mattress became clear. As the urine wasn’t able to soak into the mattress, that meant it instead soaked further and further through my sheets and pajamas, in a large wet spot with my waist at the epicenter. When I finally stopped peeing another twenty seconds later, I was wet all the way from my knees to the middle of my chest. My previous attempts at wetting the bed had felt a bit awkward and embarrassing. This was different. My heart was racing, but not from being afraid. There was a sense of exhilaration. Why was that? Was it because I had wet myself in a more realistic way? It certainly felt more real to pee while lying down than to do it how I had done it before. The sensation of laying in urine-soaked pajamas and sheets should have been off-putting, but it wasn’t. The warm sensation surrounding me felt comforting in a way I couldn’t explain. I laid as still as I possibly could under the sheets. I was left to ponder how it would feel when all of that warmth and wetness was instead contained by the pull-up. <><><> “Maddy. Maddy. It’s time to wake up.” My eyes flickered open and then shut right away again. I was in bed, but something felt really off. I turned my head to the sound of Mom’s voice. Everything beneath me was damp and clammy. The exhilaration of the bedwetting incident had faded away along with the warmth. Given Mom’s calm reaction so far, the urine must not have soaked upwards through my sheets or cover. From her vantage point, everything must have appeared dry. “At least you made it through the night,” Mom said. “I suppose we didn’t need the new mattress tonight after all, but still, it will be good to have it as a precaution until we’re sure this bedwetting phase is over.” There was no escaping from Mom finding out about the bedwetting. I mean, she had to find out, but what was the best way to do it? I didn’t want to be forced to tell her about it, but the alternative, throwing off my covers and revealing just exactly how big of a mess I’d made in bed, was embarrassing as well. I resisted her request to get out of bed and pulled the cover tighter over my body. “Just a few more minutes.” “Madelyn, seriously, you’re going to miss the bus if you don’t get your bottom out of bed right now.” “But Mom…” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence, to admit having wet the bed. Mom’s expression shifted as she walked back toward the bed. “Is something wrong?” “Um.” What else was I supposed to say? But it didn’t really matter. I was sure my face was giving away how embarrassed I was feeling again. Mom reached down and gave my cover and sheets a gentle tug that was enough to reveal the reality of what lay beneath them. “Oh, Maddy.” Mom sighed as she looked down at me. I looked away from Mom, down at the massive wet patch beneath me. It was even bigger than I had imagined in my head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know it happened until you woke me up.” “It’s alright,” Mom said. “Let’s just focus on getting you ready for school.” I slid gingerly out of bed. I decided that as much as I liked the immediate aftermath of wetting myself in bed, I didn’t care as much for how things felt once everything cooled off. Mom gave me a careful hug, making sure to not press up against the wet spots on my pajamas. “I’ll take care of getting everything cleaned up. Just toss your wet pajamas on the bed and head to the shower.” Mom retreated to the hallway, shutting the bedroom door behind her and giving me some momentary privacy to get undressed. I stripped out of my wet clothes and tossed them on the bed. How many more nights and mornings like this was it going to take? <><><> By the time I was dressed and out of the shower, all my bedding had been stripped and taken to the laundry room. The light-blue mattress was a strange look in the middle of my bedroom. There wasn’t anyway but to admit that it was an effective method for handling bedwetting. Nothing further was said about the bedwetting incident. Mom handed me a cup of yogurt for breakfast. From the kitchen, I could hear the washing machine running down in the basement. If Grace or Jackson had noticed all the laundry Mom had taken downstairs, neither of them made any mention of it, either. I finished off the small can of yogurt in record speed and then grabbed my backpack and headed toward the front door to wait for the bus. I would be able to see it coming off in the distance, so there wasn’t any need to leave the house until it was in sight. There was a pile of mail near the front door that had been brought in last night that hadn’t been yet been sorted. On top of it was another copy of Reader’s Digest. Recently, there was a new ad for the bedwetting pull-ups about every other issue. I had assumed that Mom must have seen the advertisement at some point or another. I wasn’t as sure that she had ever used these pull-ups with my sister, but I had hoped that all the advertising would have given her the idea that this could be an option to use with me. But maybe she just skimmed past the ad without looking at the finer details. The size range for the pull-ups was in small print, after all. There had to be something I could do to get her to take a closer look at the advertisement without letting her know that I was behind it. With the bus seemingly running a few minutes behind schedule, an idea came up for something I could put into motion before I headed off to school. Everyone else was still in the kitchen. The bus wasn’t in sight yet. My affinity for the magazine was already well known by my parents. Since they viewed it as educational, it wouldn’t stand out as suspicious if they came across me reading through it. I leaned back against the wall as quickly skimmed through the magazine. To my good luck, the ad for the bedwetting pull-ups appeared smack in the middle of the magazine. But how could I make sure it got Mom’s attention this time? A few ideas floated in my head. I could slightly crinkle the edges of a few pages – the pull-up ad included – so that when Mom was skimming through the magazine, she would be more likely to stop on it. But that didn’t feel like enough to actually get her attention. I could leave the magazine open to this page, but face down. On the opposite page was the start of a story I could plausibly be interested in. But would that be too much? I thought I could pass it off as believable. And I could always feign some initial discomfort at the idea of pull-ups when my parents did bring it up as an option. I pretended to read the magazine, though really all I was doing was taking in the image of the pull-up on the page, reading through all the features — five-layer protection, double leg barriers, the ability to absorb three cups of liquid. That last bit of information seemed most relevant to my case. I had peed a lot in each of the bedwetting accidents, but certainly not much. It gave me hope that the pull-ups would work for me when the time to wear them finally arrived. A minute later, I caught sight of the yellow bus off in the distance. I hastily set the magazine face down on the table, hoping that it would at last catch Mom’s attention when she opened it up later. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Writing a story that involves an abusive parent doesn't mean that the writer or readers condone abuse. All stories require conflict. That conflict often comes from the antagonist engaging in unethical, immoral, or illegal behavior, usually to the detriment of the protagonist. Portraying a villain doing villainous things doesn't mean that the author or readers support that behavior in any way. The point of the story isn't to cheer on the villain; it is to see how the protagonist survives and overcomes that challenge and how it shapes and affects their life. And yes, there is a satisfaction to seeing the villain get what is coming to them in the end. If someone creates a story about a serial killer or a rapist, they aren't condoning murder or rape, and the people consuming that media aren't doing so because they find murder and rape to be acceptable behavior. These stories don't normally that behavior. And likewise, if an author writes an ABDL story that contains abusive parents, that doesn't mean they are condoning the abuse, or that the people reading it are reading it because they like child abuse. (The one caveat I would add would be that a story that does portray abuse as acceptable/good/normal would be problematic, there isn't any question about that.) I completely understand why someone with your background would be personally uncomfortable reading about that topic, I wanted to provide an explanation for why these types of stories can be OK to write/read. And that is why stories about traumatic experiences can be important, because they can allow people who haven't had that experience to better understand and empathize with people who have. To give an example, I recently watched a really well-done TV mini-series "A Nearly Normal Family." The series begins with a deeply uncomfortable scene where a teen girl is assaulted by her coach at a sports camp. The story gives a very detailed look at how this has impacted her life and the importance of being able to listen to and support survivors of assault. As a guy, these are situations or experiences I'm not ever going to have, but there is an importance to being able to better understand the challenges women still face in society.

