AB_DeLane

We'll see. Certainly something that Maddy will need to be aware of. I mean, I think the story is good, but I'm not quite sure it's that good, but thanks! Thanks! Yep, it is fun writing a family from that perspective, especially in this scenario where their support may be making it more difficult for Maddy to get what she wants. Yep, but that will come with practice. For now, she's only able to do it if she is needing to go pretty badly (which creates a problem when she isn't able to hydrate enough or is forced to use the toilet right before going to bed)

Chapter 9: Running Dry Mom’s eyes went back and forth between the sleeping bag on the floor and the uncovered mattress still covered in baking soda. Like yesterday, I had slept in much longer than intended because of how late I had finally fallen asleep after cleaning up after the fake bedwetting incident. Unlike yesterday, Mom had come to investigate why I hadn’t gotten out of bed at a reasonable time. I had woken up to the sight of her standing over me at the foot of the sleeping bag. The second night of waking up on the floor was less disorientating than the first. I knew right away both where I was and why I was there. I had intentionally peed on the bed, and Grace had helped me clean up. I stretched my mouth open in a wide yawn and rubbed my eyes. This was not how I had intended for my mom to find out about the bedwetting. I would have preferred a discreet conversation once I was fully awake rather than be wakened to her witnessing the aftermath of it. I had less control of my secrets than I thought I did. “What happened?” Mom asked. The question irked me. The answer seemed rather obvious. Why else would I be in a sleeping bag? And why else would all the sheets and blankets have been taken off of the mattress? Why was Mom insisting that I spell it out for her? I didn’t bother describing the elaborate dream I had made up for Grace last night. “Um,” I said, my gaze fixed on Mom’s slippers rather than her face. “It happened again.” Mom sighed. “I did tell you that you shouldn’t have had so much to drink last night.” That was true. Mom had caught me in the middle of drinking one more glass of water before going to bed. I had worried that it would have caused problems with being able to pee on the bed, but I still had been hydrated enough to do so. The last thing I needed was for Mom to be fixated on how much liquids I was drinking. “I was thirsty. And it’s not like that’s caused problems before.” “And it’s not like you’ve ever wet the bed before, much less two times in a row,” Mom said. “I think it would be good if you drank a little bit less in the evening.” There wasn’t anything I could say to argue back against that. From Mom’s perspective, it was a completely reasonable request. From what I could recall, Grace had been under similar restrictions back when she was a bedwetter. I would just need to be more discreet when getting extra water to drink today. There were footsteps in the hallway. Then Grace walked by, passing my open bedroom door on the way to her own bedroom. Mom turned around just in time to briefly make eye contact with Grace before my older sister scurried off. Great. Now, Mom and Grace both knew that each other knew about my bedwetting. Mom rushed over to close the door. “I’m sorry,” Mom said. “I’ll talk with your sister and make sure she respects your privacy. I should have closed the door behind me when I came to get you up.” “It’s fine. She found out last night. She helped me get it cleaned.” “Oh,” Mom said. “That was nice of her.” “Yeah,” I said. Best to get the full truth out. “She knows that I know about her past bedwetting as well.” “I see,” Mom said. “Still, I’ll have a talk with her later this morning. Did you start the washing machine last night?” “Yeah.” “Well, no one else has started on any laundry this morning, so it’s still in there. Please move it over to the dryer before you get in the shower.” Mom left the bedroom without giving me any further instructions. It was Sunday morning. That sucked cause it meant the weekend was already halfway over. The only good thing was that I only had one more week left of school before summer break. That also meant that our soccer tournament was continuing this afternoon. We had a game scheduled for right after lunch, and there would be another one early in the evening if we won. All that exercise would at least give me plenty of excuses to drink more water. I rolled up my sleeping bag and tucked it back in the closet. I stood and stretched for a couple of minutes before heading downstairs to move the bedding over to the dryer. I wasn’t super sore from having slept on the floor, but I was beginning to notice the effects of having done so for two nights in a row. <><><> Getting hydrated was a lot more difficult when everyone was monitoring how much I was drinking. My problems with getting enough to drink started as soon as I got home from the soccer match. I had gone through two bottles of Gatorade while I had been playing, but with how hot it had been during the game, I was sure I had practically sweated it all out. We’d lost three to zero in the sweltering heat, and the score would have been even more lopsided if not for some heroic saves by Angie, who was the team’s goalie. And that was the end of soccer – at least playing competitively on a team – until it was time to try out for the middle school team in the fall. There were some summers when I had played in a summer league with Angie and Emma, but with the lengthy vacation my parents had planned to celebrate my sister’s high school graduation, that wasn’t an option this year. That had been disappointing, but Mom and Dad had made it up to me by signing me up for a week-long, overnight soccer camp instead. After having taken a quick shower, I thought I had the kitchen to myself as I retrieved a plastic cup from the cupboard and grabbed the filtered water from the fridge. Still, it wouldn’t do to dawdle. I needed to drink the water quickly. I lifted the cup to my lips and tilted my head back as I began to chug down the water as fast as possible. It wasn’t fast enough. I had gotten halfway through the cup of water when I heard my sister’s voice behind me. “Not sure that’s a good idea.” The shock of hearing Grace’s voice, especially when I had been so certain that she had been tucked away in her bedroom, caused my hand to slip. Instead of continuing to pour the water into my mouth, I splashed a large amount onto my chin and T-shirt. I turned to face my sister. “Seriously, don’t sneak up on me like that.” Graced eyed the wet spots on my shirt as I wiped my chin dry on my sleeve. My face burned. It brought me back to how she had looked at me in the hallway last night when it had been my pajama pants rather than my T-shirt that had been wet. Grace grimaced a little, as if she wasn’t entirely comfortable with what she was about to say. “Look, I know from experience that, um, drinking as much water as you’re drinking right now isn’t always a good idea.” She looked around as if she was making sure no one was eavesdropping on the conversation and then leaned in closer to me. “Probably best to limit your liquids until bed unless you like waking up to change your sheets in the middle of the night.” My chest froze at that last whispered sentence from Grace. What, why would she think that I – or anyone – would like waking up to a wet bed? “What? I don’t like it.” Grace rolled her eyes. “I know you don’t like it. It’s just a figure of speech.” “But I can’t, like, not drink anything at all,” I protested. “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t drink anything,” Grace said. “But, like, chugging a sixteen-ounce cup of water isn’t exactly going to make things easier on your bladder tonight.” It wasn’t as if I could very well argue with her about that point. My older sister was the expert on bedwetting, after all. I emptied the remainder of the water from the glass into the sink. I would need to find other opportunities to stay hydrated. That proved to be difficult. <><><> Grace had helped Mom and Dad set the table for dinner. We always sat in the same spot around the table. Our parents sat on one end together, with Jackson next to Mom, so she could keep him in line. Grace sat next to Dad, and I was sandwiched between my two siblings. The glass of water in front of my plate was technically full, but Grace had also filled it to the brim with ice, so there was only about half as much water in it as normal. Not that I could say anything about it at the moment. The last thing I needed was for Jackson to find out about the bedwetting as well. He would not handle it as discretely as I had with Grace when I was his age. I desperately wanted to excuse myself from the table to refill my glass of water, but I had a sinking feeling that Mom and Dad would definitely say something about it. They wouldn’t outright tell me that I should drink less to avoid wetting the bed – not in front of Jackson – but I suspected they would encourage me to drink less, and I didn’t want to deal with that embarrassing conversation. I stared at the glass of ice as I took another bite of spaghetti, as if I could mentally make the ice cubes begin to melt a little bit faster. By the time I was finished eating my spaghetti, enough ice had melted to allow me to have one more small sip before it was time to take the dishes to the kitchen for Grace to get them washed. The rest of the evening didn’t go any better. It seemed like every time I got up to walk past the kitchen, Mom, Dad, or Grace were in sight. That was a problem. I needed them to think I was wetting the bed naturally, like whatever genetics had caused Grace to be a bedwetter was now doing it for me. If my parents thought that the bedwetting was only due to how much water I was drinking, I worried they might focus on that rather than purchase pull-ups. I managed to sneak in a few sips of water here and there, but it wasn’t nearly as much as I’d had to drink the other night. I also put off going to the bathroom. The last time I had peed had been shortly before dinner. Even without as much to drink, if I went from then until midnight, surely I’d need to pee badly enough at that point that wetting the bed wouldn’t be difficult. <><><> It was a school night, so I was sent to bed a bit earlier. I was in the middle of brushing my teeth when Mom peeked into the bathroom. “Madelyn,” Mom said. I took the toothbrush out of my mouth so that I could reply. “Yes?” “Make sure you use the toilet before you go to bed, OK?” “I will,” I replied, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice. I didn’t want to be treated like a baby who had to be reminded to go to the toilet, even if Mom did think I’d had two actually bedwetting accidents so far this weekend. I brushed my teeth for another ten seconds and then shut the bathroom door behind me. Was Mom still out in the hallway? I couldn’t tell if her footsteps had carried her all the way to the stairs or if she had just gone to her bedroom. There also hadn’t been a sound of any doors closing. That was a problem. The bathroom wasn’t very soundproof. Mom might be able to notice if I didn’t pee at all, as should would be able to hear me if I did go like she had asked. I didn’t need to pee all that badly at this point, but I did need to go enough that I shouldn’t have trouble peeing as long as I was sitting on a toilet rather than in my bed. I lifted the lid to the toilet seat, let my pajamas fall to my feet, and sat down. I had to find a way to convince Mom and Dad that none of their other methods of getting me to stop wetting the bed – limiting fluids and making me use the toilet right before going to sleep – were working. I needed to reach the point where they would give up trying to stop the bedwetting and switch their focus to limiting the damage from it by getting me pull-ups to wear. That meant that I needed to convince them that I was doing my best to avoid wetting the bed, so I would have to use the toilet now and try to figure out a way to still wet the bed later tonight. I didn’t have any difficulty in getting my bladder to release. The sound of the urine streaming into the toilet was proof that I had done exactly what Mom had asked me to. I had hoped that I’d perhaps be able to stop the stream mid-pee, giving myself a better chance to wet the bed later, but that wasn’t successful. Once my bladder started to empty, there was no stopping it until every last drop was out. I took a peek in my parents’ bedroom after leaving the bathroom. Mom was lying in bed on top of the sheets, reading a book. That was a problem. There would be no sneaking any more drinks of water tonight, not even the yucky tap water from the bathroom sink. The next two hours passed slowly. My eyes were sore from staring at my phone by the time I was certain that everyone was asleep. There had to be a better way of faking the bedwetting, but every alternative I’d considered so far had presented some sort of complication, something that would risk Mom and Dad – and now Grace as well – discovering that something was off about my bedwetting. I had to stick to faking the bedwetting in a way that looked perfectly natural. There couldn’t be any doubt in my parents’ minds that it was real. With the clock now past midnight, I still didn’t feel like I needed to pee at all, but I was determined to try either way. I sat on my knees on the bed for about ten minutes until I could barely keep my eyes open. It was the same routine I had followed the past two nights. I strained as hard as I could, trying to conjure pictures of water and rivers and streams in my head. It was no use. I couldn’t get anything to come out. My bladder was still too empty. I nearly lay down in bed in resignation, but another plan to fake my bedwetting suddenly sprang to mind. