Family Crisis; Family Help priv. with Ishigreensa

[LilGirlLya]

Lauren Reed was at the end of her rope with her daughter Emily. It had been a hard year for the family following the death of her husband and Emily's father, Robert. The stress had taken it's toll on everyone but Emily seemed to be doing worst of all. Her grades had started falling last year but with the school year being nearly over and the circumstances of the tragedy taken into account, her poor performance wasn't enough to keep her from getting held back into fourth grade. Summer had been a nightmare though. Emily had always been a happy, easy going kid before but her behavior completely changed. The bedwetting wasn't unexpected, the doctors said while uncommon for an 11 year old, given her stature and recent trauma a reversion to bed wetting wasn't surprising. What was surprising was just how fiercely Emily fought against managing her problem at all. They tired fluid limitations and alarms and while Emily at least begrudgingly went along with them, she threw a fit when pull-ups were brought up. Every night before bed, Lauren and Emily would fight with Emily throwing a tantrum until Lauren either put her foot down and practically forced Emily into the pants or gave up and let her wet the bed despite Emily's promises that she wouldn't. Even when she got Emily into pull-ups she knew that her daughter was just taking them off again. No amount of grounding or taking away toys broke her from removing her bed wetting pants, and inevitably Emily would wake up with a wet bed and there would be another fight.

Lauren hoped Emily going to school might at least give her some relief. Instead morning tantrums led to tardies which piled up, as did detentions for Emily. Emily would complain about being bullied at school and would sometimes come home either in tears or ready to snap at her mother. In her first week of fifth grade, Lauren had gotten the call that Emily had an accident. She said that her bullies wouldn't let her use the toilet. More accidents followed, never less than one a week. Two weeks in she found out her daughter hadn't been doing her homework or studying and her grades were solid Fs. Lauren began to cry when Emily left for the day or after she went to bed, just to vent off the frustration from her daughter.

She'd try to stay in touch with her late husbands sister Jessica. Jessica had been a source of advice and a shoulder to cry on during their talks, even if she lived several states away. Emily's grades and behavior had gotten worse and Lauren knew that she'd caught Emily with messy pants but had been too shocked to say anything. Emily started doing her own laundry after that. When she found out Emily wasn't going to pass on to sixth grade and had been hiding that she already knew that, Lauren and Emily had their biggest fight yet and Lauren finally broke down and cried in front of her. Confessing to Jessica that she feared she was going to stop loving her daughter, Jessica offered to take Emily for the summer to work on her behavior issues and give Lauren the space she needed to grieve and get better.

Jessica had discussed it with her husband Tom. Susie needed so much help as it was but Lauren was hurting so much and Emily needed love and discipline if she ever wanted to see sixth grade. Accidents for a bigger kid didn't bother them either. Even though she was trying to use the potty, Susie still needed a lot of help and had a long way to go before she'd be in big girl panties. Not that Emily was much bigger than Susie. On top of everything else her height couldn't help things..

The ride to the airport had been tense and quiet. Lauren had tried to ask Emily to wear Goodnites on the flight on Emily refused. It was only two hours and she was already being punished by going to see her aunt and uncle. Eventually, Emily had cried, stalled and refused and it got so late Lauren gave up. "Alright, meet your aunt and uncle in wet pants if you want, we need to leave, now." Her mom led her through the airport, got her bags taken care of and sat in silence until it was time to board. "Goodbye Emily. See you in August. Be good, please." Lauren said, watching just long enough to see Emily get on the plane.

Once on board she had trouble getting to her seat. Most of the adults hardly noticed her, and really she was easy to miss. Despite being 11, she was extremely short for her age and had only hit 4 feet tall recently. Her tiny size and her childish, cute facial features led most to thinking she was a first grader or sometimes a big kindergartner. One time someone had guessed her for a four year old but that was last year and she'd grown a few inches since then. She hated her height. It had also made her a target but now that other girls were going through puberty, having the body of a kid was all the worse. She was teased all the time in gym and hated changing with her classmates. Gym had been the first class she started failing because she wouldn't dress out and even when accommodations were provided she could never keep up and was often targeted by her classmates. She'd started avoiding the bathrooms after bullies stole her purse and put it on top of the paper towel holder out of her reach. Of course then the accidents began and that just made things worse.

"Hello honey," a flight attendant found Emily once she had gotten seated. "Your mommy asked me to check on you, do you want to try and go potty before we take off?"

"No!" Emily hissed, the attendant just shrugged and left her alone. How dare her mother ask people to help her use the potty? She wasn't a baby, she might have accidents but she knew when she needed to go. If she needed to go here, there were no bullies stopping her. Emily took a brief nap before being woken up by turbulence. It had been a lucky break since her bladder was aching from the soda the attendant had brought her. She tried to get up but attempting to remove her lap belt brought the same attendant back over. There might not have been bullies to stop her from getting up, but as long as their was turbulence there was a flight attendant. As much as she fought it, eventually one bump was too many and Emily flooded her already damp underwear and wet herself and her airplane seat. When it was over, with no seats left to move to, Emily had to finish the trip where she was, sitting in her urine. As the plane taxied in, she unhappily realized her mom had been right.

