Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[Little Sherri]

An interesting experiment, @oznl. I suspect I would have similarly inconvenient, but survivable results. Unless I got drunk and was sleeping on a friend's new couch. Then, all hell would break loose, undoubtedly, flooding of biblical proportions. 

The "12 Month Guide" appears to be a "12 Year Guide" for me as well, although I rather suspect that both of us are also poor candidates for hypnosis. There are people who believe in themselves more than we do, I guess is what I'm saying, and for them, we are still proclaiming the universe to be geocentric, whereas they know the truth. 

I was also thinking not too long ago about the interesting world that I've put myself in, where my wife and daughter going away for the weekend (other daughter remains away at school) is no longer a big deal. I even missed them a bit. Whereas in the before times, I would have been marking off the minutes until the car rolls off the end of the driveway, so that I could gleefully and unabashedly dress like a toddler or a geriatric, around the house. 

I still have some of those abysmal Depends pull-ups I used for doctors appointments a few times... I could easily conduct a similar experiment in one. An oopsie would merely cost me a pull-up that I'd rather burn for heat than wear, anyway, whereas a true lapse in continence would have me looking for the paper towels and the disinfectant spray. 

[oznl]

Sometime a little over a week ago, I think it was a Saturday, the odometer on my permanently nappy-clad life clocked over 5 years.    

Any chronologists reading may already have realised that my blog on this is already well more than 5 years old and so my life in nappies must also be more than 5 years.

This is true.  I went into nappies full time in late 2018 but this only lasted a little more than 2 months before I went back into grown up pants in order to spend a few weeks working integrated with a short holiday in the USA.  It proved to be my last ever annual month-long pilgrimage there for work as the world, and my world in particular was going to implode in 2020 but I didn’t know that then.  Furthermore, if I’d known then what I know now about how to wear nappies as a grown up, I wouldn’t have come out of them for that trip.

It was the first week of April 2019 that I put on a BetterDry in the Qantas Club lounge bathrooms at Los Angeles airport to stay in them ever since and that was a little over 5 years ago.  Five years would have seemed like an impossibly long time back then but here we are.

I think I was downstairs painting a garage at the time our planet completed its fifth orbit of our star whilst I peed in my pants.  I forgot to celebrate, or even to remember.  I think that’s emblematic for how things look like to me right now.   There isn’t much “nappy news” to see on a daily basis and frankly, it’s sometimes tough to think about what there might be left to write about them.

Frankly, I’ve found it to be a curiously flat milestone although this may well just be my general mood.  There’s a bit going on right now in the “rest of life” department.

So many other things have changed in my life over this 5 years that it’s hard to work out what, if any, changes are nappy-related.

I still think I’m happier in my nappy.  It’s hard to be sure because I’ve largely forgotten what it’s like NOT to be in them.  For sure the thought of taking them of does induce some low-level anxiety but who’s to say that this isn’t a natural anxiety in the face how accustomed I’ve become, both physiologically and mentally, to semi-automatically peeing myself.  There’s also some legitimate anxiety about keeping the marital bed dry.

Speaking of marital, I’m still married.  It’s not been without collateral cost and I think at 5 years, I need to accept that I have all the tolerance and support that I’m ever going to get (ie: not much).  She still hates my nappies which means she hates an aspect of me and that eats away at me like battery acid.  I thought I’d be more resilient to that but rust never sleeps.

Back on day zero I’d just assumed that if I ever lasted as impossibly long as 5 years in nappies, I’d be totally incontinent and the burden of choice would have been alleviated from me.  I would no longer have to CHOOSE nappies, I would simply NEED them. 

That’s proved to be not quite true.  What I have is nappy dependence.  It means that I need nappies for simple practicality.  I need to pee far too frequently and with far too much urgency to stray too far from a toilet.  This is now to the point where it’s too burdensome to remain dry whilst conducting something resembling a normal day.  My nappies let me operate like a normal person, or even on some levels a bit better.  It’s ME who can sit through the whole “Dune” movie but at the end of the day, I’m in nappies because I have made a weird choice.  I could retrain.

I have still not escaped the responsibilities of my strange choices.

Having said that, there’s been, quite recently, one or two glimmers of something that looks like incredibly mild incontinence.  There have been damp sneezes.

There’s the bedwetting thing but some part of me knows that paradoxically, this is some kind of deliberate behaviour, albeit “deliberate” at a subconscious level where logic and strategy don’t get much airtime.  The occasional decision to pee without waking up is coming from my brain, not my bladder though.  There’s probably some volition-worthy choice points I could make that would avoid my occasional bouts of night swimming.  I’m just not sure what they are.