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Chapter 8: Equals Grace clasped both of her hands over her mouth, holding back a muffled reaction that might have otherwise woken up the rest of our family. My hands remained on the front of my pajama pants, as pointless as it was to remain in the posture as I wasn’t able to fully conceal how I had peed myself. Neither of us moved. I couldn’t take my eyes off of my sister. As much as I had worked to avoid it, I had known that it was a possibility that Grace might find out about my faked bedwetting. As a former bedwetter herself, my older sister would be attuned to the signs that something might be off about me. And it was certainly better than having my younger brother or friends discover this secret. But of all the ways Grace could have discovered my fake bedwetting, this had to be among the worst. I had anticipated something much less dramatic and certainly much less embarrassing. I couldn’t stand in front of my parents’ bedroom door forever. That was not a feasible plan. There were only a couple of directions I go could. Returning to my room wasn’t an option. Doing so would require going toward my sister. I was definitely not going to do anything to wake up my parents at this point and turn my bedwetting incident into a whole family affair. Running down the stairs in the dark wasn’t an option, either. That left the bathroom. I dashed inside it with a few quick steps, closing the door as gently as I could while also shutting it quickly. I was safe. Safe, but trapped. I listened at the door, hoping that Grace would go back to her room and give me some privacy to get back to my bedroom and get cleaned up. At least let me change into a dry set of pajamas. I was having no such luck. I flipped on the light switch. Even if I hadn’t peed quite as much as last night, my pants didn’t appear any less soaked. Enough time had passed, and the wet clothes were already beginning to get uncomfortable as the initial warmth faded away. The expression on my older sister’s face had left no doubt that there had been enough light in the hallway for her to notice how wet my pajamas were. And she had been a bedwetter. If it had been Jackson instead, I perhaps could have tried to say I had just spilled a glass of water on myself. My six-year-old brother might have been gullible enough to fall for that, especially if he was still a bit drowsy. But Grace? No, she knew exactly what wet pants looked like from having wet the bed. I heard footsteps in the hallway. I held my breath. Then there were two soft taps on the bathroom door. There was some faint whispering from the other side of the door, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. I breathed out. Grace wasn’t going to let me avoid having this conversation. I leaned forward and pressed my ear up against the door in an attempt to make out what my sister was saying. There was another series of soft taps on the door, followed again by my sister’s voice. This time, I could make out what she was saying, if just barely. “Is everything OK in there? I can help. Promise I’m not going to judge you or anything.” If I hadn’t known about my sister’s previous bedwetting, it might have been harder to trust that statement. But I figured that I could. She had actually gone through what I was only attempting to fake. I stepped back and pulled the door open. Grace at least had the courtesy this time to not stare down right at the wet spot on my pajama pants. But what was she thinking as she was looking at me? Did Grace see a reflection of herself from six years ago? If I were to go back and look at our old family photo albums from that vacation, it would be plain to anyone that I was almost an exact carbon-copy of her when she was my age. I realized that I probably looked the same to her as she had looked to me when I had watched her walk up the staircase in her wet pajamas six years ago. “I can help you get things cleaned up, but I really need to pee first.” I had been so absorbed in my own embarrassment and concern about what my sister was seeing and thinking that I hadn’t noticed how she was a bit fidgety herself. Had she perhaps woken up just in time to avoid having an actual bedwetting accident herself? Graced squeezed past me into the bathroom as I stepped out into the hallway and made a beeline back to my bedroom. That we hadn’t woken up our parents or Jackson was a minor miracle with how we had been going back and forth in the upstairs hallway. I used my shirt to pat myself dry after taking off my pajama pants and underwear. It wasn’t nearly as good as hopping in the shower to get myself washed off, but it would have to do for now. I turned and stared at my wet bedding. I just had to remember that it wasn’t like Grace hadn’t seen anything like this before. This had been her own nightly reality for years. The toilet flushed in the distance. I kept my back to the bedroom door. My hands were starting to shake. I tried to keep my mind focused on the prize at the end of the road. Soon, I’d be wearing pull-ups to bed each night. I’d only have to endure the embarrassment of peeing on the bed for a short while before I’d get those pull-ups. And then it would be incredibly easy to discreetly continue faking the bedwetting. The handle on the bedroom door rattled behind me as Grace made her way into the room, shutting the door behind herself. This was rare territory for my sister to be in. We typically respected the privacy of each other’s rooms, only opening them a bit if there was a message that needed to be passed along. Graced walked up beside me with her eyes fixed on the aftermath of my fake bedwetting incident. “Do you need a hug?” I nodded, leaning in toward my sister as she pulled me into a firm embrace and rubbed her hand on my back. My hands were no longer shaking a few seconds later. “It’s nothing to worry about,” Grace said. “I promise I’m not going to tell anyone about it.” I waited expectantly. Surely, if there was any time for her to bring up her own history of bedwetting, this would be it. It would make sense for Grace to use that as a way to try to comfort me. And that would be my chance, the chance to ask all of the questions about her bedwetting that I had been dying to ask the past few years. But, for whatever reason, Grace didn’t seem willing to bring that subject up. “So,” Grace said, her gaze again turned toward the bed. I thought back to the question Mom had asked me the other night. She had asked me if I had a dream about going to the toilet while I was asleep. That seemed like a plausible excuse to give to my older sister, though I provided more embellishment than I did with Mom last night. I described an elaborate, made-up dream to Grace, one that I hadn’t thought was a dream at the time, so when the urge to pee happened, I hadn’t realized that I needed to wake up to avoid peeing the bed. “So yeah,” I said, concluding the tale. “I thought I had made it to the toilet in time, but then I felt something wet, and I woke up.” “You probably had too much to drink this evening.” “No, I didn’t.” Grace gave me a bit of side-eye. “I recall that someone refilled her glass a couple of times at dinner.” “Yeah, that’s just the stir-fry was spicy.” Grace rolled her eyes. “Come on, it wasn’t that bad. So, anyway, were you going to tell Mom and Dad about the accident?” There was a truthful answer for me to give to that question. “I… I was going to ask for help with getting things cleaned up. But I decided I’d rather take care of it on my own.” “I can help bring things down to the laundry room. But you can’t go to bed before getting the mattress cleaned up. I’ll have to see if there are some cleaning chemicals that would work for it.” I helped Grace strip the bed. Like last night, there was a sizable wet spot on the mattress. The thin, cotton mattress protector wasn’t up to the task of handling things when an entire bladder was emptied onto it. There was no sign that Jackson or our parents had been disturbed from their sleep as we ventured out into the hallway and made our way down to the basement. Grace was carrying most of the bedding while I held my wet pajamas in one hand and my phone in the other to light the way down the stairs. How would I be reacting if I had actually wet the bed without intending to do it? I decided to try to play down the bedwetting accident. “I really don’t know what happened,” I said as I tossed my wet pajamas into the washing machine. “I’ve never had anything happen like this since like when I was a baby.” Grace gave me that look. The one that said she knew that was a terrible liar, which, a lot of the time, was true. “You didn’t wet the bed last night as well?” I tried to make my response sound as indignant as possible. “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Grace put her hands on her waist. “So, all of your bedding was in the dryer before breakfast for no reason at all? Like I said, it’s not a big deal. You don’t need to lie about it.” My face suddenly felt rather warm. Here I was, thinking I had been quite sneaky in managing to get my bedding back up to my room without being caught. And Grace had known about it all day long and hadn’t said a single word to me. Grace’s curiosity was beginning to get annoying. Time to turn the tables on her. “So what? You were a bedwetter until you were my age.” Grace’s face momentarily blanched, and then she regained her composure. “Me, no. I don’t know what you are talking about.” It was my turn to get annoyed at my sister for not being truthful with me. “It’s not a big deal. You don’t need to lie about it.” It was Grace’s turn for her face to go as red as mine had a few seconds earlier. “How? That was forever ago?” I recounted the tale about how I had accidentally stumbled across the scene of her having wet the bed that time we had been visiting our grandparents six years ago, from overhearing her conversation with Mom to watching her walk up the stairs in obviously wet pajamas. The expression on Grace’s face told me that she remembered that fateful night as well. “Mom and Dad caught me after you went upstairs. They made me promise to not tell anyone about it,” I said. “They said I wasn’t to ever say anything about it to you, either.” My voice dropped off at the conclusion of the tale, and we stood silently as the washing machine begin rumbling after having filled up with water. My shame at having my bedwetting discovered had dissolved now that I had forced Grace to admit her own bedwetting past. We were equals now. I was now burning with curiosity. There were so many things I wanted to know. Chief among them was if Grace had ever worn pull-ups to bed. I desperately needed to know if that was something my parents had ever used with her. But there were other things I was curious about as well, such as information that could help me better fake my own bedwetting in the coming weeks. How often had she wet the bed? Did it typically happen at certain times of the night? Did she usually pee a lot or a little when it happened? It was as if Grace could read my mind. “I don’t want to talk about it, OK?” she said. “Let’s just get your mattress cleaned up, and then we can get some sleep.” I silently accepted her refusal to say anything further on the matter. With our secrets now revealed to each other, perhaps I’d get another chance to talk with Grace about it once she had gotten over the fact that I had known about her bedwetting for the past six years. We returned to my bedroom, stopping at a closet while Grace showed me which cleaning supplies would be best for removing the urine stains and odor from the mattress. She walked me through the process of drying and cleaning the mattress. That was going to be helpful for future nights when I would preferably be handling this process all on my own. “That should do it,” Grace said as she finished dusting the wet spot with baking soda. “That will need to be brushed or vacuumed off in the morning.” She turned around after taking a couple of steps toward the door. “You really should hop in the shower before you get in the sleeping bag. Otherwise, you’re going to wake up smelling like pee.” I suspected that this was advice Grace had learned from experience. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com