 

 

[Ishigreensa]

Tom thought that they had quite a full plate as it was, trying to get their own eight year old daughter, Susie, through her own growing pains.  

When Susan was a baby, was diagnosed with some scientific and long named degenerative disease that meant that her nervous system was not picking up signals from her body or her brain and relaying them fast enough to her body, so that she could move normally.  In fact, it had taken poor Susie, until she was nearly three to start walking consistently, and though she fell all the time, she stubbornly got back up on her feet and walked until she fell again.  At that age, there were no crutches for her, and the doctors worried that a wheelchair would just dispirit her from ever walking, so the parents had to keep a close eye on her as she attempted to navigate her way around the house and anywhere they thought it was safe enough for her to do so until she turned five.

When Susan turned five, the doctors encouraged the parents to buy her a wheelchair because they didn't think she'd ever get moving enough that she could navigate school on her own feet.  In one classroom, she might have been fine, but these days, even kindergarteners go to special rooms for Art, Music, and PE.  So they got her a wheelchair on lease, so that they could change out her wheelchair every year while she grew up.

At five years old, she was put in kindergarten, and though she peed her pants all the time because she was not potty trained yet, due to mostly the parents just not trusting her to get to the toilet without trying to hurry herself and falling down all the time, but none of the kindergarteners really noticed that much.  When they did, they simply told the teacher that their classmate was wet.  They had not yet realized that wetting her pants was such a big social blunder, but Susan started to try to potty train herself because now, she knew when she had to pee, and she was walking around the room like a champ.  How hard could it really be to get to the bathroom?

The parents, of course encouraged her enthusiasm for being so interested in getting to the toilet in time, and they found that from that point on, Susan had mostly stopped pooping her diapers.  That made changing her so much easier for the stay at home mother, but Tom insisted that his wife, Jessica stay home so that if their daughter needed her at school, she could be there at a moment's notice.

When Susan started first grade, there was talk that the teachers had wanted to keep her in kindergarten for another year.  Though she had no trouble with the school work, the teachers feared that her still in diapers and her immaturity, as far as they were concerned, would become troublesome as she grew up.  But the parents would not hear of her being held back while she was able to keep up with her peers.  They thought the school just didn't get it, about her physical condition, and so Tom, as stubborn as they come, forced the school to pass her into first grade.

Even in first grade, Susie was never made fun of for her diapers.  Most of the class knew about it, and sometimes even caught her peeing her pants because she would go up to the teacher and looking a little shy about it, ask to see the nurse as the class saw her wet butt from the diaper leaking.  She smiled at her friends who knew about her problem when she left the room, and so wetting her pants was still not a big problem for her, though she did go to the bathroom about 2 out of 3 times at school.

Last year, in second grade, was the first time Susan had realized how mean kids could be to kids with problems.

A boy that just moved to the school that year, started to talk about Susan smelling bad, and pointed at her wet pants all the time, and told kids that his baby sister was nearly potty trained, and that Susie was acting like a big baby.  Her friends ignored the ignorant brat, but some of the others that were kind of neutral were torn about whether it was okay for her to continue to pee her pants or not and wear diapers.  By the end of the year, a few of the neutral boys and a couple of the girls started to agree with the new boy.

Still, Susan snubbed them and pretended that whatever they said was just baby gibberish that couldn't be understood.  Her friends took her lead, and they ignored the other kids, too.  So what if Susie had an accident here and there, by now, her accidents at school were down to maybe 1 in 5 times.  At home, where she had more freedom, her daytime accidents were down to 1 in 10 unless they had been out in public where she felt less secure on her own.

Now, by last year, she was fitted with some crutches that would make moving easier for her, according to the doctor, but she hated them.  The metal things made her look funny, kind of like a deformed dog or something, they hurt her elbows and forearms when she got in a hurry and didn't get them on right, and they made dressing herself nearly impossible because while she could take off and put on her clothes herself, the crutches were nearly impossible to disentangle herself from.  The wheelchair made her feel smaller than other students, and it made doing things like waiting in line, times for students to notice her more.  So, when she could, she avoided her crutches and her wheelchair.

Tom heard Jessica out, enough, that he did start to feel sorry for Emily and her mother, so he agreed to let their niece come and visit.  He just hoped it didn't cause Jessica more stress than she already had to deal with, with Susan starting to get bigger and wanting more independence, fighting for it more than most her age because of the situations that already limited her.

Susan wasn't a handful to get into a diaper, but since last year, with the new kid pulling some of her classmates towards bullying her for wearing a diaper, she stopped wanting to wear skirts and dresses unless she also had panties on.  Thus it was, that while she had no problem wearing the diaper, Tom could only get her to meet her cousin wearing her best skirt and top by promising to put some panties on over the diaper.  He bought some panties that were two sizes too big for the purpose of fitting over her diaper.

So now it was, that Tom pulled into the air port, Susan was not needing the bathroom just yet, with it only taking about 45 minutes to get to the airport, and she waited for Tom to park the car.

"Jessica, What gate was Emily arriving at?" Tom asked his wife as he tried to find the closes spot available to the gate that they had to meet Emily at.