All My Mother's Rules (Ch. 70 & Epilogue - 2/13/24)

[MinnesotaWriter]

Chapter 32: The Gray Area

I stepped off the school bus Monday morning with a bit of trepidation. I had several reasons to be nervous today. Lisa and I were to give our history class presentation this afternoon. Our practice presentation on Saturday had gone without a hitch. I wasn’t worried about myself. Public speaking isn’t fun, but I know how to suck it up and get it over with. I remained concerned about how Lisa was going to handle it. This would be the first time she had ever gotten up and spoken in front of a class before, and there were plenty of things that could go wrong.

My next worry also had to do with Lisa. She knew I was wearing a pull-up, and there was no taking that back. The diaper genie was out of the bottle. I trusted that she wouldn’t intentionally reveal my secret to anyone else, but that didn’t preclude the possibility that she might accidentally reveal my bladder problems to someone. A slip of the tongue at the wrong time would spell disaster.

My habit of heading into the bathroom right as we got off the bus no longer raised any questions from Samantha and Desi, who had gotten adjusted to my new routines. I exchanged the pull-up with white stars on it for one of Emilia’s Minnie Mouse pull-ups, relieved at the knowledge that any accidents today would be completely hidden from Mom. Back at home, I had grabbed a half-dozen of my sister’s pull-ups, as much as I dared to take at one time, and had placed them at the bottom of my backpack. I intended to be much more careful from now on about always having extra pull-ups to fall back on so that I could ensure I would return home with my initial pull-ups kept dry.

My last worry was one that had started when I first woke up earlier this morning. My diaper was wet. Emilia’s diaper was not. I had to endure the effusive praise Mom lavished on my sister for having a single night of staying dry, only to see her look of disappointment as she checked my diaper next to find that it was soaking wet. I knew I wasn’t going to get any praise, but a few words of comfort or encouragement would have been nice. One night was way too soon to make a full assessment of whether the laxative was working, but what if it worked for Emilia and not for me? The thought of my sister getting toilet trained, being allowed to wear panties during the day with me still stuck in pull-ups was beyond horrifying.

I was determined to make it through the school day without any accidents. If I could at least pull that off, then I could deal with the nighttime wetting later. Samantha and Desi were both waiting for me in the hallway as I left the restroom. Occasionally, they might feel the need to join me and empty their bladders before school began, but that wasn’t a common need for teenagers whose bladders functioned normally. The bus route had run ahead of schedule today, so we had some time to kill before our first class was to begin.

“You guys going to be good for the presentation today?” I asked, remembering how they had been assigned to work with another random student since Lisa had managed to get her uncle to put her in a group with me instead.

Samantha and Desi exchanged a nervous glance at each other. Not a promising sign. I wondered what exactly had transpired during their work on the presentation with Jonathan, their partner for the project.

“Oh, we’re good,” Desi said. “But that isn’t the right question to ask.”

“What’s the right question, then?”

“You need to ask how our Jonathan was going to do,” Samantha said.

“Is it that bad?”

“It was that bad,” Samantha answered.

“Really?”

“Like, if you have the chance to grab the bathroom pass and get out during our turn, you totally should do it,” Desi said.

I didn’t pester my friends any further about how bad the preparation for their presentation must have been. What’s the worst that it could be? Maybe their partner didn’t do any work, but Lisa and I had managed it all ourselves with just the two of us.

---

The pull-up I had changed into prior to the start of my first class remained dry as I walked alongside Samantha and Desi toward the cafeteria. I’d gotten through my first several classes without any accidents. I hadn’t needed to rush out of the room, hall-pass in hand, on a well-memorized route to the nearest available toilet. Maybe the laxative had worked? Was this just a placebo effect? Or was it just my imagination that my toileting situation was improving? After all, I had gone through periods before where I would have been certain that this situation was on the up and up.

My friends got in line to get whatever garbage was on the school menu today while I searched for somewhere for us to sit. Mom had put together a lunch for me to take to school as usual. I kept a close eye out for a spot that would be suitable for the four of us. Our lunchtime trio had expanded to four as Lisa had taken to joining us on a regular basis. It turned out that she had already staked out a four-person table near a window, and I took a seat alongside her.

It’s amazing how, when you don’t know something exists, that you aren’t able to notice it at all. But, as soon as someone tells you it was there, the signs – real or imagined – begin to appear so obvious that you couldn’t believe that you missed them in the first place.

Lisa was dressed modestly as usually. It wasn’t as if other girls at the high school didn’t wear dresses on occasion, but Lisa was the only person I could recall who I had never seen wearing a different outfit. She had confided in me the other day that she longed to know what it would feel like to come to school wearing short-shorts or leggings.

The way she dressed had stood out to me before, though I hadn’t given much thought as to the possible reasons behind what she chose to wear. Of course, I knew now that the outfit was chosen to conceal the bulkier pull-up she chose to wear. I suppose I would have difficulty wearing jeans myself I had on that brand of pull-up myself.

Lisa had a mouth-full of food right as I was about to sit down, so she just gave me a small nod instead to acknowledge my presence. We were in an emptier part of the cafeteria, and no one was seated at any of the tables closest to us. It would fill up soon, with students at nearly every seat. The lunch period had only just started and most of the students were standing in a winding line waiting to get served. It felt as though whoever designed the school and only setup the exact amount of seating in the cafeteria with no extra tables whatsoever.