Thanks, We'll be sticking with Maddy's POV for this story, but we'll continue to get lots of details about her family/friends. Nope A little more than before, but, like Maddy considered in the chapter, all she would have to do is not fake the bedwetting and she'd still be able to move on from it at any point. Regardless of how it happened, I think it would have been difficult for Maddy to keep her secret safe from Grace in the long run, since her older sister is very familiar with all the ins and outs of bedwetting. Very much so. The main question is going to be if Grace knows that Maddy knows that she was a bedwetter, and is either of them going to be willing to bring up that topic?

Chapter 7: Bedwetters Six years ago The concept of bedwetting wasn’t something that had ever crossed my mind as a young kid. I had been dry at night nearly immediately after being toilet trained during the day. There wasn’t a distinction between being potty trained during the day or potty trained during the night. If someone was potty trained, that meant that they never wet their pants at all. Period. That changed when I learned my sister was a bedwetter. In retrospect, the signs of Grace’s bedwetting were practically everywhere. But when I was six years old, the idea of my older sister peeing in her sleep was so completely inconceivable that I would never have entertained it. All the indicators that Grace was a bedwetter went completely over my head. And, looking back at it, there were many. While the washing machine and dryer were inaudible from all the way up in my bedroom, the kitchen was close enough to the basement staircase that the rumbling sounds from either machine could be heard every morning during breakfast. The distant sound of laundry tumbling in the dryer was a consistent part of the background noise in the house as I ate my regular breakfast of cereal. But I didn’t think anything of it as I munched on my Captain Crunch pieces. I was more concerned with making sure I ate them before they got soggy than anything else that was going on around me. Besides, I hadn’t known a time when the dryer wasn’t turned on around the time that I was eating breakfast, so I paid it no more heed than to the sound of Dad watching the morning news in the other room or Mom scurrying about the kitchen, prepping our lunches to take to school. A family of four shouldn’t produce so much laundry that the dryer would need to be run every day. But that wasn’t something I’d have considered at that age. The dryer simply ran nearly every morning, and that was that. If I had paid attention, I would have been tipped off by the times Grace had tip-toed past me while carrying a bundle of freshly cleaned bedding. But even when I did notice, I didn’t think much of it. Laundry was just one of my sister’s chores at the time, and chores were a topic I didn’t want any more familiarity with. Chores were a concept my parents had introduced to me last year, complete with a magnet chart on the fridge for documenting my progress toward earning various rewards. For me, that meant making sure all my toys were put away each evening, making my bed in the morning, and other random age-appropriate tasks around the house. And then there was the question of pajamas. Grace usually showered and changed first thing in the morning, so I didn’t often see her in her pajamas after I had gotten out of bed myself, but there were times when she was wearing a different set of pajamas than what I had seen her in when she had been brushing her teeth in the bathroom the night before. I certainly noticed, but it would never have occurred to me that she would have changed pajamas because she had peed on her first pair of them. I just figured she must have gotten uncomfortable in the middle of the night. Then, there was the fact that my sister never had any sleepovers. My first sleepover actually came before she had a chance to do one. My first sleepover had come a week into the summer after graduating from kindergarten when I’d had Emma sleepover at my house for the first time. It was another few years before Angie’s parents would allow her to join in on our sleepovers. Looking back on it, the fact that Grace hadn’t complained at all about not going on sleepovers when I was allowed to have one was another sign that she had been perfectly comfortable avoiding spending the night with friends, likely out of fear of her bedwetting being discovered. My sister’s room was very much off-limits, especially when my friends were over. I was sure there were plenty of reasons that a twelve-year-old wouldn’t want their six-year-old sister snooping around, but in retrospect, I wondered if I would have found evidence of her bedwetting had I searched then rather than waiting another three years until after Grace had learned to stay dry at night. Grace took the privacy of her bedroom very seriously. The door remained shut at all times, even when she wasn’t in it. She even went so far as to put a “keep out” sign on her door. She had even tried to get Mom and Dad to let her put a lock on her door, but that request had gotten shut down right away. Then there were the reminders to use the toilet before bed. Something that got said a lot more to Grace than to me. There had been times in the evening when Grace had asked for something to drink, only to have Mom or Dad tell her that it was too late for that. Watson might have declared the evidence to be “elementary” at this point, but Sherlock Holmes I was not. My six-year-old brain lacked the necessary deduction skills to put it all together. That was until the proof of my sister’s bedwetting became undeniable. <><><> I groaned as I opened my eyes. It was still dark out. Very dark out. It was such an inopportune time to wake up. I had been rudely pulled out of the most fascinating dream involving panda bears, a field trip to the art museum, and a boy band my sister liked. Why was I even awake now in the first place? I swallowed. My mouth felt dry. It was enough of a nuisance that I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep until I’d gotten something to drink. A year ago, I would have called out to Mom and Dad until one of them had woken up to get me a glass of water. They were usually reluctant to give me anything more than a couple of sips. That annoyed me, but I understood later why they were so insistent on limiting fluids. They soon got tired of getting me something to drink, and I was informed that I was a big enough girl to get out of bed and get a glass of water all by myself. But this situation was a little different. It would have been one thing if we had been at home. There, I knew the contours of our house well enough to navigate downstairs without needing to turn on any lights. But here, in the guest house we were staying at while visiting my grandparents, I didn’t even know where the light switch was, let alone the doorway. I sat in bed for several minutes while my eyes gradually adjusted to the dark; it was a moonless night on a rural property, so even then, I could only barely make out the outline of where the bedroom door might be. I nearly fell off of the bed when I rolled over onto my side. I had forgotten that it was only half the size of the bed I had back in my bedroom. I took cautious steps in a straight line toward what appeared to be the bedroom door until, at last, I had my hand on the cold doorknob. I expected darkness when I swung open the bedroom door, but there was a hint of light from the end of the hallway, coming from the stairs that led down to the main floor. That was where I needed to go. There weren’t any glasses in the upstairs bathroom. There were two upstairs bedrooms, one for me and one for my parents. My older sister was sleeping downstairs on a pull-out sofa. What was she doing up this late? The door to the bedroom my parents were using was open. I peeked inside it. It was only Dad in there. That explained the downstairs light. Mom must have gotten up with my six-month-old brother to feed him. At least that meant that there was a light on, so it would be easier to find my way to the kitchen. As I approached the top of the staircase, I heard some voices. It was my mom and my sister, interspersed with some soft crying from Jackson. I got the sense that this somehow wasn’t a conversation I was supposed to be listening to, but curiosity got the better of me. I tip-toed quietly down the carpeted stairs and then inched along the hallway until I could see into the room where my sister had been sleeping. I had to blink a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t in some sort of strange dream. My sister was wearing pajama pants that were paired with one of those extra-long T-shirts she always wore to bed, the kind that could practically double as a dress. It wasn’t the type of pajamas my sister was wearing, but their condition that caught my attention. There was a large wet spot on my sister’s pajamas. My initial thought was that Grace must have accidentally spilled water on herself. But that didn’t track. She seemed rather upset. I looked up at her face and saw that she was crying. No reason to be that upset over a spilled glass of water. Mom, who was holding Jackson, was standing close by. I wasn’t able to make out the expression on her face, but the tone of her voice suggested she wasn’t all that happy with my sister. Then, there was the location of the wet spot on her pajama pants. Yeah, it definitely wasn’t water. “I told you that I had packed it for you, Grace.” Mom said. “Why didn’t you—” “Mom,” Grace interrupted. “I told you already. I just forgot about it. Anyway, I’m not a baby.” “I’m not saying you are,” Mom said. “Which means you need to be more responsible.” Mom looked down at where Grace had been sleeping. I couldn’t see from here, but I guessed that the accident had gotten all over the bedding and perhaps the couch as well. “Just go hop in the shower,” Mom said. “I’ll try to figure out how to get this cleaned up. There have to be some cleaning supplies somewhere.” That was my cue to skedaddle. But with Grace now headed in my direction, I belatedly realized that there wasn’t any way to get up the stairs without her noticing me. Instead, I back away into an adjacent room, hoping to keep out of sight of my sister and my mom. Once Grace was heading up the stairs, I peeked out again and got a good look at her pajamas. There could be no disputing it. My sister had peed herself. I really didn’t know how to react to this revelation. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen a kid wet their pants before. That had happened to other students on three occasions during my kindergarten year. But that was different; those kids had either been too scared of the school restrooms or too scared of their teacher to ask for permission to go potty. This was my sister. She was about to be a teenager. And she had peed herself despite the fact that there was a perfectly good and accessible toilet only a few feet away from her. How? Why? It made no sense. It was just confusing, and I wasn’t quite convinced that I wasn’t still dreaming up this wacky scene. “Madelyn.” Mom’s voice was hushed, but I could sense her irritation through the use of my full first name. It turned out that my hiding spot wasn’t quite as hidden as I thought it had been. “What are you doing up?” “Um, I woke up. I was thirsty and wanted something to drink.” There was simply no way I could hold the question inside. “Did Grace pee her pants?” Mom glanced toward the staircase before answering me. “For some kids, like your sister, their bladder sometimes forgets that it is supposed to hold their pee in while they are asleep. It’s not your sister’s fault she had a bedwetting accident. Some kids, like you, grow out of it right when they are potty trained. It takes a lot longer for other kids.” That was a lot to take in all at once. Bedwetting. That was a new word for me. Perhaps it helped to define what was happening to my sister as something separate from toilet training. “Hey,” Dad said. He was not using his nighttime voice. “Heard that there was someone in the shower and then saw that no one was in bed.” “Grace had a bedwetting accident,” Mom said. Dad turned to look at me and then back at Mom. Mom sighed, adjusting her grip on Jackson, who was beginning to squirm. “Maddy already knows now. She found out because she was getting something to drink.” Dad completely brushed off the news about the bedwetting as if it was something that was completely normal and expected. “Do we think that getting something to drink is a good idea?” He asked. “But I’m thirsty,” I complained. My mouth was still very dry. “Drinking lots of water at night can sometimes lead to bedwetting accidents for kids,” Dad said. “But I don’t ever wet the bed when I drink water at night.” “Maddy does have a point,” Mom said. “Fine,” Dad responded. “But if she ruins a mattress, you can explain it to your parents.” “Go on,” Mom said to me. I went off to the kitchen but only took the tiniest sip of water. Despite my protestations that I had never wet the bed before, I was now suddenly very concerned that it could happen if I were to drink too much. I set the glass down without finishing it off and began to walk toward the stairs. “Hold up,” Dad said. “There’s something we need to talk about first.” I paused at the foot of the stairs. “While it is normal for some kids to have bedwetting issues, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t embarrassing or that other people who aren’t nice might tease your sister about it. You are not to tell anyone else that your sister wets the bed. That’s a private issue, not to be shared with anyone other than our family. Secondly, you aren’t to mention this at all to your sister. Not to tease her. Not because you’re curious. Not at all.” I understood from the way Dad’s tone had changed that this was a very serious request. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.” The shower was still running when I slipped past the upstairs bathroom on my way back to bed. <><><> Present time I had figured that wetting the bed a second time would be a lot easier. I was wrong. Like last night, I was waiting anxiously for the clock to strike midnight. Unlike last night, the urge to pee was present, but not nearly as overwhelming. While I still had drunk more liquids than normal over the course of the afternoon and evening, I hadn’t been as thorough in my hydration as yesterday. It didn’t help that Mom had caught me drinking water in the kitchen. I had planned to drink some water from the bathroom sink, but all it took was one sip of unfiltered water to deter me from doing that. I wanted pull-ups, but not that badly. Her concern over what I was drinking in the evening could turn out to be a problem, especially as the bedwetting would be turning into a pattern rather than a random one-off occurrence. Perhaps I would be able to get comfortable enough with peeing myself so that I wouldn’t need to drink excessive amounts of water to do so. I’d been lying in bed for about an hour and a half now. The first twenty minutes of that had been spent listening to Chester paw at my door. The cat’s efforts at opening the door had thankfully proven to be unsuccessful. He’d probably gone back downstairs to bother my parents. That was followed by the sound of my sister leaving her room momentarily to brush her teeth. I’d picked one of my least favorite pajama outfits for the night. It was a hand-me-down shirt from my sister. This one had a bit of special significance. It was the same T-shirt she had worn that night when I found out about her bedwetting. That was paired with some pink pajama pants with hearts on them. I wouldn’t mind if either the shirt or pants got ruined because of the bedwetting. I had kept the promise I had made to my parents six years ago. My lips had stayed completely shut. As far as I knew, Grace had no idea that I had ever known about her bedwetting. I hadn’t even brought up the subject again with our parents. If I could make it through the next week or so without Grace catching on, I’d be able to keep this bedwetting secret from her as long as my parents purchased pull-ups for me. I thought back to all the signs that had been present when Grace had been a bedwetter. I knew what I needed to avoid if I were to keep my own secret safe. That night at my Grandparents’ house had been the only time where I had stumbled across evidence of my sister’s bedwetting. That raised a lot of questions. Was her bedwetting something that was super frequent at that point, or had she, at the same age I was now, already been outgrowing her bedwetting phase? But there were other questions that remained unanswered. The fact that there had been laundry washed every morning suggested that Grace either hadn’t been wearing pull-ups to bed or that they had been totally ineffective in keeping her sheets dry. Did my parents even realize that pull-ups were an option for my older sister? Or had they – or she – decided that pull-ups weren’t how they were going to manage her bedwetting? But what about that time at my grandparents’ place? Yes, Grace had wet the bed on the first night, but as far as I knew, there hadn’t been a repeat during that week-long stay. Was it possible that she had worn a pull-up the rest of the nights there? A lot of those questions could have been answered if I had ever managed to work up the courage to ask my older sister, but a promise was a promise, so I followed my parent’s rules even after they had let me know that Grace’s bedwetting phase had ended – a move they made one vacation when they had Grace and I share a bed for the first time. I had been greatly reassured, knowing that my sister wasn’t going to pee all over me in her sleep. The telltale signs of Mom and Dad heading to bed had passed twenty minutes ago. It was likely that they were both already asleep by now. Dad’s snoring wasn’t quite as loud as last night, but I could still make it out occasionally. But all the certainty leading up to this moment was again beginning to fall away. Until last night, the idea of pretending to wet the bed had been a fantasy. It had been a fun thing to think about as I went through how different scenarios might play out in my head, all of them ending with Mom bringing me aside for a private conversation where she would reveal that she had purchased pull-ups for me to wear to bed. It had been a constant daydream over the past year as I slowly worked up the courage to finally act on my desires. But now I knew what the reality of bedwetting was like. And it wasn’t quite like how things had gone in my daydreams. Bedwetting sucked when doing it while not wearing pull-ups. It was one thing to have to inform my parents of the accident; there was no getting around that if I were to convince them that pull-ups were needed, but it was something else to have the evidence of my wet pajamas and bed displayed right in front of them. I could picture the expression on Mom’s face from last night, and I dreaded having to see it again. I nearly faltered. I nearly got up and walked to the bathroom. I nearly convinced myself that I could call it quits. But there was one thing that was stopping me. The one reassurance was that I could always stop. If faking the bedwetting got to be too difficult or too embarrassing, if I somehow found that the pull-ups didn’t live up to my expectations, all I would have to do was stop wetting the bed. I could end it as easily as it was beginning. But the one thing I couldn’t do was go through my plan only halfway. I needed to either be fully committed to it or not do it at all. The bedwetting had to be consistent and frequent if I was going to get my parents to buy me those pull-ups. I kept trying – and failing – to get my bladder to release while I was lying down in bed. I wanted the accident to look as natural as possible, but no matter how I positioned myself – lying on my side, front, or back – I was not able to get myself to pee. But there was something other than just making sure my deceit wouldn’t be found out by my parents. I wanted to know what it felt like to have an actual bedwetting accident, not just squat over my sheets and pee. But another five minutes passed by without any results. I yawned. I had two options. Figure out a way to pee or go to sleep. I got up on my knees the way I had done the night before. I turned my mind to thoughts of things that were wet. A minute later, there was a wetness and warmth in my underwear, followed by the sound of urine streaming onto the bed, proof that the method I had discovered last night had worked again. Like last night, once I had started peeing, I found it impossible to stop once everything was out. And also, like last night, the feeling of the wet clothes against my skin was barely tolerable. I picked up my phone and turned the flashlight app on. The wet spot wasn’t as big as last night, but it would more than do. It was time to get the hard part over with. So there I was, still in my soaked underwear and pants and my slightly wet shirt, staring right at my parents’ bedroom door. I’d turned off the flashlight app on my phone once I’d gotten out to the hallway. I didn’t need to make my accident any more obvious than it was already. I tried to knock. I really did. I must have raised my hand up a half-dozen times, but each time, I held my fist aloft in the air for a few seconds before letting my arm drop back down. I thought about how Mom had reacted last night. She hadn’t been upset at me, but I could tell that having to get out of bed that late had been a nuisance, especially with how she had needed to get the laundry started and clean up the mattress. Even if I had experienced a real bedwetting accident, I would have felt bad about having to make Mom clean up after me like that. If I had made a mess in the house any other time during the day, I’d be expected to clean it up on my own without any assistance. Why should this be any different? Besides, all my parents needed to know was that I had an accident. Maybe there wasn’t a need to wake them. All the bedding in the washing machine would be proof enough of that in the morning. That was a much better idea. I would change out of my wet pajamas and then take all of my wet clothing and bedding down to the basement. I could at least get a washing cycle started, and then it all could be moved to the dryer in the morning. I wouldn’t need to hide the bedwetting from my parents, but it would be much less humiliating to tell them in the morning, or perhaps they would figure it out on their own by the fact that I was doing laundry, which would make a difficult conversation a little easier. That meant I was going to have to figure out how to clean the bed. I guessed that if I were to check the closet, I would be able to recognize the cleaning solutions Mom had used last night. In less than twenty minutes or so, I’d have everything all cleaned up, and I could be tucked into a sleeping bag on the floor. I’d made my decision. Waiting until the morning for my parents to find out about this latest bedwetting accident would make things a lot easier. I was right about to head back to my room when Grace’s bedroom door swung wide open, and she stepped out into the hallway. I could have sworn that she was asleep already. I hadn’t noticed any light coming from under her door, and I had heard her brushing her teeth in the bathroom shortly after I had gone to bed myself. I stood frozen in place. There was no escape. The light from her bedroom illuminated the hallway, reaching out all the way to where I was standing. My hands slid down in front of my waist, but even had they been able to completely obscure the wet spot before Grace had a chance to see it, just the motion of hiding that part of my body would have been enough to arouse her suspicions. We locked eyes. She appeared just as surprised to see me as I was to see her. Neither of us said anything. Grace’s expression changed from the casual surprise of seeing me to concern over what must be the obvious embarrassment showing on my face. I watched in horror as my sister’s eyes drifted down to my waist, her pupils expanding as she took in the sight of my hands held in front of my wet pajamas. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com

Thanks, fixed that. I think it is safe to say that her quest for pull-ups will take a while. But we've also only had one wet night so far.