So where to next?

Five years isn’t really that long, only half as long as Ivan Denisovich’s Gulag sentence in Solzhenitsyn’s novel and generally speaking, in my Gulag the catering is better.

Year 6 I suppose.  Perhaps something interesting will happen then.  “Interesting’ of course, may well be more in the context of the apocryphal Chinese curse than “engaging” but we’ll see.

[superabsorbantpolymer]

Congrats on the five years! I love the Solzhenitsyn reference, he's one of my favorite authors. 

[Little Sherri]

Congrats, @oznl! Some days, I don't know whether to thank you, or curse your name, but either way, I wouldn't be where I am today, if I hadn't started reading your story. You are proof that an intelligent person can arrive at an illogical solution to a preposterous problem, and somehow, end up as a mentor. 

On 4/18/2024 at 3:25 AM, oznl said:

Speaking of marital, I’m still married.  It’s not been without collateral cost and I think at 5 years, I need to accept that I have all the tolerance and support that I’m ever going to get (ie: not much).  She still hates my nappies which means she hates an aspect of me and that eats away at me like battery acid.  I thought I’d be more resilient to that but rust never sleeps.

This really spoke to me, and I think it gets to the heart of something I have danced around a bit on my thread... the political capital we're expending. Neither of us live in a van down by the river, yet anyway, so I guess that gets chalked up in the win column, but it's more of an armistice than a treaty. I may be a bit more circumspect about it, because of the reality in my marriage that there are aspects of her that I at least strongly disfavour, if not outright hate, but I have to live with them and work around them, because they are areas that she's not seeking growth in. Some of them are well calcified. I have to take the good with the bad. I know there are people here who would say "I would never settle, you're not being true to yourself, you only get one life...", but the things I am talking about can take a long time to become apparent. And in the meantime, we built a life together, intertwined finances, and made people. 

Those things can be undone, of course (with the exception of the people we made, well, not legally, anyway) - armies of people do that for a living - but I know a lot of people, including a lot of divorced people, and the grass over there isn't necessarily greener. There's one guy I knew who blew out a battleax of a woman who entrapped him while he was a virginal nerd, but in medical school, who now has a penchant for running marathons, and a Porsche, and his second wife is awesome - she knows what she's got and so does he. But I know a bunch of other people who are either divorced, or their spouses have died, and they've determined that middle-aged people on the dating scene, like unemployed people, are often there for a reason, and the good ones aren't unaffiliated for very long. 

So would it be better for me to strike out for greener pastures? While towing a trailer full of diapers behind me? I'd probably end up being extorted by a Russian dominatrix who's actually a man. 

The corollary to that being, I bring some attributes to the table - income stability, an ability to function as the family cruise director, socially, a really, really long fuse, interpersonally, and, I can fix stuff. Could she do better? Maybe. But I'd bet it would take more than a few rolls of the dice. SO, I'm me, and I do some things really well, some other things okay, some things not well at all, and, I have unfathomable underpants preferences, to someone from Planet Vanilla. I guess she can hit the reset button anytime she wants to, but so far, she hasn't.

However, for a couple blissfully in thrall to each other, as we were all told it was supposed to work, I could see macerating in pee-soaked nappies 24/7 as being like spilling a slutty vat of Pinot Noir in the middle of a soft white white goose down duvet. Whereas for me, it's more like spilling a slutty vat of Pinot Noir in the middle of a patchy lawn. 

[Stroller]

13 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

Congrats, @oznl! Some days, I don't know whether to thank you, or curse your name, but either way, I wouldn't be where I am today, if I hadn't started reading your story.

Well, yes.  I'd like to thank both of you for your company and support along the way.  I was going that way anyway, I'm sure, but it's made a big difference to know I wasn't doing it on my own, and that there were the two of you with a similar approach and family situation doing pretty much the same.  It's now 5 1/2 years since I went full-time during the day, and 4 years since I went into nappies full-time at night as well.  I still just love it, and I can't believe I've never regretted it for a minute.

[WBxx]

21 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

So would it be better for me to strike out for greener pastures? While towing a trailer full of diapers behind me? I'd probably end up being extorted by a Russian dominatrix who's actually a man. 

The corollary to that being, I bring some attributes to the table - income stability, an ability to function as the family cruise director, socially, a really, really long fuse, interpersonally, and, I can fix stuff. Could she do better? Maybe. But I'd bet it would take more than a few rolls of the dice. SO, I'm me, and I do some things really well, some other things okay, some things not well at all, and, I have unfathomable underpants preferences, to someone from Planet Vanilla. I guess she can hit the reset button anytime she wants to, but so far, she hasn't.