Desi had welcomed Lisa into our group with open arms. Samantha hadn’t said anything negative about the situation, but she still mostly avoided directly engaging in conversation with Lisa, not that this was a difficult task as Lisa became much less talkative in situations where it wasn’t a one-on-one conversation. In all our years together, no one else had ever broken through into our friend group. It wasn’t as if we didn’t have friends outside of each other, but when we did things as a group, it had always ever just been the three of us.

Lisa always dressed so modestly that there was no way anyone would discern that she had a pull-up on unless they knew about it beforehand. Yet I could have sworn I had heard the faintest of rustling coming from the pull-up as Lisa shifted slightly in her chair. I hoped it was only my imagination. The idea that my – and her – pull-ups were more noticeable that I had previously thought was discomforting.

We were alone enough that we could have talked briefly about what had transpired between us over the weekend. The echoes of a hundred different conversations taking place in the cafeteria would conceal our whispers. I had more questions. I wondered about the Kegel exercises. And I almost wanted to tell her about the laxatives. Lisa hadn’t mentioned that as something she had tried before, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to raise the subject. Not because I thought someone else would overhear it, but because of the other questions that were bound to come up. I didn’t want to talk about Mom’s rules. About spending a day in the diaper. About Emilia’s potty-training struggles. About the sippy-cup I had been forced to drink orange juice out of for breakfast. The worry that permeated my thoughts was difficult to name. It wasn’t shame or fear of being judged. Lisa had grown up only knowing black and white: the unrelenting cruelty of her parents contrasted with the unwavering acceptance of her aunt and uncle. Mom wasn’t either of those. The implication was not that Mom doesn’t love me, but it was a love that more often drove her to correct, not comfort. In knowing what Lisa’s ultimate reaction had been to her own mother, I hesitated to describe how Mom chose to discipline me and my sister. I wasn’t afraid of Lisa or afraid that she might take it upon herself to do anything. I worried that she lacked the context to understand what I was going through, and that this lack of understanding might push us apart. I was unhappy with Mom, but I loved her. I at times despised the rules I had to follow but begrudgingly acknowledged their necessity.

So those things went unsaid between us. I wondered if the topic was on Lisa’s mind as well. In a matter of minutes, the seats around us began to fill up, leaving our ensuing conversation to topics safe for general consumption.

---

The worse part of class presentation days was having to listen to other students as they got up to the front of the room to speak. They almost always seemed to fall into one of two categories. Some presentations were better than yours. The PowerPoint designs more detailed and polished. Those presentations made you wish you had put more work into your project. Made you embarrassed at the thought of pulling up your own slides and how simple they would look in comparison.

Then there was the other category. This one didn’t have as many students in it, but it provided a necessary component of relief for everyone else involved. These were, of course, the students who weren’t doing nearly as good a job as you were. Maybe they hadn’t done any prep other than a few hasty hours the night before. Maybe they simply had a fear of public speaking and stammered through everything they had to say. Either way, they served a valuable purpose of easing the tension in the room. At least your presentation wasn’t going to be remembered as being the worst one.

When Mr. Higgins called our names about half-way through the period, I stood up from my desk first and let Lisa follow me to the front of the classroom. I plugged a USB flash drive containing the presentation into Mr. Higgs laptop and loaded the first of the PowerPoint slides to be displayed by the projector. We had split the five-minute presentation into five one-minute chunks of time, with each of us alternative back and forth between those segments. I had offered to take the first, middle, and ending parts, so that Lisa could be more comfortable as we went back and forth through the presentation.

The students whose presentations had proceeded ours looked bored. Everyone who hadn’t gone yet showed signs of various degrees of anxiety. Pencils slowly twirled in hands. Fingers tapped aimlessly and quietly on the wood topped desks. A couple of students were determinedly reviewing their note cards.

The motion of getting up and walking to the front of the class hadn’t been good on my bladder. I suppose it felt that the class was done, and it was time for it to be let loose in the restroom. The problem was that there was still another twenty minutes left in the period. And I was standing in front of a couple dozen of my bored or nervous classmates, not alone by myself in a bathroom stall. I hated how something as simple as getting up and walking could throw my body all out of sync.

I got the presentation started without a hitch. I kept my gaze focused on a spot on the wall on the back of the room, avoiding eye contact with any of my classmates. I had all three of my sections mostly memorized, though I took a glance or two back at the slide being projected on the whiteboard to make sure I was staying on track. I thought perhaps that standing still would allow the urges coming from my bladder to relent, but my bladder had interpreted my body’s movement as a signal that I had trekked to the bathroom next to the classroom, not to the front of the class.

I had finished the first two of the three sections I was doing for the presentation, stepping to the side of the podium for Lisa to take her final turn. Lisa was doing a manageable job with her part of the presentation on George H.W. Bush, with the exception of a couple of brief stutters that were barely noticeable.