Chapter 6: Not Going to Happen Again There had to be some kind of catch. I looked at my older sister in astonishment after hearing her spell out the favor she wanted. I really hadn’t had a clue about what the favor was going to be, but what she was asking wasn’t anywhere close to any of the guesses that had been swirling around in my head since she had done my homework for me yesterday in return for a then-secret favor. I guess I had just figured that it was going to be something a little bigger than what she had asked, or at least something that I otherwise wouldn’t have wanted to do for her. But this? It would be a piece of cake. Grace was taking us to the mall. She was supposed to stick with us as a chaperone the whole time. Instead, she was going to drop us off at the mall and return to pick us up four hours later. All I and my friends had to do was not say anything about it. “Well,” Grace said with a hint of impatience in her voice. Oh, yeah. I suppose she needed me to answer her and not just stand around gawking at her. “Yeah, of course.” And that was the end of that discussion. Grace left to head back to her room. I texted my friends the good news. I made no mention of the favor in the message to them. Nothing done on a phone was secret, after all. I really didn’t think that my parents looked through my text messages, but I wasn’t confident that they didn’t have the ability to do so if they ever wanted to. I still couldn’t help but question the situation. Grace was a good older sister, but her altruism had never extended this far before. What was in it for her? She would get four hours to herself, four hours when her time would be unaccounted for by our parents. What could be so important that she’d risk the fallout of her plot being discovered? For me, I couldn’t see any downside to it at all. Four hours by ourselves at the mall. That was going to be an easy secret to keep; it was not like I would have any incentive to tattle on my older sister. There was one other benefit for Grace, which I noticed once I went back downstairs. I suppose it didn’t hurt my sister that her willingness to take me and my friends to the mall also got her in Mom’s good graces. Mom was practically gushing about how much of a good older sibling Grace was. That was true, just not in the way that Mom was thinking. <><><> When my parents upgraded to a new minivan last year, they handed down the old one to my sister. The silver Toyota Sienna wasn’t the most fashionable of vehicles for a teen girl to be driving around. My sister had nearly thrown a fit when our parents told her that it would be her vehicle after she got her license. But a car was a car, and having one was a lot better than not having one. Grace skipped the turn that led to one of the two massive parking ramps on either side of the three-story mall and instead drove us right up to one of the entrances. “You guys have fun,” Grace said as she pulled over to the curb and put the van into park. “I’ll be back to get you right here at five. Any problems and you call me right away, OK?” I got out of the passenger seat, and Emma and Angie joined me on the sidewalk, but not without a little confusion. “We’re getting chauffeur service now?” Angie asked as Grace pulled away. Grace and I hadn’t said anything about the favor on the way to the mall. I had almost thought she had either forgotten about it or had decided to backtrack. And I hadn’t wanted to bring the topic up in front of my friends in case Grace had somehow decided to change her mind. “Oh no,” I replied. “We’re on our own today.” Emma and Angie both stared at me. “How in the world did you get her to do that?” Emma asked. I told them about how Grace had done my homework for me the other day, using that assistance basically as blackmail to get me to lie to my parents about the trip to the mall. The rules at the mall were that kids under the age of sixteen couldn’t be left unsupervised after 5 p.m. But all of our parents were stricter than that. We’d never been left on our own at the mall before. “You cheated on your homework?” Emma asked indignantly. She was a stickler for following the rules. I didn’t think that accusation was all that fair. “You heard what Mr. Thompson said. That’s for eighth grade. It’s not like we were supposed to be learning about it this year, anyway.” “Fine,” Emma said, her hands on her hips. “But what exactly am I supposed to tell my parents?” “You’ll tell them that Grace did an awesome job of taking us to the mall,” I said. “You’re saying I should lie to them?” Emma asked. “Do you want to go home?” Angie asked. “You don’t need to be specific. Just say Grace took us to the mall. That’s technically the truth, after all.” Emma sighed in defeat. “Fine.” “Then come on,” Angie said, heading toward the mall entrance. “What are you waiting for?” <><><> “I need to pee quick,” I said, excusing myself at the sight of the first restrooms we passed. The two full glasses of Kool-Aid I’d drunk with my lunch of leftover pizza had been a lot, even for my typically strong bladder. The restroom was nearly deserted. I stepped into a stall near the end. Staying hydrated like this was getting to be a nuisance. It would be so much easier to fake my bedwetting once I had pull-ups. I would need to have another conversation with Emma and Angie once I got back out to the hallway. Angie seemed on board with keeping the secret, but I needed to make it crystal clear to Emma that she had better be on the same page with us. My phone buzzed. I reached down to get it from the pocket of my shorts. It was a message from Mom sent to the group chat that we shared with her and my sister. She had asked how we were doing at the mall. Grace had already replied a few seconds later, saying that we were having a good time and had gotten there OK. I thought about joining the conversation but decided that the less I said, the better. Best to keep things simple if we were going to try to keep our stories straight. I started to head to the sink to wash my hands – which usually meant running them through the water for a few seconds – when something near the restroom entrance caught my eye. There was a woman leaning over a girl on the diaper changing station. That wasn’t an uncommon sight at the mall, and normally, I didn’t pay much attention to it, but this was different. The girl looked only a little younger than Jackson. Maybe old enough to be starting kindergarten next fall. She was certainly old enough that she should have been potty trained already. She barely fit on the diaper changing station indented into the bathroom wall. I walked over to the faucet that was the second closest to where the change was taking place. I usually rushed through washing my hands, but this time, I worked to scrub them as thoroughly as possible, taking slight peeks to the side every few seconds. There could be no mistaking what I saw. The pull-ups the girl was being changed into matched the designs on the ones I had seen in the magazine I had under my bed. This was a new idea, one that hadn’t even occurred to me before. The pull-ups were advertised as nighttime underwear designed for kids who wet the bed. But here was a girl who was wearing them during the day. I hadn’t even considered that possibility before, which made me feel a bit stupid. There wouldn’t be any reason why a pull-up worn at night also wouldn’t be effective during the day. It wasn’t like a pull-up would be less absorbent while the sun was out. But a girl not potty trained at that age? What was wrong with her? I figured it probably had some sort of special needs situation or disability. But as I continued to wash my hands, I caught snippets of the conversation between the mom and daughter: just idle chit-chat about what they were planning to do and see at the mall in what was an otherwise normal conversation for a kid that age, nothing different from conversations I’d had with my brother when he’d been that age. I averted my eyes – focusing on putting some more soap on my hands – as the mom finished putting a clean pull-up on her daughter and helped her to her feet. There wasn’t anyone else in the restroom when I at last finished washing my hands. I grabbed a large wad of paper towels to dry my hands off. The used pull-up was staring right at me on the top of the nearly full garbage bin as I went to discard the paper towels on my way out of the restroom. I paused for several moments as I stared at it. The questions it raised were ones I couldn’t even dare to let myself think about, let alone answer, for fear of the possibilities nibbling at the far reaches of my brain. I stopped at a drinking fountain after leaving the restroom, taking a few long sips of water. Had to keep up my hydration, as annoying as it was. I snuck up on my friends, both of whom were glued to their phones. I peeked over Angie’s shoulder silently to watch the videos she was scrolling through on TikTok. Dad was adamant that Grace and I shouldn’t use that app. He called it poorly disguised Chinese spyware. I couldn’t see why a foreign government would care about funny dancing videos. But he was the IT expert, so there was no changing his mind. I had to make do with gleaning information from my friends about what the latest social media trends were. “Boo!” I tapped Angie on her shoulder. She jumped and nearly dropped her phone. “You’re such a creep sometimes,” Angie said. “So, what should we do first?” Emma asked. “You decided that you’re good with being at the mall without Grace?” I asked. There needed to be no question about that before we did anything else. Emma bit her lip. “I won’t say anything. I promise. Let’s just not make a habit out of it.” “What do you think Grace is hiding?” Angie asked. “Has to be something she doesn’t want anyone finding out if she’s going to go to all that trouble to keep it secret.” “Maybe it’s a boyfriend,” Emma said. That didn’t seem likely. Grace had someone she’d gone out with for about six months during her junior year. Michael had been a bit of a jerk to me, though, so he wasn’t missed. “No,” I said. “Remember that boyfriend she had? She wouldn’t need to hide it.” “So, a girlfriend then?” Angie asked. That was an interesting question. But I thought of all the posters of boy bands that covered my sister’s bedroom walls. No, it was pretty clear where her interests lay. “No,” I said confidently. “That’s not her thing.” We considered a few other options, but nothing seemed to fit for Grace. We set the mystery of what Grace was up to aside, as there wasn’t any obvious answer we could find for her decision, and set off to explore the mall. As we walked down one of the mall’s many corridors, I thought back to that commercial that had aired on TV the other night. How my friend had laughed and mocked the idea of someone our age needing to wear pull-ups to bed. Their reaction hadn’t dissuaded me from going forward with the fake bedwetting, but it had reaffirmed the need to keep it secret at all costs. There were going to be a lot of sleepovers happening over the summer. My fake bedwetting shouldn’t be a problem as long as Mom had gotten me pull-ups by then. The ad on TV did tout the ability of the pull-ups to be discretely concealed beneath pajamas, but I wasn’t going to be taking that risk around my friends. I wouldn’t even have to wear the pull-ups to bed. I could just tell Mom that I did and then pretend that I must have had a rare dry night. So even if I was staying overnight at one of my friend’s houses, it wouldn’t be a problem at all. Bam. Someone’s shoulder hit me in the face, and I fell backward onto the hallway floor. A man standing over me cursed and then looked down at me. “Stupid kids, watch where you are going.” “Seriously, Mads, you need to pay attention to where you are walking,” Emma said as she gave me a hand and helped me to my feet. “What do you even spend all your time daydreaming about, anyway?” Angie asked. My mind immediately went back to that day three years ago. The way the pull-up felt around my waist. The way my reflection looked in the mirror. The never-ending longing to be able to finally relive that moment. “You look so adorable when you blush like that,” Emma said. “Shut up,” I muttered. I started to walk down the hallway, paying more attention to my surroundings this time. “Is it boys?” Emma asked as she caught up to me. “No, gross. Why would you even say that?” “Yep, definitely boys. I think someone doth protest too much,” Angie said. I rolled my eyes in exasperation. That was better than my friends knowing what I was actually daydreaming about. But not much better. As we made our way to the massive M&M candy shop on the far side of the mall, I had to endure their theories about which boy in our grade I must have a crush on. They went through practically every boy that was in any of my classes, weighing the pros and cons of each option, before settling at last on Ali, who was in my math class and was on the boy’s U13 soccer team for our soccer club. “Am I right,” Angie asked. I didn’t really feel like indulging in their game any longer. “No comment.” We had arrived at the candy store, which had every possible variation of M&M candies that one could want, and quite a few that I couldn’t see anyone ever eating. We filled a bag of custom flavors to share and munched on the chocolate candies while exploring the mall. We walked in a loop around each of the three floors in the three-story complex. We knew every spot in the mall that gave out free samples. There was a hot sauce place that Angie preferred. I only dared to sample the mildest flavors. I didn’t need any further motivation to drink more water. The beef jerky shop next door was my favorite. They even had alligator jerky for sale. Thankfully, there weren’t any samples for it. Besides that, we managed to get some samples of honey, chocolate, and sports drinks. We spent the rest of the time trying on a bunch of clothes. None of us had a bunch of spare cash to make any big purchases, but we had fun squeezing into changing stalls and taking videos and photos for Angie and Emma’s social media accounts. Dad probably wouldn’t approve, but he hadn’t ever explicitly forbidden me from appearing on my friends’ social media pages, and I had been smart enough to make sure that I never brought up that topic with him. Grace did a good job of covering for us with Mom. She texted me a couple of times to ask what my friends and I were up to, and then she dutifully used that information to update Mom about what we were doing. And when we were ready to leave, Grace was right on time to pick us up at five p.m. I took a look over at the dash in front of the steering wheel. My sister must have spent a sizable amount of time driving while we were at the mall. The gas tank was a lot less full than it had been when we’d left home. <><><> “How was your time at the mall?” Mom asked a few seconds after we had stepped in the front door. This was where I needed to live up to my end of the favor. I could see Grace giving me a look out of the corner of my eye, one that told me I better stick to our agreement or else. “It was great,” I said, giving my sister a smile as I looked in her direction. “It was really nice of Grace to take us.” And that was that. There wasn’t any interrogation of what we had done at the mall. That’s one benefit of being a kid who usually has a very difficult time with lying to their parents. Mom didn’t have any reason to suspect that anything was off. It wasn’t quite time for dinner. I grabbed a book I had gotten from the library, one about teenagers struggling to survive in a far-off dystopia, but I wasn’t really paying much attention to what I was reading. Outside of asking me to retrieve my bedding from the basement, my parents hadn’t even made the slightest hint at what had happened last night with the supposed bedwetting. That was both a good thing and a problem. It was good because I was supremely embarrassed by the situation. I still couldn’t get over the look on Mom’s face when she noticed my wet shorts while I was standing at her bedroom door or how Dad had craned his head around in bed to try to see what was going on. I was going to need to somehow work up the courage to do that again tonight. But there was a downside to their seeming indifference. Yes, it was only one accident, and they wouldn’t have any reason to expect that it was anything other than a one-off event, but the way it had been seemingly brushed off and forgotten about didn’t bode well for convincing them that pull-ups were going to be the solution to this bedwetting problem. And that assumed that they would know that the pull-ups were an option for me. I still didn’t know if they had ever had my sister wear pull-ups to manage her own bedwetting. I couldn’t imagine having to wash bedding every single day. The problem was I had been too young at the time to really recall if I had noticed anything out of the ordinary with my sister. It wasn’t impossible to believe that Grace had worn pull-ups and that my parents had gone to great lengths to keep the situation discreet. And by the time I had any interest in the subject, she had already long been toilet trained at night. I had secretly searched her room multiple times but had never found even the slightest bit of evidence of pull-ups. I made sure to finish my whole glass of milk with dinner. I didn’t get a refill. Having to drink one glass of it a day was bad enough. Usually, I would try to sneak into the kitchen and pour some out at the end of dinner. Mom gave me a brief smile as she noticed that both my plate and glass were completely empty as I went to drop them off on the kitchen counter near the sink. Dinners were a family affair. Grace probably would have eaten hers in her room if she had wanted to, but that wasn’t allowed. Still, she hid herself away in her bedroom, saying she wanted to work on some graphic design projects on her computer as soon as she had finished doing the dishes. That meant that game night was just me, Jackson, and my parents. He was old enough to understand the rules of Uno, but not quite old enough to handle having to draw four without coming close to throwing a tantrum. Dad took Jackson upstairs to give him a bath while Mom and I switched to playing a round of the card game Canasta. I was on pins and needles throughout our conversation as we chatted during the game. There were so many secrets that I was juggling. My desire for diapers. The fake bedwetting. My algebra homework. Grace leaving us at the mall. I tried to keep a straight face through all of it, but I must not have succeeded. It was Mom’s turn, but she set her cards down. “Is everything OK?” What did she suspect? Did she know? A wave of guilt ran over me. I came perilously close to blurting everything out right then and there. Mom reached forward and touched my hand. “You don’t need to worry about what happened last night. You remember how I told you that your sister used to struggle with wetting the bed? And that was several times a week for quite a number of years. It’s not something you can control. That’s why it’s called an accident. We never punished or embarrassed Grace for it, and it’s not going to be any different for you.” “Yeah, it’s just…” I struggled at trying to figure out what I was supposed to say. “Don’t let it bother you.” Mom said. “You’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight, and it will be a distant memory in a couple of days.” That made me feel quite guilty. My sheets weren’t going to stay dry tonight. That was out of the question now. If I were to convince Mom and Dad to get me pull-ups, it would take a lot of consistently wet nights. Plodding footsteps coming down the stairs told us that Dad was done getting my brother ready for bed. That meant the upstairs bathroom was ready for me. I was extremely glad the conversation about bedwetting had wrapped up before his return. “Make sure you brush your teeth for two minutes,” Mom said. “Oh, and Maddy, don’t forget to use the toilet as well.” I got up to head upstairs right away, much faster than I normally would have obeyed a request to go brush my teeth. I hoped Mom wouldn’t see how badly I was blushing at her reminder to pee before going to bed. I hadn’t managed to drink quite as much water as I had done yesterday. That, combined with the fact that I didn’t even need to pee nearly as much as I had at this point last night, meant that it would probably be best to get some additional liquids in me before I retreated to my bedroom. I could have drunk some water from the bathroom sink. That would have been the discrete thing to do. But I hated the taste of the tap water at our house. It was bad enough that I needed to brush my teeth with it. That was the main reason I often tried to skirt that nighttime responsibility. Instead, I tiptoed down the stairs. Mom and Dad weren’t in sight. They were probably watching one of their more adult shows in the family room. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and pulled out a filtered water jug from the refrigerator. I filled the glass about halfway up. That should be enough to ensure that I’d be more than able to pee on the bed in a couple of hours. I raised the glass to my lips, taking a few long sips of the cool water. It was a much better choice than trying to drink from the bathroom sink. “Maddy,” Mom said in a tone that suggested she wasn’t that happy about what I was doing. I lowered the glass from my lips. Mom was standing at the entrance to the kitchen. I looked down at the nearly empty glass. “What, I’m thirsty?” “You probably shouldn’t be drinking that much water right before you get into bed,” Mom said. “That doesn’t help with staying dry at night.” “Oh,” I said, trying my best to pretend that I hadn’t even thought ahead to the possibility that drinking more would cause me to wet the bed. I set the glass down on the counter. I would have preferred to have finished it. I would have to settle for a few sips of tap water upstairs instead. I put on what I thought was a good display of confidence. “Relax, Mom. It’s not going to happen again.” --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com

I do love a good cliffhanger. But yes, parents do seem to be fairly normal and supportive. Not the type that are going to force baby someone for accidents like that. They certainly view the bedwetting as a random one-off event, which makes sense since Maddy hasn't has any accidents -- day or night -- since being potty trained. Obiously they'll have to re-evaluate that as Maddy continues to have more "accidents." We'll find out -- at least partially -- in the next chapter. Thanks! She's an important character in the story. I'm having fun with writing an older sibling for the protagonist since I haven't done that in any of my past stories. That's part of what I like about writing this story as well. There's a bunch of different directions it can go, which makes it easier to pull off some surprises.