That would certainly make things pretty wild. I know. If they were normal ABDL-story parents, she'd have what she wants already and then some. There's lots of things for her to try, but she went to bed with the plan to wake up early to wet it before school, so we'll have to see how that plays out first. That's possible, also possible that it could result in adjusting summer plans. But that's still over a month away, so they're going to have to figure out things in the meantime. And there's also that sleepover/allnighter that Maddy's friends want to have on her birthday.

Thanks, like seeing the theories, though I'll need to stay mum on how those may go. That is an interesting theory. We will definitely be learning more about her parent's experiences with bedwetting and how that impacts their decision making (along with more info about how Grace's bedwetting was handled). Maddy's parents are making it easy for her to get pull-ups, that's for sure. But it would be hard for her to confess that she has any interest in them. As for the title, we'll just have to see how things play out. There's a long way to go with the story. It's been 12 chapters so far and we've only covered a Friday afternoon to a Tuesday evening.

Chapter 12: A New Solution I woke up with a bunch of fur in my face. I let out a loud sneeze as I shoved our orange cat off of me. Chester trotted halfway to my now open bedroom door – he must have snuck in while I was sleeping – and then looked back and made a chirpy meow at me. Yes, yes, I get it, cat. You’re hungry. There was no choice but to get up and feed him. Not unless I wanted him bothering me until it was time to get up and get ready for school. My digital clock still said there was an hour-and-a-half left until it was time to get up for the day. I could probably even squeeze in another ten minute of sleep if I waited until Mom came to wake me up. I looked down at my pajamas as I got out of the sleeping bag. There was a clear and obvious problem. These were the same ones I had worn to bed last night. I had forgotten to toss them in the laundry with my bedding last night. I took a deep breath. That was a close call. If Mom had caught me in these pajamas, it would have raised questions I’d be unable to provide a satisfactory answer for. I changed into a new pair of pajamas and headed downstairs with my old ones. There wasn’t a need for the flashlight app on my phone as the first rays of sunlight were coming through the windows. I walked as quietly as I could. Chester trotted alongside me, chirping noisily. At least I’d have a good excuse for being up if anyone was awake when I was returning to my bedroom. I filled up Chester’s food and water bowls in the laundry room. They hadn’t even been fully empty. The stupid cat couldn’t be satisfied with eating out of a bowl that was only half-way full. Now I needed to deal with my pajamas. I turned on the faucet in the sink next to the washing machine and held my pajamas under the water until they were soaked. I twisted them in my hands to wring out all the excess water and then stuffed the pajamas in with the still very damp bedding in the washing machine. There, now, when Mom moved the laundry over to the dryer, nothing would seem out of place. <><><> A yawn escaped me at the start of math class. Mr. Thompson was going around handing back our final homework assignment of the year before we got started on our final exam. It had taken me about an hour to fall back to sleep after putting my pajamas in the washing machine. At that point, I’d only gotten another thirty minutes of sleep before Mom woke me up for school. From the look on her face, this most recent fake bedwetting incident had completely caught her by surprise. I suppose she had thought all the preventative measures she’d made me take would have been enough to bring the bedwetting to an end. Mom had taken care of vacuuming up the baking soda on the mattress and moving the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. As far as I was able to tell, she hadn’t caught on to the fact that I had faked the bedwetting accident simply by tossing my bedding and pajamas in the washing machine. Mr. Thompson handed the algebra homework paper to me as he passed by my desk. I stared at it in disbelief. The letter “C” was circled in red at the top right corner. I skimmed through the questions. Several of them had been marked as incorrect with red dashes through them. That was a complete betrayal. It was totally unfair. I had held up to my end of the bargain in keeping Grace’s secret, and she hadn’t even bothered to deliver me a good grade. There was no way these questions had been too difficult for my older sister. I tucked the assignment angrily into my backpack. I was going to have a word with Grace after school. The next set of papers our teacher handed out was even less fun than the first. Our final exam for the math class was fifty questions long and would account for twenty-five percent of the grade for the year. It was hard enough to do math when I was fully awake, but I was exhausted from the lack of sleep over the past several days. All the numbers and symbols seemed to dance around in front of me as I tried to work my way through each question. It didn’t help that I’d already had to sit through five different tests today, with each one seeming to go worse than the one preceding it. It was no use. I gave up about halfway through, beginning to fill in the little multiple-choice circles with my pencils with my best guess after reading through the question once. At least if I finished earlier, I could find somewhere to sit and rest outside in the hallway. <><><> I struggled to pretend that the way my parents were limiting my liquids didn’t annoy me. But it wasn’t fair. Mom had made fresh-squeezed lemonade to go with our dinner of hotdogs fresh off of the backyard grill, and I had been given a much smaller portion of lemonade than I would have preferred. Even Jackson had as much as me, and Mom was as careful with monitoring his sugar intake as she had been when I was his age. But the amount I had to drink tonight was irrelevant. I intended to instead wet the bed closer to when I was about to get up in the morning, so long as I could figure out a way to be awake at least a decent time before needing to get up for school. No amount of restrictions on how much I was allowed to drink would change the fact that I would need to pee when I woke up in the morning. I wasn’t sure of all the specifics of the plan. I would simply need to improvise when the time came. I watched as Grace quickly finished her meal, excusing herself from the table and heading off toward her bedroom. I hadn’t managed to corner her yet. She still owed me an explanation for the poor grade she had gotten me on the Algebra homework. I finished my hotdog in a large final bite and washed it down with the remainder of my pitiful serving of lemonade. It was time to confront my sister. I retrieved the mangled homework paper from my backpack in my bedroom, straightening it out before walking up to my sister’s bedroom door. I knocked on Grace’s door. No response. I knocked again, a bit louder. “I’m coming,” Grace said. “Yes, I know I need to still do the dishes.” A few seconds later, her bedroom door cracked open a few inches. “Oh, it’s