However, for a couple blissfully in thrall to each other, as we were all told it was supposed to work, I could see macerating in pee-soaked nappies 24/7 as being like spilling a slutty vat of Pinot Noir in the middle of a soft white white goose down duvet. Whereas for me, it's more like spilling a slutty vat of Pinot Noir in the middle of a patchy lawn. 

You’re a realist.  Not me, I’m convinced there’s a gorgeous, bed-wetting, nymphomaniac in my future.  Just have to keep my eyes open.

[Kawaharu]

15 hours ago, Stroller said:

Well, yes.  I'd like to thank both of you for your company and support along the way.  I was going that way anyway, I'm sure, but it's made a big difference to know I wasn't doing it on my own, and that there were the two of you with a similar approach and family situation doing pretty much the same.  It's now 5 1/2 years since I went full-time during the day, and 4 years since I went into nappies full-time at night as well.  I still just love it, and I can't believe I've never regretted it for a minute.

It’s been years and even decades for me as well. Ever since I was thrown back into the diaper and went diaper dependent, permanently. Now I’m in diapers and I don’t regret being thrown back into diapers.Never have and never will because I love being diapered and being an adult baby. I love that I’m in diapers and I know I’m never gonna be let out and be potty trained. I love being diapered and being an adult baby and love that I can be an adult baby and not have any cares or worries.

[oznl]

On 4/20/2024 at 3:54 AM, Little Sherri said:

So would it be better for me to strike out for greener pastures? While towing a trailer full of diapers behind me? I'd probably end up being extorted by a Russian dominatrix who's actually a man.

You've answered your own question:  Burning “good” in the pursuit of “better” is a risky strategy 🤣

In my more cynical moments (and my baseline level of cynicism is fairly high to being with) I suspect that the secret to a successful marriage is low expectations.

Whilst I myself know for a fact that I am a tungsten monument to perfection 🤣, I accept that my befuddled beloved may misconstrue her bedazzlement at my wonder as flaws on my part and yet she (largely) overlooks them.

For my part, I’ve learned to accept that there are aspects to her that will simply never, ever improve. 

For example, irrespective of lecture, learnings or lived experience, she has zero mechanical sympathy for any device that she uses and consequentially is continually breaking stuff (cue the standard disclaimers:  “It just fell off”, “It was like that when I found it” and “Why does everything bad that happens have to be my fault?”)

We put up with each other’s imperfections and look at the relationship in terms of its overall balance sheet.  If we’d expected an uninterrupted “hearts and flowers” frolic through a field of perpetual nirvana-like state of bliss the union would have carked it on the first rubbish bin night.

The nappies are a huge number in the "debit" column however.

16 hours ago, WBxx said:

You’re a realist.  Not me, I’m convinced there’s a gorgeous, bed-wetting, nymphomaniac in my future.  Just have to keep my eyes open.

She’ll trash a washing machine and a mattress every year and nymphomania sounds like a lot of work to me 🤣

On 4/20/2024 at 5:15 PM, Stroller said:

Well, yes.  I'd like to thank both of you for your company and support along the way.  I was going that way anyway, I'm sure, but it's made a big difference to know I wasn't doing it on my own, and that there were the two of you with a similar approach and family situation doing pretty much the same.  It's now 5 1/2 years since I went full-time during the day, and 4 years since I went into nappies full-time at night as well.  I still just love it, and I can't believe I've never regretted it for a minute.

Well it's a bit better if you're not the only idiot on the special bus to crazy town 🤣  I'm trying very hard not to regret it but my beloved has other ideas.

[oznl]

Here in our sympathetic echo chamber we can lose sight about how far outside societal mores we have strayed.

One of my beloved’s very last ageing ancestors, an antiquated aunty who was already slightly dotty when I first met her nearly forty years ago, had been, from the comfort of her very expensive and almost embarrassingly luxurious aged care facility, spending more and more time off with the pixies.

We were aware that her dementia had been proceeding at pace and my beloved’s phone calls with her had been becoming more and more surreal.

Recently, Aunty Dotty had decided that the aged residential facility in whose secure “high care” wing she now resided, was in fact a corporate headquarters and furthermore, she was its CEO. Apparently she’d been issuing managerial imperatives and unemployment threats against a range of staff.

Before however she could proceed with the restructure of her business and presumably laying off most of her workers, she got pneumonia (again) precipitating the care facility calling the “next of kin” after packing her off in an ambulance.