Chapter 5: About That Favor I woke to the sound of claws being dragged across wood. Chester was scratching at the door, his paws all the way past the doorknob. The cat was a master of breaking into my bedroom. Getting out of it, not so much. He dropped his paws to the ground, turned around to glare at me, and let out a loud, high-pitched meow. I rolled over as if to move to the side of the bed, only to find myself completely tangled up in a sleeping bag. I looked around for my friends – Angie and Emma – but they were nowhere to be found. But I was on the floor in a sleeping bag. And I only slept in those during sleepovers. So where exactly were they? Oh, wait. The events of last night came back to me. The struggle to get my bladder to release. The flooded sheets after I had finally managed to trick it into letting go. Having to knock on my parents’ door to inform them of the supposed accident. Mom setting up the sleeping bag for me on the floor. Chester meowed loudly at me again and then resumed his scratching at the door. It was only slightly better than having to listen to chalk on a blackboard. I scrambled out of the sleeping bag. Better to let him out quickly than have Grace, or worse, Jackson, open the door for me and discover that all my bedding was missing. I’d have a hard time coming up with a good explanation for that, along with why I had ended up on the floor in a sleeping bag. I cracked the door open just enough for Chester to squeeze through into the hallway and then closed it right away. I stretched my hands in the air. I always felt so stiff after sleeping on the floor. How long had I slept in, anyway? I grabbed my phone off of where I had left it on the floor next to the sleeping bag. I tapped the screen. Already 10 a.m. I had really slept in. But that made sense with how late I had stayed up. I scrolled through my notifications. There were a half-dozen messages from Angie and Emma, ribbing me for how late I had slept in. Both of my friends had been up earlier, discussing what our plans would be for the day. They had come to the decision that they wanted to go to the mall. I agreed that it sounded like a bunch of fun, but aside from needing a ride, none of our parents were going to let their middle schoolers stay at the mall unchaperoned. I highly doubted that any of our parents wanted to spend time at the mall this weekend. And there weren’t any other good options at the moment. Emma’s older sister would sometimes be willing to go along with us, but she wasn’t getting back home from college for a few weeks. Angie didn’t have any siblings at all, so that wasn’t of any help. And Grace, well, she worked very hard to avoid spending any more time around my friends than was absolutely necessary. I wasn’t even going to bother asking her. In most other things, Grace and I were on good terms as far as sisters with a five-year age gap between them could be. We both had inherited our parents’ red hair, and I was practically a younger mini-me of my sister, everything else diverged from there. I was the athlete of our family, taking more after my dad in that regard. I mostly stuck to playing soccer, at least competitively, but I was always the first girl picked for any of the activities during gym class. If only I had managed to get Dad’s brains as well. I wouldn’t have any trouble doing math at all. Grace was much more artistically inclined. She planned to major in graphic design at college. I did like to doodle myself, but only as a distraction during boring school lectures; nothing that ended up in my notebook could exactly qualify as art. I grabbed a change of clothes so I could get dressed in the bathroom after the shower. Jean shorts and a tie-die shirt were the plan for today. Even though I had showered in the middle of the night, I still needed to shower again this morning, as I had only gotten under the water to briefly clean off the urine that had gotten all over me from intentionally wetting the bed. I texted my friends that I would check with my mom about the possibility of going to the mall but told them to not get their hopes up. I suggested going over to Angie’s place, which was closest to the neighborhood park, to kick around a soccer ball for a bit if the mall plan didn’t work out. With my clothes in hand, I hesitated in front of the bedroom door. Now was yet another moment of truth. I would have to walk out into the house with the full knowledge that Mom knew that I had wet the bed last night. There wasn’t any reason to think that Dad didn’t know either. If he somehow hadn’t managed to get a glimpse of my wet pajamas last night, Mom would have certainly filled him in on all the details of what had happened. I’d vastly underestimated how uncomfortable that would make me feel. But I could at least take solace in the fact that Mom hadn’t seemed upset at me in any way, and she had handled that late-night bedwetting episode with the expertise of someone who wasn’t out of place in that situation. I stepped out into the hallway. No one was in sight. I speed-walked toward the bathroom. <><><> There was a lingering smell of scrambled eggs when I walked into the kitchen, but any hopes for a late breakfast were dashed by the empty pan on the stove. “Good morning,” Mom said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee and a now empty plate of scrambled eggs set to the side of the book that was propped open in front of her. “Morning,” I replied. “I had meant to save you some,” Mom said. “But I think your father ate them. He thought you were going to sleep in all the way till lunch at this point.” “That’s fine,” I said, even though my stomach was telling me that it would have liked some scrambled eggs. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that brief exchange, but something still felt off between us as I left the kitchen and walked over to the family room. Mom knew. She didn’t know the real secret. But she knew a secret. It felt as though that one act of pretending to wet the bed had irrevocably altered things between us, a situation that made me feel more uncomfortable because it couldn’t be acknowledged at the moment. “About time you’re up,” Grace said as I walked into the family room. My older sister turned to look at Dad. “You always give me such a hard time about sleeping in. And I’m always up in time to at least eat breakfast.” Dad opened his mouth slightly and then bit his lip. Yeah, he definitely knew as well. I had already come that close to having my secret come out. “Good morning to you, too,” I muttered to my sister as I sat down on the couch and slid my phone out of my pocket. I sent a few more texts to my friends while trying my best to ignore the show that Jackson was watching on the TV. Mom joined us a few minutes later. She gave my sister a look, and Grace went off to the kitchen. Dishes were her chore, after all. Mom glanced to make sure that Grace was out of earshot before turning back to talk to me. “There’s some laundry for you to grab from the basement.” “OK.” I figured that’s where my bedding would still be, as Mom had taken in downstairs to get washed last night. I went back to looking at my phone. “Maddy,” my dad said. “Yes?” “Your mom asked you to do something.” No, she didn’t. She just said my bedding was in the basement. Oh. It hadn’t dawned on me immediately that she had said that to let me know she expected me to go and deal with it right away. Why couldn’t she just tell me what she wanted directly? “Oh, yeah. I’m on it.” I stood up from the couch. Then, I remembered there was something I had told my friends I was going to ask Mom. May as well get it over with. “Hey, Mom, can I ask you a question?” “Sure.” “We were wanting to go to the mall after lunch.” Mom didn’t need an explanation of who I was going to be going with. That could only mean Angie and Emma. “You think you could take us?” “Sorry,” Mom said. “But I’m taking your brother to a birthday party for one of his friends from school. Maybe another time.” I looked over at Dad. “It is a nice day out.” I just stared at him. That wasn’t an answer. Dad finally elaborated on his response. “That means I’m sure there are better things to do than stay inside all day.” “Fine,” I said in defeat. I trudged off toward the laundry room. “Oh, and Maddy, don’t forget to clean the cat litter while you’re down there,” Mom called out after me. <><><> I decided that I was glad we only had one cat as I finished scooping out the litter box. I wrinkled my nose as I tied up the bag and tossed it into a garbage bin. Still, it certainly beat having a dog. No way was I going to go around picking up poop off the ground every day. With that chore done, I turned to the more embarrassing task. My bedding was still in the dryer. It must not have finished long ago, because the sheets were slightly warm as I scooped them up into my arms. Grace was still washing dishes when I came up from the basement. Thankfully, she was too focused on her task to turn and look at what I was doing. I knew that part of the family room was also visible from the top of the basement stairs, but I intentionally didn’t look in that direction. I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with my parents, not as they knew exactly why all the bedding had needed to be washed this morning. Jackson was too busy watching Saturday morning cartoons to pay any attention to me, and he was too young to draw any inferences from seeing me carry my bedding back to my bedroom so soon after having gotten out of bed. I walked as quickly and as quietly as I could to the staircase that led to the second floor. I shut my bedroom door behind me and dropped all of my bedding in a heap on the floor. I breathed a sigh of relief. How many more times would I need to go through this charade? Were my acting skills up to the task? I think I had Mom and Dad fooled so far. I’d gone off script last night with my inability to tell my parents that I had wet the bed, but that only added to the obvious shame that I had to have been showing. They had to have believed it was a real bedwetting accident. But how many nights and days were going to have to pass before this could settle into what would be a much simpler routine? Faking bedwetting while wearing a pull-up was going to be a lot easier. These late nights and sneaking around to bring my laundry back to my bedroom weren’t going to be sustainable. I needed pull-ups. And I needed them now. A thought did cross my mind. Maybe after one or two more nights of bedwetting, if my parents hadn’t purchased pull-ups for me by then, I could go ahead and ask them to get some for me. But that wasn’t going to happen. If I wasn’t even capable of verbally admitting that I had wet the bed, there was absolutely no way that I could somehow manage to ask them to purchase pull-ups for me. Besides, I had already ruled out that course of action. I couldn’t give them any hints that I somehow wanted to wear pull-ups. But there wasn’t any other option of getting pull-ups other than the path I had already set myself on last night. Plus, the worst of it was already over. I wasn’t going to have to do anything tonight that I hadn’t already proven that I was capable of doing. I knew I could make myself pee in bed. I knew I could endure the humiliation of walking over to my parents’ bedroom to inform them of the accident. I knew I could get past the embarrassment of having to help my mom strip off the bedding and hand her my wet clothes to bring down to the wash. I could deal with needing to bring my bedding back to my room while trying to avoid catching my sister’s attention. All I had to do was keep my eye on the prize. I crawled onto the uncovered mattress and leaned over to where I had peed on the bed last night. There didn’t appear to be any obvious stains. I leaned in and took a sniff. Didn’t smell bad, either. Whatever cleaning stuff Mom had used obviously worked well. What was it that she had said last night? Oh yes, that it hadn’t been the first time when she had needed to get up in the middle of the night to deal with a wet bed. I suspected some of the cleaning solutions might be leftovers from when Grace had been a bedwetter herself. I had just finished making the bed when there was a knock at the door. I knew it was my sister. Jackson would just burst in right after knocking, and my parents would announce that it was them. “Come in.” “I can take you to the mall,” Grace said as she peered her head in through the open door. That got my attention. But that raised a whole host of questions. Chiefly, why in the world would my older sister volunteer for a task that she disliked so much? Grace stepped into the bedroom and shut the door behind her. “So,” my older sister said, lowering her voice to just barely above a whisper. “About that favor I wanted from you yesterday.” --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com

Companies that make diapers have zero incentive to make it easy for a child to potty train and every incentive to make the process stretch out as long as possible so they can drain every last bit of profit from the child's parents before the kid learns to use the toilet. That's unregulated, late-stage capitalism at its finest -- the pursuit of infinite growth of profits no matter what the cost is to society. That doesn't mean that there aren't some valid reasons for larger diapers, such as for kids with disabilities or ones dealing with bedwetting. And kids are larger now than they were in decades past. But there is also a push from diaper manufacturers to normalize kids being in diapers longer than they physically need to be. For example, the whole idea of waiting until a child is ready to potty train has changed from waiting for the child to have the physical skills to independently use the toilet to waiting for them to make a decision to give up diapers. Whether a child wants to wear diapers or not is irrelevant. Once they have the physical ability to use the toilet, it's the parent's responsibility to teach them. There are many things kids have to learn (whether they want to or not) in order to function in society. And the comfort of disposable diapers and pull-ups makes that process all that more difficult. --- Of course, I would also eagerly welcome adult-sized pampers or even a tape-on variation of Goodnites big enough for adults.