you?” Grace said. “I’m busy.” I shoved the homework paper in her face before she could shut the door on me. Grace nudged it aside with her hand. “What are you so upset about?” Grace asked nonchalantly. “I got a ‘C’ on the assignment. You were supposed to help me get all the questions correct.” Grace rolled her eyes. “Let me let you in on a secret of cheating on homework. Never get a score that would make your teacher suspicious. If you had turned in an assignment that had every single answer correct, that would raise a lot of questions. I doubt you’ve gotten an ‘A’ on any assignment in the class this year, and to do so on an especially difficult one would make it look really obvious that you didn’t do the work yourself.” “Oh.” I hadn’t considered that at all. “If I hadn’t helped, you probably would have gotten a zero on it,” Grace said. “So, you still came out well ahead. Now, if you don’t mind, I have things to do.” Grace stepped back and shut the door in my face. I was left to wonder how she was so knowledgeable about cheating on homework. <><><> “Maddy, your dad and I need to talk with you about something.” I could feel my heart begin to speed up. That phrase was never the harbinger of good news. I looked up at Mom from where I was sitting on the couch with my phone. She was standing near the entrance to the living room. There was a serious look on her face, but it differed from the more annoyed expression that she wore when I was in trouble for something. Jackson was oblivious to Mom’s request. He was sprawled out on the carpet in front of the couch, playing Minecraft on a tablet. Thankfully, Grace was nowhere to be seen. She was secluded upstairs again in her bedroom after having come down briefly to wash dishes in the kitchen. What could I have possibly done wrong? The list of options was longer than I would have liked. It had to be something more than just forgetting my chores. I would just be sent off to do them right away if that were the case. The one thing that didn’t worry me was my end-of-year grades. They weren’t looking to be that good, but Mom and Dad wouldn’t be getting hold of them for at least a week or more. That could be dealt with later. But there was the Algebra quiz. Had Mr. Thompson decided something was off after all and told my parents about it? Or had one of my friends blabbed about how Grace had left us on our own at the mall? Either of those would have me spending a sizable amount of time grounded at the start of summer break. But as bad as either of those two outcomes might be, there were even worse possibilities to consider. What if they’d caught on to how I had been faking the bedwetting? If they questioned me about whether it was real, would I be able to lie effectively, or would I crumble under the pressure of that interrogation? “Maddy, come on,” Mom said, giving her head a slight shake in the direction of the hallway. I stepped carefully over my brother as I walked in a straight line toward the hallway. Regardless of what I was going to be disciplined for, I had a pretty good idea of how it was going to go down. Unlike either of my friends, I had never been on the receiving end of a spanking. That didn’t mean that my parents’ disciplinary methods were ever enjoyable. In fact, there were a number of times when I think I would have rather endured a spanking than be forced to be grounded from electronics for a week. As I followed Mom down the hallway, I was mentally bracing myself for the long lecture I was about to get, followed by being grounded from whatever my parents thought would best convince me to behave better in the future. There wasn’t a specific location in the house where these conversations normally took place; it was always somewhere away from my siblings, so they couldn’t eavesdrop on the conversation. I followed Mom to the entrance room, where Dad was already sitting on the right side of a small couch. Dad patted the middle of the couch. “Why don’t you have a seat, Maddy.” That was different from normal. Aside from the fact that these lectures usually began before being given a chance to sit down, there was the realization that neither of my parents had used my full name. That made me even more confused. So, I wasn’t in trouble? I took a seat next to Dad, and then Mom squeezed in beside me to my left. There was barely enough room for us on the couch, which was probably only meant for two occupants. I kept my mouth shut. Better to wait and see what exactly my parents were up to than guess and be wrong. “We need to have a talk about what’s been happening at night,” Mom said. “About how we’re going to need to handle the bedwetting.” There it was. I tried to get myself into the right mindset for this conversation. I had to talk as though the bedwetting was surprising and upsetting, that I wanted nothing more than for it to come to an end. And, if possible, I needed to find a way to discreetly steer the conversation toward the possibility of getting pull-ups without revealing how badly I wanted those specific undergarments. “It is kind of our fault, in a way,” Dad said. “And mine,” Mom added. I looked back and forth between my parents. How in the world could it be their fault that I was wetting the bed? “I read that if both parents had a history of wetting the bed as kids, then it meant their own kids have a three-in-four chance of being bedwetters themselves,” Dad explained. Fractions always gave me a hard time. I tried to picture it in my head the way that my elementary math teacher had explained long ago. Leave it to Dad to turn bedwetting into a math problem. “What that means,” Mom said, “is that since your father and I both were bedwetters when we were kids, that means that it was very likely that our own kids would have issues with that as well. We thought we’d dodged a bullet with you and Jackson, but I guess not.” Wait. What? I conjured images of Mom and Dad as kids, drawing on old family photo albums I had gone through before. The idea of either of them waking up in the middle of the night to wet sheets was too much. I started to laugh. “No way.” I looked back and forth at Mom and Dad again. Sitting sandwiched between them was making this conversation more difficult than necessary. “For real?” “I think I wet the bed nearly every night until I was nine or so,” Mom said. “I remember I wasn’t allowed to go on any sleepovers until I stopped. It lasted a bit longer for you, honey?” “Yes,” Dad muttered. I’d never seen him look so flustered. “Bedwetting didn’t stop for me until I turned fourteen. My siblings weren’t as, um, understanding about it as they should have been.” “The point we’re trying to say, Maddy,” Mom said, “is that bedwetting isn’t a big deal. It isn’t your fault or anything you need to be embarrassed about. It’s something that lots of other kids have to deal with. I don’t think this bedwetting phase should last all that long, but we’ll be with you to help you get through it, no matter how long it takes.” “And if you have any questions or anything you want to tell us,” Dad said. “I promise we won’t judge you for it. We went through the same things as you.” If only I was bold enough to take Dad up on that offer. There was a question I wanted to ask really badly. Had either of my parents worn diapers or pull-ups to bed? Had there even bed ones available in