The fight to keep myself from performing a twitching potty-dance in front of all my classmates was becoming too difficult to ignore. I reached my hand out to the podium, gripping it tightly to steady myself. I let myself pee, trying to keep the stream of urine as slow and limited as possible. I took a couple of small breaths in an attempt to keep the discomfort in my pants from showing on my face. If there was one time I couldn’t have a pull-up fail on me, this was it. It didn’t fail. I couldn’t know that directly, as I didn’t dare take a glance down at my pants while the whole class was staring at me, but enough people were watching that there would have been a visible reaction should any sudden wet spots have formed on my jeans.

With the urge to pee out of the way, I wrapped up the remaining portion with ease. Lisa had wisely counseled me to leave the “pull-out game” quip out of the presentation.

After we returned to our seats in the back of the classroom, there wasn’t much point in grabbing the bathroom pass to avoid the supposed disaster that my friends predicted to occur during their turn to give their presentation. I ended up being glad that I had passed on grabbing it, as a few minutes later Lisa got out of her seat to take the bathroom pass, having apparently done a better job at avoiding an accident during this class period than I had.

It turned out that my friend’s dire predictions about the state of their group presentation had been a tad melodramatic. Was Jonathan prepared? Not at all, he stuttered his way through an awkward two minutes that ended in a ten second pause of silence before Samantha took over and got the presentation back on track.

---

When the history class ended, I had gone over to the nearest bathroom right away, intent on changing into a new outfit for cheerleading practice in privacy, so that I could keep a new, dry, pull-up on during it. After I had finished pulling up my workout shorts, with the waistband tied as snug as possible to prevent them from coming down and exposing the pull-up, I began to hear a commotion coming from out in the hallway. Some yelling. Some laughter. The sound of racing footsteps of students headed in unison toward the source of whatever was going on.

Using cold water, I washed my hands quicker than the twenty seconds you are supposed to take, not bothering to try to get the finicky sink to spout out warm water. One paper towel later, my hands were mostly dry as I stepped out into the hallway with my palms rubbing against my shorts to get the remaining moisture off of them.

It turned out that the clamor wasn’t coming from right outside the bathrooms, but from the far end of the hallway, and I gasped when I turned to see what was happening. Lisa was bent down on the floor on her hands and knees, scrambling to pick up a collection of books and school supplies that had scattered across the hallway near her locker. Her dress was hanging down by her feet as she frantically grabbed books and haphazardly attempted to stuff them into her wide-open backpack. That wasn’t the worst of it.

Claire and two of her senior friends stood around Lisa like three points on a triangle. They were tossing an object back and forth over her head, as if they were playing a game of hot potato or monkey in the middle.

After giving my shorts a quick look over and tug to ensure that my pull-up remained discreet, I took off running down the hallway toward Lisa. As I got closer, I had to zig zag and squeeze between other students as a growing crowd had assembled, gawking at the scene. A couple of the students had their phones out, plainly recording the escalating situation, but no one had stepped forward to diffuse it.

It wasn’t until I got closer that I realized what Claire and her friends were holding. It was one of Lisa’s white, unused pull-ups. Had it spilled out from the backpack by accident, or had they intentionally emptied it onto the floor only to discover the pull-up? I wouldn’t have put it past Claire to have discovered Lisa’s pull-ups and to have exposed them on purpose. She was a snoopy bitch.

I had reached the edge of the crowd when Claire snuck up behind Lisa before I had a chance to do anything. Claire grabbed the bottom of Lisa’s skirt and yanked it upward over her head, exposing a frilly white pull-up with an unmistakable wet spot on it.

“Uh oh, this baby needs her diapie changed,” said Claire, in a sneering, sing-song voice.

Her lackeys echoed the taunt loudly in a chant that carried across the hallway and resulted in a wave of laughter from the students close enough to have gotten a view of Lisa’s pull-ups.

“Baby needs her diapie changed. Baby needs her diapie changed.”

Lisa struggled with the dress for a few seconds before getting it back into a position where it concealed the pull-up. With the last of her books in her bag, she zipped the backpack halfway and stood up, leaving a smattering of pens and pencils behind on the floor. The sense of humiliation was evident in her tear-crossed face as she stood up, snatching the pull-up out of Claire’s hand.

I couldn’t believe Claire had stooped so low, but then I remembered how she had nearly outed me a while back in the locker room after cheerleading practice. That sent a chill down my spine. This could just as easily have been me.

I stepped forward toward Lisa. I was at a loss for words. I wanted to reach out and grab her hand and take her down the hallway to somewhere private. As I reached out to her, Lisa gave me a firm shove to the shoulder, pushing me out of the way, before taking off running down the hallway as onlookers stepped aside to clear a path for her. The pull-up was still in her hand.

[Arendeth]

Thanks for the chapter, looks like the pullups being taken from the younger sister sister is going to likely be found out.

[BabySofia]

Poor Lisa... I hope someone turns them in and these bullies get what they deserve...

[AdultInnocence]

For a stunt like that Claire should be kicked from the cheer-leading team as it would go against school rules and they wouldn't want to associate a bully as being part of the team.

Feel sorry for Lisa and I just hope that Sarah can do something to help her.

[Sarah Penguin]

1 hour ago, AdultInnocence said:

For a stunt like that Claire should be kicked from the cheer-leading team as it would go against school rules and they wouldn't want to associate a bully as being part of the team.