Chapter 4: Unless I Knock I really hadn’t thought this through as well as I should have. I continued to stare down at the massive wet spot underneath me on the bed. The urine had spread out in a puddle around me. I could feel the wetness beneath me from my knees to my toes as my bare skin pressed against where the urine had soaked through the sheets. It was still warm, though not quite as warm as it had been in the seconds after I had finished peeing. I couldn’t bring myself to move. I had attempted to inch away at first, but that only accentuated the feeling of the wetness against my skin. I did not like that sensation at all. I drew in a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. I had done it. Actually done it. I hadn’t chickened out this time. This next week was going to be the worst of it. I was going to need to keep doing this until my parents decided to purchase pull-ups for me. And that was something that had to be their decision. No twelve-year-old, even one who would be far better off wearing pull-ups to bed, would be actively asking their parents to purchase them for her. That meant Mom and Dad would need to arrive at the decision on their own, without anything but the most subtle of hints from me. As I sat uncomfortably on what couldn’t actually be described as an accident, I now fully understood why my two younger cousins had no issues with their parents buying them pull-ups to wear to bed. For the longest time, I had struggled to understand why someone who was just a regular bedwetter – not someone like myself who actually wanted to wear diapers for the sake of wearing them – would be OK with doing so at night. The proof was right underneath me. There couldn’t be any way that someone would prefer going through this every night rather than wearing a pull-up or diaper to bed. There couldn’t be any question that having an accident contained in a pull-up would be preferable to having to deal with soaked pajamas and bedding in the middle of the night. I couldn’t just continue to sit in the middle of the bed. I inched over to the side of the bed, leaving a trail of wet spots across the sheets as I moved away from the nucleus of the fake bedwetting accident. I reached to the side of the bed, where I could barely make out the outline of the lamp sitting on the nightstand. My hands fumbled across it in the dark for a few seconds before they came across the light switch. I averted my eyes, shielding them from the blinding light with my arm. Then I opened my eyes again. The damage was far worse than it had appeared when I had wet the bed in darkness. My light pink sheets only made the location of the accident more apparent. And I had indeed left a trail of wetness over to where I was sitting next to the lamp. The bottom of my light blue cotton pajama shorts were completely soaked, as was the underwear beneath them. Even my T-shirt hadn’t been completely spared. The bottom of it must have touched a wet spot on the bed as I had gone to turn the lamp on, as there were some wet spots on the bottom of the shirt as well. I had known the process of faking bedwetting to get pull-ups wasn’t going to be pretty, but even then, the reality of what it was going to entail hadn’t really sunk in until now. But now what? My initial plan had been to wet the bed in the morning, but I had worried that might not be a good idea. There were several problems I found with that option. The first was that all the wet spots on the bedding would still be warm; it would look a lot more like I had peed a few minutes ago than having had an accident in the middle of the night. Too suspicious. The second issue with that idea was how it would be much harder to conceal the bedwetting from Grace and Jackson. They would both be awake, and it would be much more likely that they would come across wet laundry being hauled down to the laundry room or eavesdrop on a conversation about bedwetting between me and our parents. That meant that a nighttime accident was necessary, and I would need to proactively inform my parents about it. How in the world was I supposed to begin that conversation? Hey, Mom and Dad, it’s me. Maddy. You know, your twelve-year-old daughter who has never wet the bed before. About that. I just pissed all over my pajamas and bed just now while I was asleep. Sorry about that. Can you help me get cleaned up? Just another thing I hadn’t thought through. But I was going to have to do it, and soon. I stifled a yawn. I couldn’t risk falling asleep and being forced to attempt to stealthily hide my wet bedding from my siblings while also informing my parents of the accident. I just had to trust that my parents would show the same amount of discretion in handling my bedwetting as they had done for my older sister. I grabbed a dry portion of the bed cover and used it to wipe off my feet and legs before getting off of the bed. It wasn’t super bad to walk in wet shorts, but the wet underwear beneath them clung to me uncomfortably as I retrieved my phone, turning on its flashlight function as I turned off the bedroom lamp. I had to nudge Chester back into the hallway with my foot as I creaked open the door. The stupid cat would probably accidentally end up in my wet bedding if I let him in. It was bad enough that I was probably going to need to get in the shower. The one time we’d had to bathe that poor cat gave me no desire to have to do it again. I shut the bedroom door behind me as I entered the hallway. A few seconds later, I was standing in front of my parents’ closed bedroom door. I couldn’t bring myself to even gently tap on the door, let alone knock on it enough to wake them up. But the longer I waited, the more likely it was that one of my siblings might get up to use the restroom or get a late-night sip of water. I silently went through a half-dozen variations of what I could say to my parents. I wasn’t happy with any of them. The truth was that I wasn’t going to find the right thing to say. There wasn’t any possible way to explain the situation to my parents that wasn’t completely and utterly humiliating. My thoughts drifted back to the magazine under the bed. This was the price I had to pay to get my pull-ups. I hoped it would be worth it. I reached out and pressed the palm of my right hand against the door. The door wasn’t locked, but I knew better than to open it without their permission. I pulled my hand back a few inches and then did what could be most accurately described as a few soft pats on the door. In the silence of the night, the sound of my palm on the wood door seemed to reverberate through the hallway. But I knew I hadn’t actually made enough noise to wake anyone up, whether that was my siblings or my parents. I closed my hand into a fist. I couldn’t bring myself to knock on the door. I thought of a desperate plan to turn back. I could sneak down to the basement. I knew for a fact that the washer and dryer weren’t audible from the second-floor bedrooms. I could get everything washed and dried. I could remake the bed. No one would be any bit the wiser to what had occurred. I would be exhausted the next morning. But it was Saturday. I could sleep in. I shook my head. That was how this always went. I couldn’t let myself get turned aside, not after everything I’d done. I tried to build an image in my head of what my life would be like next week. Mom would have purchased a small package of pull-ups for me. I would have pretended to be embarrassed about using them, but would have reluctantly agreed to do so in the end. I would be lying in bed, wearing them in place of my underwear. I certainly wouldn’t have any pajama shorts over them. No, I would want to be able to see the colorful design, run my hand against the crinkly exterior. Even three years later, I could still longingly recall exactly how that had felt, along with the padding that so comfortably fit between my legs. And then, when I was wetting myself in bed, it would all be contained. I wanted ever so badly to know what that felt like. None of that was going to happen unless I knocked. No matter how embarrassing the next week was going to be, it would all pass. And I would get what I wanted. I rapped my knuckles on the door several times. I winced at the sound it made, but there was no way around it. I paused, listening first for any sounds from behind the door and then from further down the hallway where my siblings were sleeping. Nothing from either one of them. I rapped my hands again on the door. This time a little harder than before. And this time, there was a result. I thought I heard something creaking from beyond the door. Then a hushed conversation. Then a couple of footsteps. Then the door opened. I didn’t have to fake the shame and embarrassment I felt as the bedroom door creaked open to reveal Mom standing in front of me in a nightgown, with the dim light of my phone illuminating her face. My hands were trembling as I looked at her. Through the gap in the door, I could see Dad, who was still in bed. He was also craning his head to get a look at me. “Is everything alright?” Mom asked. She didn’t sound as though she was fully awake yet. “I… I…” The beginning of my planned response drifted off into nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. It turned out that I didn’t have to. My face burned as Mom’s eyes drifted away from mine and down toward my waist. There was no immediate verbal reaction to what she was seeing, but her eyes told the story that her lips didn’t. Her eyes blinked rapidly a couple of times and then widened, staring at my shorts for several seconds before breaking away to look back at me. I couldn’t meet her eyes this time. I focused instead on the sash of her nightgown. Mom turned around and motioned for Dad to get back into bed. “It’s OK, honey. I’ve got it.” She stepped out next to me in the hallway, pulling the bedroom door shut behind her. “Let’s go and get everything cleaned up,” Mom said as she began to walk toward my bedroom. Even though I’d had some light from the lamp and my phone, my eyes still weren’t prepared for how bright the room suddenly got when Mom flipped on the light switch to my room. Mom took a deep breath as she surveyed the bedroom. “You have one of those dreams where you thought you were sitting on the toilet?” “Yeah,” I muttered. I didn’t even know that was a thing. But it seemed like a believable lie to go along with. “Well, it happens,” Mom said. She didn’t sound upset. Just tired. “I’ll take care of getting the bedding in the wash, but you need to get yourself cleaned up as well once you’ve helped me get the bedding stripped.” I tossed all of my pillows to the floor. They, thankfully, had been completely spared. Mom didn’t say anything further as she helped me strip the bed. The cover hadn’t gotten all that wet, just a little bit from where it had gotten tossed in the wet bedding and used to dry myself off. The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the bedding. The sheets were very soaked. There was a thin cotton mattress protector beneath the sheets. Also soaked. And then there was the mattress itself. The wet spot on it was as bad as I had feared, considering how wet all the bedding had been. I really hoped that I hadn’t ruined it. Though, on the other hand, that type of damage might spur my parents on to get me pull-ups a lot more quickly. Mom had wrapped the sheets and mattress protector in the much dryer cover and was holding it all in her arms. “One more thing, Maddy. I need to wash your clothes as well. Just take them off in the bathroom, and then you can inch the door open a little bit to hand your wet pajamas to me. I need to put them in the wash with all of your bedding. And you need to get cleaned up in the shower before getting dressed again for bed.” I hastily grabbed some underwear and clean pajamas from the dresser and retreated into the bathroom. I grimaced as I pulled off my wet shorts and underwear. I had forgotten how much I disliked the sensation of wet fabric on my skin. Per Mom’s instructions, I slid my wet clothes through a slightly open door. I winced at the thought of Mom having to pick them up as if she wasn’t already holding plenty of evidence of my supposed bedwetting accident. I turned on the shower, adjusting the shower head so that the water was coming out at an angle that would allow me to step into the shower and wash my midsection without getting my hair wet. I hated going to bed with wet hair, and I wasn’t going to use a loud hairdryer at this time of night. There wasn’t much that could wake up either Jackson or Grace, but the hair dryer might be loud enough to do so. The last thing I needed was for either of them to be wondering why I had been up taking a shower at this time of the night. Since I wasn’t washing my hair, it only took me a couple of minutes to get scrubbed down. I washed as thoroughly as I could, eager to get every trace of urine off of my skin. Once I had pull-ups to wear to bed, that wouldn’t be a problem. Those would actually be able to absorb everything. I could see the light coming into the hallway from my open bedroom door as I stepped out of the bathroom. I walked slowly through the hallway in a conscious effort to not create any more noise than I had made already. Mom was patting the mattress dry with paper towels. There were two bottles of cleaning sprays on the nightstand, along with a rather sizable pile of wet, discarded paper towels. A bit of guilt ran through me at the sight of Mom cleaning up after my mess. None of this was fair to her. I grabbed a handful of paper towels off of the roll and leaned over the mattress next to Mom, pressing the towels against a wet spot that now gave off the harsh scene of cleaning chemicals. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled as I pressed another wad of paper towels into the mattress. Mom took a break from patting the mattress dry and rubbed my back. “Don’t worry about it, Maddy. You were asleep. It wasn’t your fault. Besides, it’s not like it is the first time I’ve had to clean up a mattress in the middle of the night.” I knew she was referring to my older sister, but as eager as I was for more details about Grace’s past bedwetting, I couldn’t bring myself to ask Mom some more questions. Besides, I doubted I would get any more answers than on that day when I had accidentally found out about my sister’s bedwetting. We went through a couple dozen more paper towels before Mom stepped back from the bed and turned to look at me. “Well, I think your mattress will survive. But it still needs to dry some more. I set up your sleeping bag on the floor.” I had been so focused on helping Mom clean the mattress that I hadn’t noticed the dark purple sleeping bag that had been unrolled at the foot of the bed. It was all set up for me to crawl into. And, of course, Chester was already curled up on top of it. For a dumb cat, he could be pretty perceptive sometimes. I knelt down and slid into the cool sleeping bag, careful not to displace the cat. “I wouldn’t get too worked up about it,” Mom said quietly to me as she went to turn the light off. “I’m sure it’s just a one-time thing.” Her hand touched the switch. I was enveloped in darkness. If only she knew. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com

https://www.google.com/alerts It's pretty useful. Put the title of your story in quotes and it catches stuff easily.

Littles Sissys & ABDL,s Broadcast - YouTube They are doing audio narrations of a bunch of ABDL stories, including one of mine, "Diapers Never Lie," without giving any credit to the authors. And it's not even good quality, just AI droning over a picture of a diaper. Thoughts on if, or how, to deal with this? Comments are turned off and I don't see a way to message the channel. And I'm not filing a copyright dispute with YouTube cause that requires giving a lot of identifying information that I'm not going to associate with my ABDL writing. I probably wouldn't mind if they had either asked about it or at least acknowledged me as the author (with a link to one of the places I had posted the story), but they don't seem to be doing that for any of the content they are taking. Kind of fluky that I found it. The only reason I noticed was that I have Google Alerts set up for all my titles. Anyway, they've done narration for ton of stories. More than 2,000 videos, 3,000 subscribers, and 1 million views. Some of the ones I recognized on there after a brief scan. Trading Spaces Scene 30 (youtube.com) @BabyStevie26 Life and Death Choices Made Casually Scene 59 - YouTube @WriteAndLeft

I would have interest in doing a Samantha story at some point, provided I have a good idea for a plot, but I'm not sure what the best timeline would be to tell that story. That's fair enough. It's hard to pick a spot to end, and I wanted to at least have some brief answers to a few plot things before it was wrapped up. Had to jump ahead enough to where all of the Mom's court stuff would at least be settled. Thanks, there wasn't any story in particular as a basis for her. There's a subreddit for kids of narcissists that I've stumbled across on occasion, but there weren't any scenarios/scenes taken from that.

That was very much me as well, the few times I tried to deceive my parents about something. Never was a good Poker player either. But yes, I think this story will have a good answer to that question. I think we'll get an idea about how well thought out Maddy's plan is (or isn't) in the coming chapters. She's not going to admit to doing it on purpose, but there is a questions as to whether she go right to her parents to say she wet the bed, or if she will let them discover that fact on their own. But no magic nurseries will be appearing in this story. Based on my other two stories on Daily Diapers, I should have added a trigger warning before the first chapter: Caution, story contains depictions of healthy family dynamics. It may not be as easy for her to get what she wants as she expects it to be. Hmm... That would be quite disappointing for her.

There's going to be a lot of interesting things in store for Maddy soon. Thanks, and yeah, I certainly would never have had the guts to do it either, but I also had to share a room with my brother. As adults, we obviously know that pretending to wet the bed as a kid is a bad idea for a whole host of reasons (many of which will pop up in this story), but I think it is one of those ideas that a lot of people who got into ABDL in their younger years may have toyed with in their heads. And obviously, for some adults, there is an appeal to either becoming a bedwetter or becoming incontinent. The premise for this story is basically to take a "what if" look at what could actually happen if a teenager were to try and pretend to wet the bed. That's certainly another way to look at that analogy.