their size that long ago? But I had to work to hold myself back from asking about it. No kid my age was going to proactively seek out information about diapers. I had to remember that I was supposed to be feeling embarrassed and concerned about the situation. “I just don’t get why it started all of a sudden.” “I don’t know either,” Mom said. “We’ll worry about that if it keeps up. For now, I think we’re just going to focus on making things a bit easier to clean up if the bedwetting happens again. We are going to need to do something to make sure that your mattress doesn’t get ruined. Cleaning it up afterward is OK for the occasional accident, but not if you are peeing on it almost every night.” I focused all my thoughts on keeping a straight face. This was it. This was when they would tell me that they had purchased the pull-ups so that the mattress wouldn’t be getting wet every night. I could hardly believe my luck. I would be getting pull-ups after wetting the bed only three times in four days. “We’re going to switch your mattress for the one that Grace has on her bed,” Dad said. “It has a waterproof covering, which makes it a lot easier to clean up after bedwetting accidents.” That was not what I wanted. There was no hiding the look of disappointment on my face. But it improved my subterfuge, as Mom and Dad took it to be a sign that I was embarrassed by needing a special mattress. Mom began to rub my back. “I’m sure this bedwetting phase will run its course quickly enough, but until then, won’t it be a lot nice to not have to worry about cleaning the mattress in the middle of the night? You could swap the bedding out and go back to sleeping in bed rather than on the floor in a sleeping bag.” “I guess.” Mom had a solid point. It would be nice not to have to spray cleaning solutions and then dry off the mattress with paper towels and sprinkle baking soda all over it. Faking the bedwetting would take a lot less work on my part. “We better get that done before it’s time for bed. Why don’t we get that taken care of now?” Dad said. I followed my parents up the stairs and to my bedroom. My room was a bit of a mess. I had some dirty clothes tossed on the floor that should have been put in the laundry hamper, there was a pile of unfolded laundry on my bed that I had been supposed to get put away before dinner, and then there was the fact that I hadn’t made the bed either like I was supposed to. I had just tossed the clean sheets and covers haphazardly across the mattress. Mom examined the scene with a sigh. “We’ll talk about the state of your bedroom later. Why don’t you get everything off of the mattress and set it to the side while we talk with your sister about the mattress swap?” They left me to it, shutting the door behind them as they walked over to my sister’s bedroom. I picked up the dirty laundry and tossed it into the hamper in the closet, then went to tackle the mess that was my bed. After tossing everything unceremoniously on the floor, I heard some raised voices from out in the hallway. I tiptoed over to my door and placed my ear right up against it. “You’ve been asking for a new mattress for a long time,” Dad said. “Yeah, and you always told me that you weren’t quite ready to trust me with one yet,” Grace said. Did that mean what I thought it meant? Grace had supposedly stopped wetting the bed when she was twelve. “Seriously, it was only like once or twice a year at that point. Besides, it hasn’t happened for like two years now.” That probably wasn’t without any close calls, though. The time Grace had caught me in the hallway a few nights ago, she had been in quite the hurry to go use the toilet herself. “Exactly,” Mom said. “So now is the perfect time to do the swap because of how your sister has been wetting the bed a lot the past few days.” “That’s gross, Mom. I don’t want Maddy’s mattress. Not after she’s peed all over it.” “Hey,” Mom said. “It got cleaned up right away each time. There aren’t any visible stains, and it doesn’t even smell funny at all. Besides, it’s not like the mattress you are giving her hasn’t been peed on several hundred times.” “Yeah, but it has a plastic cover. It cleans off without a trace.” “Look, we’re doing the mattress swap. I’m sure Maddy will be done with the bedwetting soon. When that happens. She’ll have her old mattress back, and we’ll buy a new one for you.” “Ugh, fine,” Grace said. “I’ll get the sheets off.” I heard my sister’s bedroom door shut rather loudly. I retreated to standing back near my bed lest my parents returned to my bedroom to catch me eavesdropping. Mom opened my bedroom door a few seconds later. “Are you all set, Maddy?” “Yeah.” “Good; why don’t you help me get your mattress off of the bed frame?” The mattress wasn’t as heavy as I had expected it to be, but it was still a bit of work to lift it up and set it against the wall. Dad and Grace entered the bedroom a minute later, carrying a strange mattress. It wasn’t a normal looking white mattress, like mine, and it also didn’t have a fabric exterior. It instead had a light blue vinyl exterior. It looked more like something that would be seen in a hospital than a bedroom. The new mattress fit onto the bedframe perfectly, which was the benefit of us both having queen-sized beds. From how Grace was looking at my mattress, I could tell that she was trying to determine if there were any visible urine stains on it. I didn’t know why Grace had thrown such a fuss in the hallway. It seemed that she was getting the better deal out of this. She finally had a normal, comfortable mattress to sleep on. “Well, that’s set,” Mom said. “Why don’t you get your bed made, Maddy, we’ll leave you to it.” Dad and Grace grabbed my mattress while Mom went ahead and held the door open all the way so they could maneuver it out into the hallway and toward Grace’s bedroom. Mom shut the door behind her, leaving me by myself. Once all the sheets and covers were back on, my bed didn’t look any different. At first glance, there wouldn’t be any way to tell that something was off. The changed the moment I laid down on it, as it crinkled loudly, reminiscent of that time three years ago when I had snooped through my sister’s bedroom. Even shifting my weight ever so slightly caused more plastic crinkling sounds. There was no question that it was a downgrade from my other mattress. It likely was going to take a while to get used to sleeping in it. Still, it couldn’t be argued that this was going to beat sleeping on the floor. I tried to lie as still as I could, just to get a moment of silence. It wasn’t the pull-ups I had been hoping for. It was progress. Mom and Dad were now taking the bedwetting seriously, but was it progress in the right direction? Had this been their sole solution for my sister’s bedwetting? What if they had never once purchased pull-ups for her? What if my parents didn’t care that my sheets and bedding got soaked with urine every night so long as the mattress was protected? Could that be the reason I had never noticed Grace wearing a pull-up before bed? Was this why I hadn’t been able to find any evidence of pull-ups since that time I had searched her bedroom? Had my parents deliberately decided not to get her pull-ups, or perhaps had they not even realized that it was an option? My sister had been potty trained around