Feel sorry for Lisa and I just hope that Sarah can do something to help her.

Assuming the teachers believe the accusation. 

[kerry]

2 hours ago, Sarah Penguin said:

Assuming the teachers believe the accusation.

Considering that Lisa is a teacher's kid, I'd say it's likely they would.

[Sarah Penguin]

6 hours ago, kerry said:

Considering that Lisa is a teacher's kid, I'd say it's likely they would.

My teacher parents only believed me about 'peer' bullying and ostracism if it   happened directly in front of them. If something happened elsewhere and someone did something and blamed me for it when it came around to taking my word over anyone else they automatically dismissed my defenses, usually without letting me state them or objections at being framed and i'd get  end up  getting  spanked at a minimum.  Never allowed to get mad at insults and though and god forbid shout at someone and embarrass them by making a scene. Which dad would be doing then by shouting too.  Though I wasn't in any of their classes.

[Bonsai]

So I guess that Lisa suspects Sarah to be the one who outed her.

[WBDaddy]

19 minutes ago, Bonsai said:

So I guess that Lisa suspects Sarah to be the one who outed her.

Alternate theory:

Lisa recognizes the type of person Claire is, and in order to prevent Sarah from being outed as well, she pushes her away, to keep Claire from becoming more "interested" in Sarah and what sort of connection she might have with Lisa. 

[Little Sherri]

8 hours ago, Sarah Penguin said:

If something happened elsewhere and someone did something and blamed me for it

This was pretty much my experience; my parents thought that being bullied was 'part of growing up', or, that whatever was happening, we probably did something to deserve it. In the end, I think that it made me tougher, because I knew that I had to solve my own problems - there would be no point going home and whining to my parents about it. So, my immediate reaction to what happened to Lisa was that Claire needed a quick punch to the throat, either from Sarah, or from Lisa herself. That said, my wife and I take a very different approach with our daughters; we may not be able to solve all of their problems, and there are some things that kids need to learn to work out on their own, but, we are always willing to listen, and we don't immediately turn blame back around onto them. 

[Guilend]

18 minutes ago, Little Sherri said:

This was pretty much my experience; my parents thought that being bullied was 'part of growing up', or, that whatever was happening, we probably did something to deserve it. In the end, I think that it made me tougher, because I knew that I had to solve my own problems - there would be no point going home and whining to my parents about it. So, my immediate reaction to what happened to Lisa was that Claire needed a quick punch to the throat, either from Sarah, or from Lisa herself. That said, my wife and I take a very different approach with our daughters; we may not be able to solve all of their problems, and there are some things that kids need to learn to work out on their own, but, we are always willing to listen, and we don't immediately turn blame back around onto them. 

I told my son after he got suspended from kindergarten for hitting a kid that was bullying him physically that if the teachers don't put a stop to hit and the kid put his hands on him first without being provoked by him then by all means punch him and I'll back him up 100% 

[Little Sherri]

13 minutes ago, Guilend said:

I told my son after he got suspended from kindergarten for hitting a kid that was bullying him physically that if the teachers don't put a stop to hit and the kid put his hands on him first without being provoked by him then by all means punch him and I'll back him up 100% 

Unfortunately, these days, with zero tolerance policies, it doesn't matter who the aggressor was, often times, both kids just get suspended right off the bat. But, that said, my experience has been this: so far, 100% of the time, the first time I pushed (or punched) back, was the last time I had any issue with whoever decided to try their luck with me. Bullies look for soft targets; they are usually not interested in risking humiliation or personal injury in front of a crowd. Oftentimes, all I had to say was "You want a fight? Okay. You got one.", and they'd make up some excuse and walk away. I don't encourage my kids to start fights, but I do tell them not to be a soft target - if they need to push back, they have my support. But I have daughters, so it's way more psychological with them than it was with boys. As is the case in @MinnesotaWriter's story!

[WBDaddy]

6 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

Unfortunately, these days, with zero tolerance policies, it doesn't matter who the aggressor was, often times, both kids just get suspended right off the bat. 

I was in middle school in the 80's, and it was like that back then.  The school isn't interested in justice, they're about not getting sued, so if you fight, you get suspended, period. 

[Diapeered]

Well what interests me for this story that the school allowed Lisa's uncle to be her teacher for history since I would think that a school would avoid putting a student in the same class as a relative unless they were the only one teaching said subject to avoid accusations of favortism or other such things.

Well with the laxative subject it may help but on the other side it could possibly make her urination stronger compared to before so there might be a chance that Sarah's sisters pull ups wouldn't be able to hold her accidents anymore compared to before.

With Emilia having improvement with her potty training and Sarah still having night time accidents her mother might thing that the laxatives didn't work for sarah and do it again while her sister doesn't need a repeat at least for a while, the other worry for sarah would be if her sister finishes her potty training before she can fix her problem so she would either have to sabotage her own sisters potty training orfind out some other way to  hide her accidents

[AdultInnocence]

On 2/8/2021 at 10:14 PM, Sarah Penguin said:

Assuming the teachers believe the accusation. 

Plus there were plenty of phones out, so if any one of them shared it, then a teacher could run across it.

[Diapeered]

3 hours ago, AdultInnocence said:

Plus there were plenty of phones out, so if any one of them shared it, then a teacher could run across it.