Chapter 3: Point of No Return Past the point of no return The final threshold What warm, unspoken secrets will we learn Beyond the point of no return? The music Mom played in the car always had to be educational. She had been a theater actress until Grace was born, when she’d traded that for the stability of a tedious office job. Even after all these years, she still had a thing for musicals. We’d been listening to The Phantom of the Opera on car rides for the past week and a half. It had been a desperate effort to keep Mom from singing along to the lyrics while my friends were in the car. It was one of her favorites; Mom had parts in the musical as a high school student and later as a professional actress. Thank goodness the musical was nearing an end. But that raised the uneasy question of what Mom would have us listening to next. Grace and Jackson had the two bucket seats in the middle row of the van, while I sat between Emma and Angie in the back row on the way home from the soccer game. There were few things capable of fully distracting me from my years-long quest to get my hands on pull-ups or diapers, but soccer was one of them. And our season wasn’t over yet. Emma had scored the winning goal with five minutes remaining, heading the ball into the net after I lofted a pass into the penalty box. Mom was driving us home so that Dad could put in an order for pizza. Dad leaned over to tilt his head and look at us from the front passenger seat. “We need to figure out what kind of pizza to order.” That led to an immediate clammer of responses. I wasn’t particular about my toppings. But my siblings and friends all had strong preferences. “Hold up,” Dad said. “One at a time. Tell me what you’d like when I say your name.” After getting each of our answers, Dad determined that we’d need cheese, pepperoni, and BBQ chicken pizzas to have something that would be suitable for everyone’s palates. He placed a delivery order on his phone. The pizzas would arrive ten minutes or so after we made it home. We pulled into the driveway. The ignition was turned off. The music came to an abrupt end just as the chorus was repeating. Past the point of no return. My efforts at being hydrated for tonight had continued throughout the soccer game. Playing midfield was hard work, so I didn’t have any difficulty going through a couple of bottles of water. This would be it, though. Once I began to wet the bed, there would be no going back to the way things were before. There would be no hiding that I was wearing pull-ups. Not from Mom and Dad. Most likely not from my sister. I felt confident I could keep my secret from Jackson. And there was absolutely no way I was going to allow my friends or anyone at school to discover it. Could I live with that? Could I live with my parents and sister, thinking I was a bedwetter? Was that a fair price to pay for finally getting what I had been seeking for three years? I tried to push those worries to the side. My sister had been a bedwetter, and she had turned out completely fine. Pretending to be one couldn’t result in things going any worse for me. Besides, once I was old enough to be able to get pull-ups on my own. I could slowly stop wetting the bed, pretending that I had grown out of the issue. I made my decision. I unscrewed the lid to the half-full bottle of blue Gatorade sitting in my lap and drank another few ounces. If the amount of liquids I’d been drinking so far this afternoon and evening had stood out to anyone as odd, no one said anything about it to me. Emma and Angie left their sports bags in the trunk as we got out of the van. Mom would take them home after dinner. Something wet and rough began to lick my leg as I sat down on the couch. “Shoo!” I gave Chester a mostly gentle push away from me. The cat flicked its tail in annoyance. He jumped up on Angie’s lap instead. I had thought it was cute when our cat had first licked my legs after returning home from a soccer game one evening a couple of years back. I just thought it meant that he really liked me. Leave it to Grace to spoil the mood. She had informed me it was probably only due to my skin being salty from sweating. Chester didn’t love me. He wanted to eat me. And if I were to suddenly keel over and die, he probably would do just that. It’s hard to look at your beloved pet the same way again in light of that information. Yes, a family of redheads had, of course, adopted an orange cat. The jokes practically wrote themselves, and Angie and Emma had been more than willing to make them in the three years since our family had adopted that orange menace. The doorbell rang. Dad went to the front door to get the pizzas. Mom went down to the basement to grab some soda for us. I followed my friends and siblings to the dining room, where the three pizzas, as well as cheese bread and dipping sauce, were laid out on the table. I was just about to pick up a plate to put some slices of BBQ chicken pizza on when Mom called me over from the kitchen. “Madelyn, can you come here for a second?” Mom was waving at me from the kitchen. I set my empty plate down. That Mom was using my full name wasn’t a promising sign about where this conversation was heading. Maddy – with a “y” – was what I usually preferred to be called. When a new teacher was going through the roll call for the first time at the start of the school year, I would make sure to let them know that I preferred my nickname rather than Madelyn. Sometimes, Grace and my friends would tease me and call me Mads, especially if I happened to already be irked by something. That could get annoying pretty quick, even if I had to admit that it was rather funny. Mom and Dad were usually good about calling me Maddy, except for when I had done something wrong. Then I was Madelyn. But what exactly had I done wrong? Mom was still holding the two-liter Mountain Dew that she had brought up from the basement. That was going to be key to the success of my plans tonight. Plenty of caffeine and sugar to keep me up later, and I would be well-hydrated before going to bed. “Maddy, look at me.” “Huh?” “Did you not hear a word that I said?” I looked down at my feet. Had Mom been talking? “Um. Maybe not.” Mom sighed. “I noticed that you hadn’t cleaned the cat litter when I went to grab the soda. Can you please go and do that now? There weren’t a lot of chores that I had to do, but one of them was that it was my responsibility to clean the cat litter every day when I got home from school. The chore had completely slipped my mind. That wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. It wasn’t like I was intentionally trying to avoid it. I didn’t like scooping the cat litter, but it beat washing dishes, which was one of the things my older sister was tasked with helping out with. “Now? But I’m hungry? I’ll go do it after dinner. Promise.” “It needs to be done now, Madelyn. We don’t need the basement to get all stinky.” There was a subtext beneath her calm but firm tone, one that suggested something both Mom and I knew. If I didn’t complete that task right now, I was likely going to forget to do it until tomorrow. And Mom wasn’t going to be all that happy about it. Besides, I didn’t have anyone but me to blame for needing to do the chore; I had been the most vocal proponent of getting Chester a couple of years ago. The sound of my feet against the wooden stairs echoed noisily as I descended into the basement. Mom wasn’t wrong about the litter being stinky. I wrinkled my nose as I went about the unpleasant task of cleaning up after the cat as quickly as possible. <><><> We brought our food into the family room, where a trio of couches formed a half-circle facing a large, flat-screen TV. Grace had retreated to her bedroom to eat her pizza in solitude. Her tastes in TV shows were a lot different from my friends’ and mine. She pretty much avoided Emma and Angie when my two friends were over. To be fair, I gave my older sister’s high school friends plenty of distance as well. Being the last to fill my plate and cup had come with its advantages. With everyone else already in the family room. I filled my cup to the brim with pop, drank half of it, and then filled it up again. I would need to brush my teeth extra good before bed tonight. That is, if I remembered to do so. That was another task I had a hard time keeping track of, much to my parents’ – and dentist’s – annoyance. Angie – short for Angelina – had only cheese pizza on her plate. She was the pickiest eater I had ever met. I didn’t know how she managed to get enough calories each to subsist. The girl with dark brown hair done up in a ponytail eyed my BBQ chicken pizza as I took a seat next to her on the couch. She looked quite put off by it. “I don’t think that counts as pizza,” Angie said. Emma rolled her eyes from the other couch she was sitting on by herself. “Says the girl who won’t even eat pepperoni and sausage.” “Hey, I saw a documentary about how they’re made,” Angie retorted. On that topic, I did actually take Angie’s side, though, unlike her, I wasn’t well on my way to becoming a vegan. “She does have a point, though,” I said to Emma while taking a bite of my chicken pizza. “I don’t really care for mystery meat.” We were streaming a show on Netflix while we ate our dinner. I wished my parents had been willing to pay enough to avoid ads, but instead, we were getting interrupted every fifteen minutes by commercials. My parents had left the room shortly after finishing their pizza slices, leaving control over what was on the TV to us. I usually looked down at my phone during the commercial breaks, but this one caught my eye. It was something I had never seen before on the TV: an advertisement for the very product I was trying to get my hands on by becoming a bedwetter. There were a bunch of boys and girls dressed in pajamas for a sleepover. There was a narrator talking about how two of the kids had an embarrassing secret they needed to hide from their friends. “Wait, are those diapers for teenagers?” Angie asked as the ad showed a boy and a girl, not all that younger than ourselves, putting on a pull-up. Pull-ups, I thought silently. Those are pull-ups. If they were diapers, they’d have those sticky tapes to attach them around the waist. That was not a distinction I was going to dare bring up to my friends, though, so I had to sit silently as they gave their loud observations about the commercial. “What kind of loser would wear those?” Emma said as the ad broke away to show a picture of the product and its packaging. I stared straight ahead at the TV, not because I wanted to watch the advertisement while my friends were present, but because I wasn’t sure how successful I was being at putting on a poker face. It wasn’t that I wasn’t aware of how unusual my desires were. There was a reason I had confided in no one over the past three years. There was a reason that all my attempts to fulfill it had been conducted in utmost secrecy. I knew my friends would find the idea of someone their age being a bedwetter to be strange or weird, but to hear the venomous ridicule coming out of their mouths was something altogether different. It raised the stakes of what I was about to do tonight. “Yeah, that’s really gross,” I added, pretending to share their disgust over the topic as well. There was a sudden realization in the middle of the conversation. I needed to pee. Badly. I didn’t leap up from the couch. I needed to preserve at least some of my dignity, but I did walk out of the room rather quickly, that walk turning into a jog to the bathroom as soon as I was out of sight. I pulled down my underwear, wishing it was a pull-up I was removing instead. But if it had been a pull-up, I wouldn’t have needed to rush off to the toilet in the first place. My urine was even clearer than it had been before dinner. The plan of getting extra hydrated was working. I would have no issues peeing in bed tonight. Everyone was still focused on the TV when I returned to my place on the couch. Nothing more was said about the ad for pull-ups for bedwetters. It was long forgotten as the drama of the TV show continued. Our next soccer game wasn’t until Sunday, but we’d already made plans to meet up at Angie’s place tomorrow after lunch. We watched two episodes before it was time to say goodnight to my friends. The word was one that was difficult to say in light of the advertisement on TV, and I nearly stuttered over it as I waved goodbye to Angie and Emma as they followed Mom out the door. <><><> I picked up Chester off of the bed, set him down in the hallway, and made sure the door was actually shut securely behind me before I returned to bed. For a cat as dumb as he was, the fact that he had learned to open my bedroom door in the middle of the night was a source of endless annoyance for me and plenty of amusement for my siblings. For whatever reason, he had decided that I was his person, and therefore, my bedroom was the one that he wanted to be spending the night in. The problem was that my bedroom door didn’t always close all that securely, so if that fat orange cat were to push hard enough against it, he could get it to open enough to slip through and come sleep on my bed. I wanted no part in waking up to his butt being planted on my face. Not again. No, thank you. Tonight, of course, I had bigger concerns about him being in my bed than where he would plant his behind. It wouldn’t do to have the cat get caught up in the bedwetting that was set to happen in less than an hour. I looked at the digital clock on my nightstand as I returned to bed. Still, thirty minutes to go until midnight. I’d been in bed for almost an hour now. Since it was still technically part of the school year, I had a bedtime, even on weekends. Normally, I would have been annoyed at being sent to bed at 10:30 p.m. this close to summer break, but tonight, I did so without complaint, though I still had to be reminded by Mom to make sure to brush my teeth. Midnight was the earliest I could attempt to wet the bed, but I still had to wait to make sure everyone else was asleep before I began. Jackson, being six, got sent to bed right after dinner, around 8 p.m. He was an extremely sound sleeper. Nothing was going to wake him until he got up to zoom around the house and watch Saturday morning cartoons around 7 a.m. My parents were still up watching TV at the moment. This was their chance to watch the shows that Jackson and I hadn’t been allowed to see yet and ones that Grace had no interest in. But their evening schedule was at least predictable. Give them another ten to fifteen minutes, and they’d be brushing their teeth and taking out contact lenses. I’d likely be able to hear my dad snoring from the hallway before midnight. Grace was the wildcard, but whether she was asleep or not was less of a concern. She tended to seclude herself in her bedroom on weekend evenings. The main problem was that I was already beginning to feel a fairly strong urge to pee. As the evening wore on, my trips to the bathroom had become more and more frequent. I wasn’t sure how much I had drunk since coming home from school, but I was sure it had to be some crazily excessive amount, much more than whatever was recommended for staying hydrated during the day. I turned my phone’s flashlight on and retrieved the magazine once more from the drawer in an attempt to distract my thoughts from my bladder for the moment. I buried myself beneath my covers so the light wouldn’t be noticeable from outside in the hallway. I read through each line of the advertisement again and again. At this point, I could recite it from memory, the pictures of the pull-ups and the words used to describe them crystal clear in my mind’s eye. But there was something different about being able to hold it in my hands. It made it tangible. This wasn’t just something I had dreamed up. These pull-ups were real. And soon, they would be mine. I heard some faint noises in the distance and hastily shut off my phone. Mom and Dad were getting ready for bed. I could hear the sink running off in the distance in the bathroom as they brushed their teeth. I listened with bated breath as the sounds of them getting ready for bed continued. After a sprinkling of footsteps, their bedroom door clicked shut, and there was silence. As much as I wanted to resume my examination of the magazine, I couldn’t risk getting it ruined in the bedwetting. I carefully put it back in its place in the dresser drawer. I wouldn’t need it anymore once I had actual pull-ups to look at and wear. Would I toss the magazine out, then? Or would I keep it as a memento of the journey that had gotten me to this point? The clock silently struck midnight. I cracked open my door, doing so cautiously in case Chester was in the hallway waiting to come in. To my right was my sister’s bedroom on the opposite side of the hallway. The light was off. The same was true of my brother’s bedroom on the opposite side of the hallway to the left. I couldn’t make out my parent’s bedroom door, which was down to the left on the same side of the hallway as mine, but, as I had predicted, the sound of Dad’s snoring was proof enough that at least one of my parents was still asleep. I’m not sure how my Mom managed. I shut the door and tiptoed back to my bed, sliding beneath the cover and sheets. Unlike last night, my bladder was now aching, giving me clear signals that it was time to go to the toilet. I lay sprawled out under the sheets of the queen-sized bed. I now had to convince my bladder that it was perfectly OK to empty itself in this position instead. I held my breath. There would be no turning back when I did this. No way to hide the wet bed or the questions it would raise for my parents. But if I wasn’t going to do it now, when was I ever going to do it? I strained my bladder, trying to get myself to pee for several minutes. Nothing came out. I hadn’t considered how difficult it was going to be to wet the bed intentionally. My bladder was desperately telling me that it needed to go, but it was like there was some sort of mental block preventing me from going while I was still in bed. I had experienced a similar problem once before. There had been that time I had attempted to create a makeshift diaper out of plastic grocery bags, toilet paper, and duct tape. I had found myself unable to pee into it until I had sat on the toilet. In retrospect, that had been a good thing because the makeshift diaper had ended up leaking heavily into the toilet. I had figured that the problem then had been that I simply hadn’t waited until I was desperate enough to pee. Though, come to think of it, I couldn’t recall a single time that I had ever wet my pants from reaching that point of desperation since being potty trained. That had to be somewhat unusual. I could recall plenty of times when classmates in preschool through elementary had endured the humiliating experience of wetting their pants in class. Then there was Hannah, who had wet her pants during third-grade recess. I felt bad about it now, but we didn’t let her hear the end of it for the rest of the school year. That matter was mostly long forgotten now. Jokes about that situation had long lost their effectiveness. The urge to urinate was now almost painful. I rolled from my back to my stomach. Still couldn’t pee. I shifted to my side. Waited another painful minute. Still couldn’t get my bladder to release. Then I was on my back again. Still nothing. My bed was completely dry. I needed to go so badly now, but my body was telling me the only place it was going to do so was the toilet. I stood up from the bed. This was clearly stupid. A twelve-year-old girl wasn’t supposed to be peeing in her bed. What in the world was I doing? I began to hobble toward the closed door, both hands clutched between my legs. I made it halfway to the bedroom door when the image of the pull-up re-entered my mind. Was I really going to give up this easily after all my plans and preparations? Yes, someday, I would have the freedom to go and purchase those pull-ups for myself. But that would be ages and ages from now. I already knew what three years of waiting felt like. I couldn’t do it again. If not tonight, when was I going to do it? It was the same pattern, over and over again. My pent-up desire was foiled by my unwillingness to follow through when the time came to actually have the ability to put into motion a foolproof plan to get what I wanted. I returned to bed, but I didn’t lie back down. I had a different idea to try to trick my bladder into letting go. I pulled back the covers, so that I was sitting on the sheets in the middle of the bed, where my waist otherwise would have been had I been lying down. If I couldn’t make myself pee while lying down, perhaps I could do so while sitting on my knees. I tried to get in the right headspace to get myself to urinate. I thought of roaring waterfalls, trickling brooks, the pattering of rain outside my bedroom window, my hand reaching out to test the water pouring out from the shower, finding that the water was just the right amount of warmth to step into. Something began to stir in my bladder. The front of my pajama pants was warm and wet, and it was only getting warmer and wetter. It was all I could do to keep my hands from reaching down to the front of my pajamas. No point in getting them wet as well. My intention had been to make only a small accident. Enough that there wasn’t any question about what I had done, but not something super crazy that would be a pain to get cleaned up. I had figured that it would be easy to control how much I peed. I was wrong. There was simply no stopping the warm flow of urine that ran down my legs and onto the bed. Ten seconds passed. Then, twenty seconds. Then, thirty seconds. Then, forty seconds. Then it finally came to a stop. Even in the darkness, I could make out that the wet spot on my mattress was ginormous. It wasn’t so much a spot as it was a massive puddle covering a sizeable portion of the bed. I was past the point of no return. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com

I'm hopeful that I won't ever take that long to write a story again. Thanks! And it is quite incredible how many really good writers there are for ABDL stories. And the nice thing about writing in the genre is there are a surprisingly large amount of people who read it. Thanks! I'm glad you liked AMGR. Certainly not quitting my day job anytime soon, but it's nice to earn a little extra on the side. The biggest help with editing from the comments was seeing times/situations where something that I thought I had explained well wasn't quite being understood. Which let me know there were things that needed to be clarified or explained better in future chapters. That's one of the benefits of writing in a serial style. On the other hand, you can't go back to the beginning and change things easily if the ending is shaping up differently than expected. Overall, the plot remained very stable since the addition of Lisa in chapter three. The ending was always going to be Sarah moving in with her after being rescued by CPS. Thanks! I really appreciate that. Like I've said before, that's not an environment I grew up around at all, so it is nice in a way to see that the story does match how narcissists behave in real life, even if that is obviously more difficult to read about at times. Thanks! I wrote the ending for this and AMGR fairly close together. It helped tie in the themes from both of those stories. She is not a nice woman at all. I do think it is easier to notice how bad her behavior is when looking at the earlier chapters in light of what happened later. And yes, shame is not effective at all in potty training or handling incontinence.

Minor correction to note: Fixed a continuity error in chapter 2. Maddy will be entering eighth grade in the fall, not high school. I will say that after two stories with protagonists as the oldest child (Sarah and Lisa) and another with an only child. I am having fun with writing a middle child and having interactions with an older sibling as well. Thanks!. Yep, and same goes for the parents as well. Thanks! Thanks! Depends on if the sister if sister is going to be feeling sympathy or schadenfreude.