the same age as me, meaning she would have been about two when she was dry during the day. She didn’t stop regularly wetting the bed until she was twelve. Had she really gone through ten straight years of waking up to wet pajamas every night? Ten straight years of needing to change sheets and bedding in the dark, first with her parents’ help and then on her own? That sounded absolutely awful. And that still left the question about what had happened on that vacation to my grandparents’ place six years ago. Grace had wet the bed that first night. And there had been no further evidence of accidents after that. Had six-year-old me simply not been all that observant? Or had something else been going on at the time? I hadn’t even considered the possibility of different types of mattresses. I realized that there was still a lot about bedwetting that I didn’t know. I checked my phone. It was about time to get ready for bed again. I went to brush my teeth and use the toilet. There was nothing to do but keep pressing forward with my plan. My parents still seemed to think that the bedwetting would end soon. Perhaps if it didn’t, they might start to look at solutions other than the waterproof mattress. I set the alarm on my phone for forty-five minutes before I was supposed to be up for school. It wouldn’t do any good to have it wake anyone else in the house. But I had the perfect solution in mind. As I laid back down on my now super crinkly bed, I plugged a pair of headphones into my phone. I tucked one of them into my right ear, making sure to lay down in a way that wouldn’t cause me to dislodge the headphones while I was asleep. I would pee in the bed when I woke up early and allow Mom to discover me sleeping in a wet bed when she came to get me up for school. I needed to make the bedwetting as inconvenient as possible. I had to get to a point where my parents would realize that pull-ups would make managing it so much easier. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Daydreaming is normal, but obsessive, compulsive, excessive daydreaming, which distracts from and gets in the way of real-world responsibilities, isn't normal, and can be a sign of ADHD or other neurodivergence. Obviously, that in and of itself wouldn't be enough for a diagnosis. A therapist would want to see a lot of other behavior patterns. Well, at least with this last chapter, Maddy is 9 years old since it is a flashback from three years ago. I think Maddy is aware enough that her interest in diapers isn't normal and wouldn't be considered acceptable that she is going to keep it to herself. Yep, but remember as well that this was how Grace's bed was three years ago, when Grace was 15 and Maddy was 9. Oh, there shouldn't be any question that she is better at this point. It wouldn't be out of the question for the mom to have a few things to try before pull-ups and diapers come into consideration.

Chapter 11: My Sister’s Room Three years earlier I had never liked road trips. That much time spent cramped in a tiny space was too much. My body would tell me that I needed to move, and then I couldn’t. But what made the drive home from the funeral take even longer was this new idea that I had become obsessed with. I needed more than anything to wear a pull-up again. All I could think of as the miles passed by were schemes about how I could manage to get my hands on one. “Mommy, I need to pee.” Ahead of me in the front row, my three-year-old brother was squirming desperately in his car seat. Grace and I had retreated to the back row of the van for the return journey home, mostly to give us some space from our annoying younger brother. “Mommy,” Jackson whined again, his voice reaching a painfully high pitch. Grace and I exchanged a glance. This scene with my brother had been a frequent occurrence on this road trip. “The next rest stop is in five miles,” Mom replied. As if that made any sense to a three-year-old. How was Jackson supposed to know how long that was going to take? “But Mommy,” he whined as the squirming continued. It was hard to know how serious of an alert it was from him. Despite all the whining for potty breaks on this road trip, my younger brother hadn’t wet his pants at all. He had been potty trained for a little over a year now. Mom and Dad had gotten to work on it right away after his second birthday. My parents had tossed out all of Jackson’s diapers and made him run around naked outside for a couple of days that summer. I didn’t understand how that was supposed to help with toilet training, but it had worked, even if the process had grossed out Grace and me a bit. That Jackson was fully potty trained was unfortunate. If Jackson hadn’t been potty trained yet, or had perhaps been a bedwetter like his cousins, that would have been another potential source of pull-ups. I couldn’t recall what methods my parents had used to potty train me. But I hoped that was not how it had gone. “Should have made him wear a pull-up for the trip,” Grace muttered softly next to me, making sure her voice wasn’t loud enough for Jackson to notice. Wouldn’t that have been nice? That would have solved my issue of getting a pullup. I tried my best to ignore my brother’s whining for the next five minutes. Having a now-potty-trained three-year-old on a road trip at least meant that we were making a bunch of stops. I’d get a chance to run around at the next rest area. Perhaps it would even have a half-way-decent playground to explore. Like previously, we made it to the rest area without Jackson wetting his pants. As soon as Dad shifted the gear into park, Mom hurried to get Jackson unbuckled and out of his car seat. The rest of us followed behind at a much more leisurely pace as Dad then took Jackson off to the men’s restroom. Mom would insist that Grace and I make a stop at the restroom as well, even if I protested that I didn’t need to go at all. I did manage to pee a little, but only just a little, before heading out behind the rest stop building to check out the playground. The play area was a bit sad, designed more for toddlers than kids my age. The top of the lone slide was only slightly taller than me. The only good thing was that it had a two-person swing set. I pushed off to get myself started as my thoughts drifted back to my plans to acquire a pull-up. Even though Mom and Dad had previously assured me that Grace’s bedwetting days were long past over – otherwise, I don’t think I previously would have agreed to share a bed with her at a hotel – I had nevertheless attempted to ascertain whether she was perhaps secretly wearing pull-ups under her pajamas. I hadn’t dared try to check while she was asleep, but when we were getting out of bed, I laid on my side to watch my fifteen-year-old sister slide off of the mattress onto the floor. The brief glimpse under her short nightgown told me that she was wearing regular, big-girl underwear. A disappointing result, but not all that surprising. The question that lingered the most in the back of my head was whether my sister had worn pull-ups during her years as a bedwetter. Grace obviously hadn’t been wearing a pull-up that night. I had stumbled across the aftermath of her wetting the bed. But I couldn’t take that as proof that she had never worn a pull-up before. Could Mom’s annoyance at her that night have been