That's true since people would have made videos of it they would probably show it to their friends or send it to their friends and a teacher could possibly come across it, I really dislike mob mentality someone is being bullied lets not help them lets just watch and record what is happening.

[MinnesotaWriter]

I do try to respond to most comments. But probably shouldn't have waited until there were 15 of them to do it all at once, oops..

On 2/8/2021 at 7:46 PM, Arendeth said:

Thanks for the chapter, looks like the pullups being taken from the younger sister sister is going to likely be found out.

You're welcome! We'll have to see how that plays out.

On 2/8/2021 at 8:06 PM, BabySofia said:

Poor Lisa... I hope someone turns them in and these bullies get what they deserve...

Yeah, Claire certainly has been nothing but trouble.

On 2/8/2021 at 9:13 PM, AdultInnocence said:

For a stunt like that Claire should be kicked from the cheer-leading team as it would go against school rules and they wouldn't want to associate a bully as being part of the team.

Feel sorry for Lisa and I just hope that Sarah can do something to help her.

Yeah, I haven't been particularly nice to Lisa lately. 

On 2/8/2021 at 10:14 PM, Sarah Penguin said:

Assuming the teachers believe the accusation. 

That would be important.

On 2/9/2021 at 12:26 AM, kerry said:

Considering that Lisa is a teacher's kid, I'd say it's likely they would.

An important, but underrated factor. Claire might not even have known that, too. Sarah didn't find out the connection until Mr. Higgins told her.

On 2/9/2021 at 6:43 AM, Sarah Penguin said:

My teacher parents only believed me about 'peer' bullying and ostracism if it   happened directly in front of them. If something happened elsewhere and someone did something and blamed me for it when it came around to taking my word over anyone else they automatically dismissed my defenses, usually without letting me state them or objections at being framed and i'd get  end up  getting  spanked at a minimum.  Never allowed to get mad at insults and though and god forbid shout at someone and embarrass them by making a scene. Which dad would be doing then by shouting too.  Though I wasn't in any of their classes.

That is rather sad. That said, it is interesting to see all the recollections of how bullying was handled in their times.

On 2/9/2021 at 10:14 AM, Bonsai said:

So I guess that Lisa suspects Sarah to be the one who outed her.

That would be one theory.

On 2/9/2021 at 10:27 AM, WBDaddy said:

Alternate theory:

Lisa recognizes the type of person Claire is, and in order to prevent Sarah from being outed as well, she pushes her away, to keep Claire from becoming more "interested" in Sarah and what sort of connection she might have with Lisa. 

That would be another theory.

On 2/9/2021 at 3:08 PM, Little Sherri said:

This was pretty much my experience; my parents thought that being bullied was 'part of growing up', or, that whatever was happening, we probably did something to deserve it. In the end, I think that it made me tougher, because I knew that I had to solve my own problems - there would be no point going home and whining to my parents about it. So, my immediate reaction to what happened to Lisa was that Claire needed a quick punch to the throat, either from Sarah, or from Lisa herself. That said, my wife and I take a very different approach with our daughters; we may not be able to solve all of their problems, and there are some things that kids need to learn to work out on their own, but, we are always willing to listen, and we don't immediately turn blame back around onto them. 

Well, probably best that an altercation didn't break out right there between Sarah and Claire, especially since a bunch of students were catching it on video.

On 2/9/2021 at 3:20 PM, Guilend said:

I told my son after he got suspended from kindergarten for hitting a kid that was bullying him physically that if the teachers don't put a stop to hit and the kid put his hands on him first without being provoked by him then by all means punch him and I'll back him up 100% 

Kindergarten seems a little young to be getting suspensions. Feels like a time-out in the corner would be more deserving. 

On 2/9/2021 at 3:33 PM, Little Sherri said:

Unfortunately, these days, with zero tolerance policies, it doesn't matter who the aggressor was, often times, both kids just get suspended right off the bat. But, that said, my experience has been this: so far, 100% of the time, the first time I pushed (or punched) back, was the last time I had any issue with whoever decided to try their luck with me. Bullies look for soft targets; they are usually not interested in risking humiliation or personal injury in front of a crowd. Oftentimes, all I had to say was "You want a fight? Okay. You got one.", and they'd make up some excuse and walk away. I don't encourage my kids to start fights, but I do tell them not to be a soft target - if they need to push back, they have my support. But I have daughters, so it's way more psychological with them than it was with boys. As is the case in @MinnesotaWriter's story!

It's just like sports games. It's not about which player punched the other ones first. It's about who the refs see doing the punching (hint: normally it is the one retaliating).

On 2/9/2021 at 10:02 PM, WBDaddy said:

I was in middle school in the 80's, and it was like that back then.  The school isn't interested in justice, they're about not getting sued, so if you fight, you get suspended, period. 

Yeah, schools don't do a good job when they try to take on the role of the justice system (whether for middle school fights or more serious things).

On 2/9/2021 at 10:26 PM, Diapeered said:

Well what interests me for this story that the school allowed Lisa's uncle to be her teacher for history since I would think that a school would avoid putting a student in the same class as a relative unless they were the only one teaching said subject to avoid accusations of favortism or other such things.