Chapter 2: Fully Prepared I tilted my head back, forcing myself to finish each drop of water from the twelve-ounce glass that I had filled to the brim. I had just come home from school, but it wasn't too early to begin working on getting myself as hydrated as possible for what I was planning on doing tonight. Plus, I had a soccer game to play in a couple of hours. It wouldn't hurt to be prepared for that, either. Grace was already home when the bus dropped me off halfway down the block in our suburban neighborhood. It was easy to get lost in the neighborhood if you didn't know what street you were on. Development in the neighborhood had just finished when we moved in a decade ago. The cookie-cutter homes all looked the same – houses painted with a repetitive palette of bland colors, a scattering of barely mature trees dotting the front yards. I waved goodbye to my two friends, Angie and Emma, as I got off the bus, knowing that I'd be seeing them again in a few hours. Angie was three blocks down from my house. Emma was on the opposite side of the sprawling neighborhood, about a half-mile away. We'd put a lot of miles on our bikes once our parents had decided that we were old enough to make the trek back and forth between our houses unsupervised. Emma's parents were going out for the evening, so she would be hitching a ride with us to the game this evening. My stomach felt uncomfortably full after downing so much water so quickly. I belched. "Well, excuse you," my older sister called out from the living room, where she was reading a book on the couch. I probably should have taken it a bit slower, sipping on the water over the course of a few minutes rather than trying to chug it down all at once. But I couldn't help myself sometimes. I was very much an all-or-nothing type of person, and I wasn't going to allow myself to waver the slightest bit in my commitment to finally wetting the bed tonight. Grace always arrived home from high school before the bus dropped me off. In a few minutes, she would walk to the end of the block to pick up Jackson when he was dropped off from elementary school. It was nice to have some freedom between the time I got dropped off by the school bus and the time when my parents returned home from work. Yes, Grace was left in charge, but my older sister was more focused on making sure Jackson wasn't getting into trouble than worrying about me. The most she would ever do would be to remind me to do my homework, which was better than getting a lecture from my parents for not having gotten started on it before dinner. I set the empty glass on the counter next to the sink and retreated to my bedroom. I should have been starting on my homework. Any assignments from school were supposed to be done before I could have any time to myself, but I had no desire to even try to begin working on the Algebra sheet that I had been sent home with. I shut the door behind me as I entered the bedroom. Grace knew better than to barge in on me. We had a well-established quid pro quo about staying out of each other's rooms. I knew she wasn't going to barge in on me announced. Jackson, on the other hand, had about as much respect for boundaries as one would expect from a six-year-old boy, which is to say that he really didn't have that many. I had to be a lot more careful when he was around. My bed had a set of dressers underneath it, most of which I used for storing various odds and ends. My clothes went into my regular dresser and closet. Buried beneath a pile of old books and notebooks in the bottom middle drawer under my bed were some of my most treasured possessions. I had three copies of Reader's Digest. After the first time I had come across the ad for the nighttime pull-ups on it, I browsed through all the magazines my mom hadn't managed to throw out yet. A few had the same ad, so I didn't bother keeping them, but I did get lucky enough to find one with a different ad. Then, for the following year, I kept a close watch on the new magazines that were arriving in the mail. Mom thought it was nice that I was doing so much reading. But I was just carefully scanning all the ads, hoping to get another glimpse of the object that had been the focus of all my desires for the past couple of years. A couple of months later, I was in luck. There was a new ad in the magazine, one that noted an upgraded absorbency for the pull-ups. I waited a couple of weeks to be sure that Mom was finished reading the magazine before squirreling it away at the bottom of my dresser drawer. There was a reason that I maintained this paper collection. My dad was an IT network administrator. The very first lesson I got from him about the internet was that absolutely nothing that happened on it was truly secret. Yes, there were layers of secrecy you could hide behind, but if someone was looking and knew what they were doing, they could find it out. The next lesson was never to talk with adults or strangers online. And the third was never to put my personal information where people could easily access it. I don't think he had intended it to be a veiled threat that I should be careful about what I was doing on the internet, but I had taken the message in that direction anyway. It had taken all of my self-control to not Google the name of the pull-up brand that I had seen in Reader's Digest a year ago. The ad even had a website listed for the product. I knew there had to be better pictures on there. I wanted to look at it so badly, but there would be no good explanation of why I had visited that website. My smartphone, which I had gotten as a gift at the start of middle school a couple of years ago, had come with a parental control app on it. My mom had been reluctant to have me get a phone in the first place. My older sister had been made to wait until the start of high school. Grace had been a bit salty at how I had been allowed to get a phone a lot earlier than her, though her attitude changed when she realized Mom and Dad were going to be monitoring it. I didn't like having the parenting software on my phone, but it was the compromise Dad had reached with Mom, which had been the only way she would have agreed to let me have a phone before high school. My sister – set to graduate high school in two weeks – had a lot more freedom with how she used her electronics. Maybe I could convince Mom and Dad to let off the restraints some when I started high school. I pulled out the most recent magazine from the drawer and flipped it open to a dogeared page marking the most recent pull-up advertisement. If Mom hadn't been aware that these pull-ups were a thing when my older sister had been a bedwetter, she surely was aware of it now. I knew for a fact that she read these magazines cover to cover. I wondered. How many nights in a row would I need to wet the bed before she was to go and purchase the pull-ups for me? Knock. Knock. Someone was tapping on my bedroom door. "Anybody home?" Grace called out, knocking again. I hastily pulled back the sheets on my bed slightly, tossed the magazine under them, and pulled the sheets back on top. It really wasn't unnecessary. Reading a magazine shouldn't be suspicious in any way, but I nonetheless felt compelled to hide it, as if having it in view when Grace opened the door would somehow give me away. I rolled my eyes. I wasn't going to play along with whatever stupid knock-knock joke Grace was trying to make. "Just come in," I yelled back. Graced opened the door just a couple inches, enough for her to stare at me through the hallway. There was no mistaking us for sisters. As I could tell from family photos, I was a spitting image of her when she was my age, from our red hair to green eyes to the expressions we made on our faces. "I'm walking over to wait for Jackson. Why don't you get started on your homework?" She didn't even wait for a reply; she just turned right around and headed back down the hallway. She didn't even bother to close the door behind her, probably because she expected that I'd be leaving my bedroom to get started on homework right away. I knew better than to be annoyed at her. If not for the reminder, I probably would have completely forgotten about my homework. My parents knew me too well. I was not allowed to do homework in the bedroom, especially not with the door shut. That my parents had good reasons for that decree didn't mean that I liked the rule. <><><> The homework sheet sat in front of me. I'd been seated at the kitchen table for ten minutes and hadn't yet written anything down with my pencil. Next to the paper was a glass of water – I'd only filled it halfway up this time – that I was periodically sipping once a minute. The water was not helping me concentrate. Each time I took another sip of water, all I could think of was what I was going to be doing tonight. I didn't need to pee yet. That I had a strong bladder was probably one of the reasons I hadn't taken after my sister's bedwetting. I heard the sound of the front door opening in the distance, followed by the sound of running feet and my sister's voice calling out after them. "Hey! You! Get back here. No shoes in the house." Jackson raced down the hallway, past the kitchen, and into the family room. Watching TV was his typical routine when he came home from school. Grace followed after him, an irritated look on her face as she went to get him to take off his shoes. I wished that I could say that the arrival of my siblings had interrupted my train of thought, but there hadn't even been one to begin with as I stared back down at the sheet of homework yet again. I tried to think back to what Mr. Thompson had been saying about how to start the process of solving these equations, but I had been far too distracted earlier this afternoon in class. I was so going to fail my math class next year. I was not looking forward to the start of high school. All my teachers kept stressing how our grades would actually really matter starting then. It felt like grades mattered plenty already, with how my parents reacted to my report cards at the end of each semester. But if getting my report card was what I would need to endure in order to begin my summer break, then that would be a fair tradeoff. There was the pitter-patter of running feet again, but this time, it wasn't quite as loud. Jackson sprinted past on his way to the front door. This time, his sneakers were in his hands rather than his feet. Grace came into the kitchen to get a snack for my brother. She stopped to peer over my shoulder. "Algebra, already?" She sounded a bit incredulous. "I don't think I started for you until next year." I explained how Mr. Thompson had been so evil as to have us working ahead, all in the name of having us ready for next year. "That's nonsense," Grace said. "Like anyone in your class is going to remember that after summer break." She went and grabbed a bowl from the cupboard and filled it with some trail mix that she carried over to Jackson. I wasn't hungry, but I realized it might be a good idea. Something salty to eat would help make me thirty enough to continue drinking more water. Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to procrastinate more on my homework. I was sorely tempted just to make up some numbers on the assignment. It wasn't like it would count for much, and I probably wasn't going to get that good of a grade in my math class, anyway. I found myself staring up at the wall while I munched on the salty snack, leaving my homework sheet ignored on the table. How long was it going to take for this plan to be successful? Would I have pull-ups by tomorrow night? That wasn't likely. I couldn't imagine a one-off event leading to that purchase. Two nights in a row? Maybe. But it was more likely than not that I was going to need to keep this up for a while. I was pretty sure I could keep my bedwetting secret from Jackson. He wasn't observant enough to notice anything that didn't directly impact him. And there was no way Mom and Dad would be telling him about my accidents. They hadn't even told me about my sister's bedwetting until that one time I had accidentally stumbled across her secret. There would be trouble if Jackson did find out. Sure. Mom and Dad would tell him not to say anything, but I couldn't trust him not to accidentally let it slip when my friends were around. Grace, on the other hand, was probably too observant. There would be a lot of laundry needing to be done before the pull-ups were purchased, and even if she didn't notice on the first night, she was bound to catch on. But I felt I could count on her discretion, given that she would know all too well what it was like to be dealing with that issue. We had actually never had a conversation before about her bedwetting. I had never been bold enough to bring it up with her. And it was one of those random topics that never had a natural chance to be asked about. She would have been sure to wonder why I was interested in it all of a sudden. "You're looking a little lost there." I snapped out of my daydream. Grace was standing next to the kitchen table again. "I'm fine," I lied. "I, um, I'm just working it out in my head." Grace stared down at the empty worksheet. "You don't know what you're doing, do you?" I sighed. "Not one bit." Grace pulled up a chair and sat down next to me. Her voice switched to an awful, gravelly Italian accent. "I can do that homework for you, but someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me." I stared at her blankly. What kind of drugs was my older sister on? Grace sighed and rolled her eyes as she leaned back in her chair. "The best movie quotes are wasted on the young." That still didn't make a lick of sense. "Look, I'll give you the answers," Grace said. "That wasn't fair to give you this hard of an assignment. It's nearly summer. It's time to relax, but there might be something I'll need you to help me out with later." "What's that?" I asked. "Don't know yet. But if there is, you need to do it for me, OK?" I looked at her a little suspiciously. Grace wasn't one to play pranks on me. At least, not on any day other than the first of April. But the fact that she wasn't willing or able to tell me was slightly ominous. On the other hand... I looked back down at all the still unanswered questions. It would be nice to get an "A+" for once. I reached to hand Grace the pencil, but she waved my hand away. "Oh no. You still need to write the answers down. Has to look like you actually did it." Further proof that Grace was the smart sister. She had a valid point. My handwriting was like chicken scratch compared to her elegant calligraphy. Grace walked me through each of the half-dozen Algebra questions. She didn't just spit out an answer for me right away, even though it was clear that this assignment was as easy for her as it would be for me to go back to doing my third-grade math homework. "Let me see your nails," Grace said. I held out my hand. She placed hers next to mine. The difference was night and day. The edges of my nails were rough and uneven, a result of how I often picked at them mindlessly during my classes or other times when I was bored. Her's were perfectly manicured, colored with lavender nail polish. "You need to stop picking at them like that," Grace said, taking a close look at my fingers. Embarrassed, I pulled my hand away from hers. "I can't help it," I muttered. Ten minutes later, we were all done. I couldn't wait to see the look on Mr. Thompson's face when he would have to hand the assignment back to me with an A+ written on it. "Thanks! You're the best," I said, as Grace got up from the table. I gave my sister a hug. "Not a problem," Grace said. "Just don't forget your side of the deal." All the water I had drunk was beginning to have its desired result. I made it to the bathroom with plenty of time to spare. I sat and peed for what felt like forever. I remembered reading something about how the color of your urine could determine if you were hydrated enough. Mine was practically clear from how much I'd had to drink. I wished more than anything that I was peeing into one of those pull-ups instead. I tried so hard to imagine what it would feel like. None of my attempts at makeshift diapers had ever been remotely successful, so I was left to ponder what that experience would be like. I hopefully wouldn't have to wonder about it for much longer. As long as I continued to drink up through my soccer game and the rest of the evening, I would be fully prepared to wet the bed tonight. Now I just needed to figure out what Grace wanted from me in exchange for doing my homework. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com

Thanks! I'm glad to slow down for a little bit, but there's another story I'll probably get drawn into writing soon. You're welcome! Thanks! I'm glad you're liking it. You're welcome, and thanks! Thanks! That was a crazy long time ago.

You're welcome! This flashback was loosely based on some experiences I had growing up, which I took some creative liberties in putting it into this story. We'll get some more flashbacks with Maddy as we see how her interest in diapers/pull-ups developed. Thanks! I've had a very hectic week finishing both AMMR and AMGR and getting this story outline enough to start writing.

It is sad, but it's also nice to get closure and have some different stories to read/write as well. I think the sentencing was fairly realistic. She deserved as much as she could get, I just couldn't envision a real-life scenario where she pleads guilty and gets more than 10 years. Thanks! That's the hard part about endings, especially with a long story like this. I felt it was best to wrap up the major storylines, but it's ok to leave some things to the imagination. Though I think from other stories I've read, it is better to error on ending too early than dragging it out too long. Thanks! It is a bit sad, but the good news is there are more things to read. Thanks, the mom was always going to get what was coming to her in the end. That final, brief repudiation of what she had done was a fitting way to allow Sarah to finally feel free of her rules. But also in the sense of making it clear to readers that there wasn't anything redeemable in the mother's behavior. My lips are sealed about the sequel. Yeah, I have thought about putting this and "Diapers Never Lie" on Amazon. I would have to do a pretty thorough re-write/edit first, but I'm still pretty hesitant. The main reason is that not everyone feels the same way about ABDL stories with minors as protagonists. I'm a little leery of getting in trouble with Amazon for that, especially given how ABDL stuff has gone down on other sites. As far as regular, adult ABDl stories go, I don't see that going away on Amazon. They are too big to be bullied into moderating content by anyone, and there is far, far more kink/explicit material out there on kindle.

Thanks! Thanks! It was hard for me as well. As I was writing these last few chapters, I was definitely thinking about how I could easily have continued this story for another 20-30 chapters, going into detail with Sarah's recovery and return to school. But at the same time, the story was always about her relationship with her mother and her eventual escape, so it made sense to end it when it did. And I have several other stories that I want to tell, so it is kind of nice to be digging into some new characters and plots. I nearly considered ten to be on the high end, especially considering a plea deal, but it's hard to tell. These types of sentences vary a lot in real life. Depends on a lot on the specific state laws and what judge does the sentencing. As far as back child support, that's an excellent question. Not something I get into in the sequel either. I would assume that if it is the case, it would be covered by the equity in the house. The Mom has lived there for 15 years, so, when you factor in housing values rising and the fact that she is halfway through the mortgage, selling that would net a sizeable amount of money. Thanks!

Have two new stories to announce, including the sequel. Will have another post this evening to share some thoughts on the story. All My Girlfriend's Rules This is a standalone sequel to "All My Mother's Rules" It's available on Amazon. Sarah’s story continues six years in the future. Now nearly finished with college, she must confront her incontinence and the lingering trauma of her past while embarking on an unconventional relationship that has the potential to radically alter everything she thinks she knows about herself. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVJQK85L ratings/reviews appreciated The Girl Who Wanted to Wear Diapers This is the new project I'm starting today. The first chapter is out already. The second will be out on Thursday. The one thing 12-year-old Madelyn desires most in the world is to wear diapers again, and she is prepared to do anything to make that wish come true, even if that means faking bedwetting to convince her parents to purchase pull-ups for her. The plan is simple. What could possibly go wrong?