because she hadn’t been wearing one when she should have been? “You want me to give you a push?” Grace asked as she joined me out on the playground. “Sure.” She took hold of me and pulled me back super far. I hung on for dear life as I swung forward, my back nearly parallel to the ground. Grace took a seat on the swing next to me and pushed herself off as well, though she didn’t go quite as high in the air as me. Mom tended to hang on to all of our old clothes. In the back and upper shelves of the two closets in my bedroom were boxes and stacks of old clothing. Perhaps Mom had been saving them for if Jackson had turned out to be a girl, and she had never had the time to toss them out afterward. Or perhaps there was still the possibility of another baby joining the family. There were a number of options I had thought about for getting a pull-up. But one of them stood out above all the rest. I was going to search my sister’s bedroom at the next possible opportunity. <><><> A couple of weeks passed before the perfect opportunity came up. It was Friday evening in the summer, and Grace was having a sleepover with some of her friends. Normally, that would have been a perfect opportunity to have Angie and Emma over, but their families had other plans this weekend, so I was left all to myself. Usually, that would have sucked. But this night, I planned to make the most of the opportunity. My parents had hurried me off to bed a little earlier than normal. There was a TV show they wanted to watch, and apparently, I wasn’t old enough to be allowed to watch it yet. I had gone through all the motions of getting ready for bed except brushing my teeth. I didn’t like brushing my teeth. And tonight, Mom and Dad were too busy with their show to check on me as I hurriedly got ready for bed. Now, I was in my pajamas, standing at the end of the hallway in front of Grace’s bedroom door. Jackson was sound asleep. My parents’ TV show had begun a few minutes ago; I had crept halfway down the stairs to make sure I could hear it playing in the distance. Grace was out of the house. There would be no one to bother me as I explored my older sister’s bedroom. Grace didn’t have the stereotypical “keep out” sign on her door. But it wasn’t necessary. Her room had always been off limits to me and Jackson. In fairness, the same rule applied to Grace for my bedroom, not that my older sister had any interest in entering it. I reached my hand out tentatively to touch the handle, turning the doorknob and pushing in the door. I took two cautious steps into her bedroom and shut the door behind me. I was standing on forbidden ground. Our bedrooms couldn’t be more unalike. Grace had posters of bands and other artwork on the walls. In the corner was a fancy desktop computer, the kind with a glass side that lets you see all the components. If Grace had worn pull-ups, and they hadn’t been thrown away, where would they be? I opened each of her dresser drawers, sifting through them carefully. No pull-ups, only regular underwear. But that made sense; the pull-ups wouldn’t have stayed in the dresser. Why would she want to see a reminder of her bedwetting every time she went to get dressed? If the pull-ups were in her bedroom, they would be where Mom had tucked away the rest of my sister’s old things. I slid open one of the closet doors. There were a bunch of boxes on the top shelf, but they were completely out of reach for me. I grabbed the chair in front of Grace’s computer desk and dragged it over to the closet. Even standing up on it barely allowed me to reach up and touch the boxes on the top shelf. I pulled a cardboard box down and set it on Grace’s bed. I didn’t find any pull-ups inside the box once I undid the cardboard flaps on top. But I did get a glimpse of some of the hand-me-downs that might be coming my way in a couple of years. There were a bunch of old shirts and sweaters in the box that I remembered my sister wearing a couple of years ago. That meant they would be mine – if I wanted them – in a couple of years. Every year or so, Mom would bring some of Grace’s old clothes to my bedroom and have me sort through which ones I wanted to have for myself. Mom didn’t make me keep anything I didn’t like, which was a relief, as our styles could be quite different at times. But there were no pull-ups in this box. But that was OK. There were still six more boxes to check in this closet and then a whole other closet to look through afterward. I checked the time on the digital clock next to my sister’s bed. I still had another thirty minutes to go before I needed to be back in bed, in case my parents came upstairs immediately after their show was over. The searches of the next five boxes proved to be as fruitless as the first. Not a single pull-up in sight. I returned all the boxes to the closet. Time to check the next one. Another ten minutes passed by, and my disappointment grew as the mundane contents of each box were revealed. That was followed by a cursory search of my sister’s nightstand drawers and some drawers at her desk, but that, too, was fruitless. It wasn’t fair. I had gotten my hopes up so much over the last few weeks. I was so sure that I’d find some pull-ups. I was so eager to see what the girl’s version of them would look like. There was, of course, always the chance to search my brother’s bedroom as well. But, to the best of my knowledge, my parents had never once bought pull-ups for him. He had gone straight from diapers to superhero-themed underwear. Fitting into his pull-ups might have been a stretch. I couldn’t imagine a baby diaper fitting me. But I would still try to find a way to search his bedroom at some point, even if it was a disappointing plan “B.” With my plan defeated, I walked over to Grace’s queen-sized bed. I still had another ten minutes to spare before I needed to be out of her room. I sat down on Grace’s bed next to a few of the boxes I hadn’t yet put back onto the closet shelves. My bottom didn’t sink into the mattress like it did when I sat down in my own bed, and the motion of sitting on the bed was accompanied by some loud crinkles. That was really strange. I patted my hand firmly on the sheets. Definitely firmer than my own bed. And it was still making that weird crinkling sound. I laid back on the bed. Not comfortable at all. How did my sister manage to fall asleep on this every night? I got up from the uncomfortable bed. I wouldn’t have wanted to lie down on it for any longer than necessary. I admitted defeat in my search for pull-ups. May as well get back to my bedroom early. I nearly dropped the last box as I put it back into place on the closet shelf. After doing one last check to make sure I had put everything back into place, I left Grace’s bedroom and headed to my own bed, sad that I hadn’t found any pull-ups, but happy that I had a much nicer mattress to sleep on than my sister. I was going to have to get used to disappointment. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

I've been very intentional about including those scenes for Maddy and just the general way she's been written as well. She certainly isn't intended to be neurotypical. There are a number of reasons for that, but that's for later in the story. And yes, I imagine there might be a Harry Potter reference or two in the story at some point.