Well with the laxative subject it may help but on the other side it could possibly make her urination stronger compared to before so there might be a chance that Sarah's sisters pull ups wouldn't be able to hold her accidents anymore compared to before.

With Emilia having improvement with her potty training and Sarah still having night time accidents her mother might thing that the laxatives didn't work for sarah and do it again while her sister doesn't need a repeat at least for a while, the other worry for sarah would be if her sister finishes her potty training before she can fix her problem so she would either have to sabotage her own sisters potty training orfind out some other way to  hide her accidents

I think the most interesting dynamic going forward will be between Emilia and Sarah's potty training and how their mother handles that.

On 2/10/2021 at 11:13 AM, AdultInnocence said:

Plus there were plenty of phones out, so if any one of them shared it, then a teacher could run across it.

People documenting the evidence of their own crimes? Now where did I see that happen most recently in the news ?

On 2/10/2021 at 3:09 PM, Diapeered said:

That's true since people would have made videos of it they would probably show it to their friends or send it to their friends and a teacher could possibly come across it, I really dislike mob mentality someone is being bullied lets not help them lets just watch and record what is happening.

We'll have to see what comes of those videos.

[AdultInnocence]

17 hours ago, MinnesotaWriter said:

People documenting the evidence of their own crimes? Now where did I see that happen most recently in the news ?

lol I get the reference!

Thanks for taking the time to respond to all of us! I was really hoping it was a new chapter. I now it still says 32 but I couldn't remember which chapter was last haha.

[MinnesotaWriter]

Chapter 33: M.A.D.

“You knew,” Samantha said, looking pointedly at me from across the aisle as I took a seat next to Desi on the bus.

“I what?”

I knew exactly what Samantha was suggesting that I knew. I just didn’t need her to know that. And I certainly didn’t care to acknowledge it.

The whole school must know about Lisa wearing pull-ups by now. The hallway had been crowded with onlookers yesterday afternoon when Claire had dumped the contents of Lisa’s backpack onto the hallway floor to discover one of Lisa’s extra pull-ups. Everyone watching the incident undoubtedly would have shared the gossip with their friends, who would then share it further. And that’s how a rumor – or in this case an actual salacious fact – spreads throughout a high school in less than a single day.

This wasn’t close to the most scandalous thing that a student had done this school year. It’s a high school; shit happens. But it might take top prize for the strangest or weirdest. And that meant basically everyone already knew about it. And, if they didn’t know about it, they would know about it by the end of the day. My anxiousness over the upcoming school day eclipsed by far anything I had felt yesterday. A class presentation seemed like amateur hour compared to this.

Samantha leaned in toward me, keeping her voice down. I hoped no one on the bus was paying close attention to our conversation. I’m sure some must have noticed how I had been hanging out with Lisa more frequently. The conclusions they might arrive at should they attempt to connect the dots would probably not be generous to me.

“You knew that Lisa wears diapers.”

“Pull-ups,” I said, correcting her before realizing that in doing so, I had essentially supplied an affirmative answer to her question. “That’s what she had on. Not a diaper.”

“Pull-ups, diapers, whatever,” Samantha said. “My point was that you knew she was wearing them.”

To someone who is incontinent, the distinguishment between those two particular garments is important, as Lisa had made clear to me on Saturday and as I knew full well from my own experience. To anyone not in that world, I suppose it doesn’t make any lick of a difference.

“Yeah, so?

I didn’t think Lisa would say anything about my pull-ups, but when each of us had been keeping the other’s secret, I had felt safer knowing that she wouldn’t reveal my secret as I could in turn reveal hers, and vice versa.

As soon as I had arrived home from cheerleading practice, I had constantly been turning on Fortnite on my computer. Not to play. I only went to the game’s lobby and checked my friends list to see if Lisa was online too. I had even dared to turn on my computer after Emilia had begun snoring lightly after being put to bed. But each time, Lisa’s account status had indicated it had been away since Sunday, and she hadn’t replied to the numerous messages I had sent her way.

“How long have you known?”

I would have felt guilty gossiping about Lisa under any circumstances, but in this case, given that I was recently afflicted with the same bladder problems as her, any discussion about Lisa was going to be awkward to manage without also giving myself away. I wanted to escape Samantha’s badgering questions in a way that didn’t implicate the pull-up under my jeans that suddenly felt much more conspicuous. A lie is better with a little bit of truth mixed in between.

“I was at her house on Saturday. We were prepping for the presentation. I accidentally found out, and she made me promise not to say anything about it.”

“Like, does she actually use them?”

What is it with people asking if someone uses a diaper or pull-up? And why in the world would you wear one in the first place if there wasn’t a need to use it?

“No, she just wears them for the fun of it,” I said, snapping back in annoyance at Samantha’s question.

That remark produced a reaction I hadn’t expected from Samantha. She looked extremely taken aback by my sarcasm. Her face flush red with embarrassment. Good. She should feel that way for digging into a situation that was none of her business.

“There’s a video,” Desi said, joining in the conversation at last. “It. Um. The diaper, sorry, pull-up, looks like it has been used.”

“Wait, someone posted a video of Lisa online?”

“It wasn’t up for that long. It got taken down pretty quickly.”