I listened to one half of the phone call from the aged care facility.  When it concluded, I was duly briefed: both on Aunty’s C-suite antics at her “corporation” and the sudden hove into view of unplanned medical interventions.

“She’s been admitted into hospital again but we’ve got a do-not-resuscitate directive now so if it comes to that, I’ll have to fly down for the funeral” my beloved informed me.

That seemed a little harsh.  It’s just a touch of pneumonia and as far as I could tell, she was otherwise very happy running her business.  It was her “employees” that I felt sorry for.

“Really?”  I said.  “I know she’s got a bit of dementia but she seems well enough.  I didn’t think she was THAT far gone?”

“Well it’s not just that.  She’s TOTALLY incontinent now” my beloved explained.

And that was that.  Clearly her life was no longer worth living, at least in the eyes of her family. In fact I know that her care facility is completely geared for nappy-clad residents and probably, for reasons of safety and convenience, prefer them that way.  Similarly, Aunty Dotty was troubled by her new padded underwear, after her own idiom, many around her would know.  This was NOT a lady who was afraid to complain.  I strongly suspected she hadn’t even noticed that going to the toilet had mysteriously become a thing of the past for her.

On the face of it, it’s just her next of kin that’s decided that things can’t go on.

I HAD to say something, despite my life experience telling me that saying something on the home front when silence is an option is rarely a great idea.

“Well I’ve been in nappies for more than 5 years now and so unsurprisingly, there’s a bit of incontinence creeping in there.  Does that mean I get a do-not-resuscitate label from you on the way past the admissions desk?”

“Don’t be ridiculous” she replied in a clipped voice. 

Unsurprising.  Also unsurprising was the immediate termination of discussion.  With a theatrical sigh, she pointedly picked up her smartphone and proceeded to ignore me with it for what would otherwise have been, the balance of our conversation. 

My mentioning of my nappies and my emerging dependence on them precipitated the usual reaction: a complete shutdown of engagement.  It was like somebody pushed the discussion off a cliff.

Sitting forlornly in my new and unexpected breakfast table solitude (along with sitting in my reasonably wet night nappy), my imagination wandered forward a couple of decades: into the enlightened age whereby voluntary medical euthanasia decisions had been extended to family members of the perpetually bewildered. 

Doddering around in my late autumnal years, in defiance of ample evidence for cognitive decline I would still escape from my beloved’s supervision to “fix” things around the house.  On day after a slip on a ladder, an expletive, a thud and sudden and unexpected ambulance ride, I found myself laying on a trolley in an ER, my beloved at my side.  Men in white coats clustered around.  They didn’t talk to me.  I’d been finding it hard to find the correct words inside my head to use sometimes and the fall hadn’t helped this at all.

“Mrs Oznl we’re sorry that Mr Oznl has suffered this fall but given his age and co-morbidities we’re wondering what your wishes are with respect to his medical interventions?”

“Oh don’t worry dear, I mean, he’s TOTALLY INCONTINENT!  I don’t think there’s really any point in him soldiering on.”

“We respect your choice Mrs Oznl.  It IS a nasty ankle sprain and he’d almost certainly need physiotherapy afterwards.  We’ll cancel the x-rays and just give him something for the pain until the termination team can get down here from upstairs.  We probably don’t even need to change him.  They won’t be long and he’ll probably just use his nappy again anyway during the procedure.  Most people do.”

“Well at least he got the TV aerial fixed before it came to this!”

Her position on this cannot be written off as a societal outlier.  Since the introduction of voluntary assisted dying laws for the terminally ill in my jurisdiction, many individuals have nominated nappy dependence as the trigger point for them “pulling the plug” so to speak.

The truncated conversation and the decision that triggered it writ large her thoughts on the matter: death before diapers. 

That’s what “normal” looks like apparently…

[NoIllDL]

@oznl Once again, I must say that I find your relationship with your wife fascinating.  And amusing.  And sad.  

[oznl]

4 hours ago, NoIllDL said:

@oznl Once again, I must say that I find your relationship with your wife fascinating.  And amusing.  And sad.  

Awww, I've said before, she gets a bad press here.  This is because if you drew Venn diagrams between my nappies, her, and positive feedback there just isn't ANY intersection of those sets.  There IS positive feedback from her.  It just doesn't relate to nappies.

I've still been impressed at her capacity to maintain her rage (or at least, a Mahatma Ghandi style position of passive aggression) for this long without either deciding to leave or giving in.