There certainly could be. Will have to see if Maddy realizes that before anyone else does. I'm sure that is something Maddy has considered as well, especially since she has decided to have more variety with her fake bedwetting accidents. Thanks!

Chapter 10: Change of Plans I fell asleep last night without pretending to wet the bed. But that was OK. I’d come to the conclusion that I was going to need to adjust my approach to bedwetting if I wanted to convince my family that the bedwetting was real and not going away anytime soon. I was supposed to set an alarm on my phone before going to bed on a school night so that I would get up in time to get on the bus, but I rarely remembered to do so. That meant that instead of a buzzing sound from my phone, I was rudely awakened by Mom knocking on the bedroom door. “Madelyn, I’m not going to say it again. You need to start getting ready for school right away.” There were a couple more knocks on the door, followed by a longer pause. I opened my eyes long enough to take a look at the digital clock in the room. It was fifteen minutes past when I should have gotten up to get in the shower. For the first time in three mornings, I had woken up in my bed rather than in a sleeping bag on the floor. I closed my eyes again. I was too exhausted to even want to sit up in bed. There was a reason Mom and Dad never let me stay up past midnight on a school night. These late nights were absolutely killing me. The door creaked open and then clicked shut. I heard Mom’s footsteps as she approached the bed, but I kept my eyes closed. Just let me have a few more seconds of rest. Pretty please. Mom sighed and rubbed her hand against my shoulder. “You really need to get up now, Maddy, or you’re not going to have time to eat breakfast before catching the bus.” That would have been fine with me. I didn’t care to eat breakfast most mornings now if I could avoid doing so. But Mom and Dad usually insisted that I get something to eat before going to school. Sometimes, when I was running late, they’d just hand me an orange or a banana, which would often get passed off to one of my friends. Mom rubbed my shoulder again. I opened my eyes. There was no use putting it off any longer. I glanced up at Mom. “Looks like someone slept a lot better last night,” she said. I didn’t agree. I opened my mouth in a wide yawn. “But I’m so tired.” “But your bed stayed dry, right?” Mom asked in a whisper that was unnecessary with the door closed. Oh, that’s what she was referring to. I rolled my eyes, attempting to be the perfect caricature of a soon-to-be teenager, annoyed that her mother would even dare ask that kind of question. “Of course it did.” “That’s good,” Mom said, though she did take one more glance down at my midsection as she said so. “I think as long as you don’t drink too much and remember to use the toilet before bed, we shouldn’t have any repeats.” I nodded in agreement. I could let her think she had won, for now. With Mom now convinced that I was awake, she left the bedroom, leaving me to hurry through my morning routine. I tossed the covers off and went to select an outfit for the day to have something to change into in the bathroom once I was done showering. I grabbed a pair of black leggings and a light-blue T-shirt that had three ducks in a row on it – two yellow ones and one gray one. I was much more awake the moment I stepped into the shower. My change of plans had been the result of several realizations, ones that were even clearer after having a night to sleep on it. The first realization was that I couldn’t just keep doing the same bedwetting routine night after night. It was fine to try to do the most normal type of bedwetting for the first couple of nights of faking the bedwetting, but I was going to need to risk mixing things up. Wetting the bed in the same way at the same time, night after night, would eventually appear unusual if I were to be following an exact pattern. The second realization was that it was OK to have a few random nights where I didn’t wet the bed at all. I seemed to recall from the conversation three years ago with my bedwetting cousins that they hadn’t wet the bed every night, either. I didn’t know how things had been for Grace, but perhaps her experience had been similar. The third realization was that I was going to need to follow all of my parents’ rules about limiting my liquids and using the toilet before bed. It was becoming apparent that pull-ups would likely be a measure of last resort, so I had to make it appear as though every other attempt at stopping the bedwetting was unsuccessful. If they were to catch me drinking too much water, they would blame it on that rather than considering other solutions. I decided that, at least for this last night, I would let Mom, Dad, and Grace think that they’d won, that their efforts to curtail my liquids and ensure that I used the toilet before bed had been enough to bring this recent spate of bedwetting to a halt. I would prove them wrong tonight. It would involve a little more risk, but I didn’t have any other choice. There were several knocks on the bathroom door, followed by the sound of Dad’s voice, which was barely noticeable with the shower still running. “Maddy, you already were up late. You don’t have time for a long shower.” That snapped me out of daydreaming about my new plans for faking bedwetting tonight. I rushed to finish cleaning myself up. By the time I had finished showering and dressing, the bus was set to arrive in less than five minutes. Jackson had already gotten on his bus for elementary school, and Grace was driving to school, so she was still lazily picking through her breakfast while staring at her phone. If the high school hadn’t been in the opposite direction from our house as the middle school, my parents might have had Grace drop me off on her way to high school, but even though I hated how long the bus ride was – and needing to get up extra early for it – the one nice thing was that it gave me time to spend with Emma and Angie before classes began. And besides, the school year was nearly over. Just one more week. Just a bunch of final exams and standardized tests to wade through, and then I’d be free for the whole summer. And there wouldn’t be any actual tests this morning. Monday was prep day, which meant teachers in each of our classes were doing final reviews before it would be time to take our final exams and other end-of-year tests. Not that it mattered much. Even if, by some miracle, I were to ace all of my tests, it wouldn’t bring my grades up to where my parents wanted them to be. That was the downside of having a really smart older sister. Grace had just had to go first and set a bunch of academic expectations that I wasn’t capable of meeting. “Sleep well last night?” Grace asked as I sipped on a glass of orange juice that Mom had hastily poured for me. This time, I caught on to the fact that my sister was really asking about the bedwetting, not whether or not I had gotten a good night’s worth of sleep. “Yeah,” I replied, avoiding eye