Well, that gave Samantha an answer to her question, at least. I wondered how many students at the school had gotten a chance to see the video before it was taken down. I hoped that it wasn’t too many.

“Anyway,” I said, desperate for something, anything, to help me steer the conversation in a different direction. “We could agree that Claire is a bitch.”

“Of course,” said Samantha and Desi in unison.

Claire had tormented me relentlessly during yesterday’s cheerleading practice. The fact that I had been hanging out with Lisa more and more hadn’t escaped her attention. Claire hadn’t gone so far as to imply that I also wore pull-ups, but she intended to make it clear that my close association with someone who did was to be a mark of shame for me as well.

This was all my fault. Claire couldn’t get back at me because of Coach Addison’s edict that any further conflict between us would result in us both being removed from the team. The fight that had occurred in the locker room when Claire had attempted and failed to expose my own pull-up wearing had resulted in an uneasy truce between the two of us. We had words for each other now and then, but only when Coach Addison was out of earshot, and neither of us had been reckless enough to let it evolve into anything greater than that.

That left Lisa, who Claire probably wouldn’t have given two shits about, except for the fact that it had been Lisa who I had been protecting from Claire’s bullying when I had struck that bitch in the face in the cafeteria during lunch period. Claire wasn’t allowed to get back at me, so she had struck out at Lisa instead.

“So, Lisa is incontinent then?” Samantha asked, bringing the topic right back to Lisa again.

I paused at the question. That wasn’t even a word that I had known prior to my wetting accidents beginning. I wasn’t sure how it had ended up in Samantha’s vocabulary, but I wasn’t going to risk revealing that I was aware of what that word meant.

“Incontinent? What does that mean?”

“You know. Like not being able to control your bladder.”

There wasn’t any answer to that, other than to state the obvious.

“I guess so.”

“I thought that was only an old people thing,” Desi said. “Or, you know, if you pop out a bunch of babies.”

“Ewe,” I said. That was a mental image I didn’t want to have this morning.

The conversation took a brief pause. I guess Samantha had finally run out of questions about Lisa. And neither myself nor Desi wanted to continue with the current topic of conversation.

“So, anyway,” Samantha said, as I breathed a quiet sigh of relief that she appeared to be taking the conversion in a different direction at last. “We need to have another sleepover.”

“Absolutely!” Desi said, chiming in before I could attempt to pour some cold water on that proposition.

A little over a month ago, my answer would have mirrored Desi’s. With the return of my bedwetting, as much as I wanted to hang out with my friends, there wasn’t any way I was going to risk falling asleep at Samantha’s house. But I realized also that the bedwetting wasn’t my only source of hesitation about a sleepover. I thought back to the game of Truth or Dare that we had played. It had started as your standard sleepover affair, before spiraling out of control to the point that Samantha ended up successfully daring Desi to urinate in one of her brother’s pull-ups. That was a level of awkwardness I didn’t care to repeat.

“For sure, I’ll have to ask Mom,” I said. “She wasn’t too thrilled about the last one, so I’m not sure she’ll say yes.”

There was absolutely no way at all that I was going to pose that question to Mom. She hadn’t let me attend sleepovers in my previous bedwetting phase and I couldn’t imagine that her response would be any different now.

“Well, if we can’t do a sleepover, we could at least hang out for a day on a weekend,” Desi offered.

It wasn’t until after we had gotten off the bus that I realized we had overlooked an important question about our next get together. Would Lisa be invited?

---

Lisa did not join us for lunch that day. I thoroughly scoured the cafeteria, thinking she perhaps had been too ashamed to come sit with us and had instead tucked herself away in some obscure corner of the room. She was nowhere to be found. I had made a point to stop by her locker several times as well, but again didn’t find any sign of her.

I expected that she had likely skipped school today, though how she managed to do get away with that with an uncle as a teacher was surprising. Maybe Mr. Higgins had agreed to say that it would be OK. No one I had talked to so far in the school day had made direct mention of Lisa’s pull-ups, but I had caught mention of the topic in snippets of conversation from quite of few of my peers as we had made our way through the hallways between classes. To be fair, a few of the comments were kinder, with suggestions that it had been wrong of Claire and her friends to bully Lisa, and that it wasn’t right to make fun of someone with a medical condition like that. But most of the comments, well, they weren’t worth repeating.

I was glad Lisa wasn’t around to hear it. I just really hoped that some other student would do something noteworthily stupid enough to get everyone’s attention onto something else soon. I understood, perhaps better than anyone else at the high school, the amount of shame she was feeling and how that was going to drive her hesitancy to new extremes.

Shame is the acknowledgement of our failure to conform to expectations placed on us by society. We feel shame, not in the act itself, but in our knowledge of how our peers would react should they be made aware of what we had done.

But shame is a double-edged sword. I was more keenly aware of the side of it that Lisa and I felt. From the moment a child could walk and talk, society ingrains upon them the expectation that they perform certain bodily functions on the toilet and only on the toilet. You couldn’t be a big kid unless you do this. And the inverse, if you are still peeing and pooping in your pants, you must be a baby. So we hide our incontinence. We rush off to the toilet as often as we could get away with it. We wear pull-ups or diapers for the times we can’t. We select our outfits in a manner that hopefully will conceal our deceit, the reality that we aren’t really normal at all.