contact with her. “Maddy,” Mom called out from the front room. “Your bus is at the other end of the street.” I picked up my backpack and rushed to the front door. Mom placed a banana in my hand, which I knew right away was going to be given to Emma. <><><> Both Emma and Angie had already turned thirteen during the school year. I was a late bloomer. I wasn’t going to officially be a teenager for a couple of weeks. My two friends didn’t hold their status as official teenagers over me. Well, at least not that much. Emma accepted the banana from me as I took a seat next to her on the bus. That was good because I wasn’t all that hungry, and it would have been wasteful to just toss it out. I spent the first portion of the bus ride describing the soccer camp my parents had signed me up for in great detail. “Yes, yes, we get it. You’re going to have a fun time without us,” Angie said, after I had been rambling on the topic for about ten minutes. I shut up at the realization that I had indeed been talking nonstop since I had sat down next to Angie and Emma. “If you can stop being a chatterbox for a few seconds, we can start making some other plans for the summer,” Emma said. The conversation turned to getting together for a sleepover. That was dangerous territory. I needed to get my hands on pull-ups before then so that Mom would feel comfortable sending me on the sleepover. I, of course, wouldn’t even take them out of my backpack, but Mom wouldn’t need to be aware of that. The one good thing was that Angie’s parents were taking her on a road trip for a week right after school was let out. That would push off the first sleepover long enough that my parents should be getting me pull-ups after having run out of other ideas to treat the bedwetting. “We could do the sleepover on your birthday,” Emma suggested. She turned to Angie. “You’ll be back by then, right?” Angie took a look at a calendar on her phone. “Yep, we get back the day before.” “I was thinking,” Emma said. “That we should do something special for it. How about pulling an all nighter?” “No way, I’d be out of it by 2 a.m. at the latest,” Angie said. Emma looked over at me. “Well, birthday girl?” That was perfect. Even if I didn’t have pull-ups by then, I could convince Mom I’d be fine until after my friends left to go sleep things off for the rest of the day at home. “That sounds like fun,” I said. “I can do it as long as I can have enough caffeine.” “OK,” Angie said, giving me a look. “Now I really know that it is a bad idea. No way should you be allowed to have that much caffeine.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. Emma joined with Angie in staring incredulously at me. “Let’s see,” Emma said. “There was that time in second grade when you had pop during the pizza party at school. Do I need to remind you what happened afterward?” I blushed. I was very grateful that Emma hadn’t spelled out what had happened in that embarrassing incident. “That was ages ago,” I protested. “Besides, our teacher should have known that my parents didn’t let me have any caffeinated drinks when I was that young.” “Well, what about that time Allen tricked you into drinking that energy drink last year?” I groaned loudly. “That wasn’t my fault, either. How was I supposed to know that Starbucks’ lemonade was caffeinated?” “I’m not saying it was your fault, just that maybe caffeine and you don’t mix very well,” Angie said. “You practically had the shakes, and you literally couldn’t shut up for hours. Mr. Gainwell had to send you to the nurse’s office until you could calm down.” “That’s still different,” I protested. “I’ll be thirteen. I’ll be fine as long as I pace myself and no one surprises me with drinks secretly spiked with caffeine.” “Fine, but we’re doing the sleepover at your house then,” Angie said. “Your parents can deal with you if you get too hyper.” I agreed that this was a fair deal, though it might take some convincing for my parents to go along with it. <><><> I followed all my parents’ rules about limiting my liquids to the letter after I got home from school. I made sure to not drink too much, and I made sure that they could see that I was only filling my cup halfway up the few times I did have something to drink this afternoon and evening. I didn’t get any further comments about limiting my liquids. I didn’t think that was because my parents weren’t paying attention, but because I’d given them no opportunity to complain, as I was following the directions without needing to be given any reminders. Mom did end up reminding me to go and use the toilet before getting into bed, but I would have done so even if she hadn’t said anything to me. The hardest part tonight was having to wait until I was certain that everyone was asleep. As the clock again passed midnight, I once again found that I had no need to pee at the moment, which wasn’t a surprise for tonight. But that didn’t matter. The situation tonight was perfect. I’d done everything my parents had wanted me to do in order to avoid wetting the bed, so when I would trick them into thinking I had wet the bed anyway, despite all of those precautions, they would have no choice but to look for other solutions. The plan tonight was simple, and there was only a tiny risk of being caught at the wrong time, so I figured I could pull it off. I would do what I had considered doing the night before, but only this time, I would do it without wetting my bed in the first place. I eased myself out of bed, turning on the lamp on the nightstand to let me see what I was doing. I removed all the bedding into a pile on the floor. It was a lot to carry all at once, but it would be a lot less risky if I did it all in one trip. I went to open my bedroom door first, as I’d not be able to easily grab the handle with my hands full. The only point where things could go wrong would be right now. I’d only be in the hallway for a couple of seconds, but if Grace were to come out of her bedroom and notice that none of the bedding I was holding was wet, that would out my plan then and there. But it only took a few seconds to walk down the hallway, even while trying to do so quietly with a massive bundle of laundry in my arms. Soon, I was on the stairs and out of sight, letting me slow down lest I trip over Chester in the dark. I deposited the bedding in the washing machine, added some detergent for good measure, and got the washing cycle started. There wouldn’t be any way to tell that I hadn’t actually peed the bed. It would just look like I had been responsible for taking care of the cleanup myself without waking Mom and Dad. And there wouldn’t even be any need to say something to Mom directly. She would be sure to come across the full washing machine at some point after I had left for school. I remembered to sprinkle baking soda on the bed before getting tucked into the sleeping bag on the floor. My only regret as I was drifting off to sleep was how much it was going to suck having to take a bunch of tests tomorrow while being extra tired. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/