But there is another side to it. The side of Claire and her friends, who tormented Lisa mercilessly after discovering she was wearing a pull-up. The side of the onlookers in the crowd, who laughed, took videos, or maybe just stood quietly without thinking about intervening. But’s it’s also the side of Samantha. How she teased her brother for his bedwetting pull-ups. How she brought that humiliation onto him by tricking his body into wetting itself at night. You see, to someone who is normal, their first instinct when they react to something that isn’t normal is to differentiate themselves from it, as if shame is somehow contagious, and they might get infected if they associate themselves too much with it.

Shame is nothing without knowledge. You couldn’t feel bad about violating society’s rules if you aren’t aware of them. Did Adam and Eve shit and piss themselves everywhere they went in the Garden of Eden? They were naked and unashamed. Without shame, that great motivator to action, would they not simply have done their business when and wherever they pleased?

When a young toddler relieves themselves into a diaper, they don’t feel any shame or embarrassment. They are yet to be burdened with expectations of how they ought to behave. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, at some point, the curse of knowledge is given to us. And, with the full awareness of our bodily functions and society’s expectations for them, comes the shame when those expectations aren’t met.

That reminded me. Emilia had been dry again last night. And I had woken up soaked. My bedwetting had been more bearable when it had been happening to my sister as well. I didn’t fear getting any inquisitive looks for her or judgement glances from Mom, but the act of waking up in a wet diaper becomes that much more shameful when you have to contrast it with a much younger sibling who has managed to remain dry. I hoped the trend wouldn’t continue. At this point, as much as I wanted my own bedwetting to also stop, I’d settle for Emilia joining me and becoming a bedwetter once more.

---

“Who could tell me what M.A.D. is,” Mr. Higgins said, as he spelled out the word in three red capital letters on the whiteboard.

Like all students, we had settled into a routine of where we sat in each class. This wasn’t elementary school, where a teacher laid out the room in a carefully organized seating chart, designed to keep troublemakers apart. We’d long since been in the habit of taking the same seat each time during history class, so Lisa’s absence was easily noted when the class began with her seat in the back row still empty. She was never late to her uncle’s class.

Mr. Higgins had made no mention of his niece’s absence. He never did roll call at the start. I assumed he knew all his students by face – or by seat – and marked our attendance that way.

No one initially raised a hand to Mr. Higgin’s question. It didn’t help much that it was at the end of the school day, and I’m sure most student’s minds were wandering to topics of anything but school.

“Is this about the magazine?” said a student in the front row — a bit of a smart aleck — who Mr. Higgins had called on after he raised his hand.

“No, but the magazine began in the same era as this,” the teacher answered, tapping the back of his marker right below the word on the whiteboard.

“It stands for Mutually Assured Destruction. Pretty scary right? The idea is fairly simple. Us and the USSR were in the middle of a cold war. Can anyone tell me what that meant?”

The smart-ass in the front row raised his hand again. Mr. Higgins ignored him. After a few seconds passed with no other takers, Mr. Higgins continued his lecture, leaving the student to awkwardly lower his hand.

“That doesn’t mean we were ignoring each other; we just didn’t engage in any direct confrontation. We didn’t fight a World War III against communism. There was a bunch of spying and trying to catch spies. Some proxy wars. And a big arms race to see who could have the largest military and the biggest bombs, but nothing that escalated to the point where we declared war on each other.”

That sounded an awful lot like how Claire and I had spent the past couple of weeks.

“That’s where nuclear missiles come in. The power to completely wipe a country off of the face of the planet. You’re too young to remember this, but when I was your age in school, we had to do our normal fire drills, but along with that, we had a drill during which we would hide under our desk, practicing what we might do if a nuclear war were to begin.”

That brought a bit of nervous laughter. How would hiding under a desk do any good?

“I know, right, a wooden desk isn’t going to do much good if a nuke was dropped next door. But still, that’s what they had us do. But as powerful as nuclear bombs are, they have a major downside. There’s no going back once they get used. If the Soviet Union had nuked us, we’d nuke them back. And then tit for tat until there wasn’t anything left of us, and maybe the rest of the world as well. That’s where the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction comes in, since both sides knew any direct military confrontation would almost certainly lead to an escalating series of nuclear strikes that would only end with both nations destroyed, it was clear that we were better off leaving each other alone.”

That gave me an idea about what to do with Claire.

[BabySofia]

I hope she's successful. I'm afraid she's going to get busted for her daytime accidents as soon as her mom stops wasting the money on her sisters pull-ups... Her days of getting away with it are probably quite short here... 

[Sarah Penguin]

[Arendeth]

Thanks for the chapter.

[Baby Billy]

I feel sorry for Lisa, she was finally making a friend at school and now she may never want to go back.  Every high school has people like that girl who need to bully others to feel important somehow. 

[Diapeered]

I wonder what Sarah is gonna do with Claire, I wonder if there is a reason that Claire feels the need to bully or harass people she thinks are weaker than her is there a secret she has that makes her feel like she has to act this was as compensation so she herself doesn't get bullied and can maybe be used against her if someone finds out

Maybe Sarah needs to find Claire's achillies heel 

[D503]

Great writing as usual, thanks