Why?

[Baby Mommy]

When I was a child, I positively refused to be one, that is to be treated or to act as a child. Now that I am middle-aged, I enjoy nothing more than to regress into childhood. (Not my own--somebody else's!) Even things that are certainly not fun, a painful medical procedure, for example, can be made slightly more pleasant or at least tolerable if I allow myself to cry and be comforted. During a spinal tap, I had to suck my thumb to keep from squalling out loud like a toddler. Afterward, they actually brought me ice cream and told me I was a good girl! It pays to cry--hee, hee.

None of this applies in the presence of my mother. Even in the throes of hard labor and childbirth, I emitted not one squeal of pain in front of her. She was there throughout the birth of my third child. Having my first two babies, I had yelled and screamed and hollered, even cried as loudly as if I were a baby myself. Yes, of course it hurt every ounce as much the third time, but with my mother in the room, I bore it in silence and refused to so much as say "ouch."

Years later, I discussed this inconsistency with Mom. I "confessed" how much I had yelled before, but still encumbered by a mental hang-up, I left out the part about crying. Mom said she didn't see anything unusual; it seemed to her that most people are conditioned to being "on their best behavior" with their mothers in the room. I waxed a bit philosophical about her association of "stoic refusal to express pain" equals "on my best behavior," but she never got my point. Come to think of it, Mom herself can cry without inhibition in front of anyone, including her own mother, if she feels cause. So why am I unable to show the tiniest molecule of emotion in her presence, even at a funeral, where such "behavior" is expected? I haven't cried in front of my mother for decades. I have an easier time in front of strangers.

I'm positive that this quirk goes hand-in-hand with my refusal to be a child when I was one, and my pleasure in acting like one now. Something in me has its roots in early childhood. Physically, I matured faster than usual. I wore a bra to third grade and had thick, dark hair under my arms that I would not be permitted to shave for another two years. Mom and I definitely differ in opinion here. She considers even the hairiest of eight-year-olds too young to shave. I say anyone old enough to grow it is old enough to shave it. After finally convincing her with the selling point that I was ashamed to raise my hand in class because the other kids laughed, I got my first razor.

Here I began to associate maturity with painful humiliation. My rapidly changing body, at an age when most children resemble hairless twigs, got me made fun of.

Nor was I "babied" much as an infant. An American proverb says, "Baby your baby when he is a baby, and you won't have to baby him the rest of his life." Well, for me this was impossible. First, I was born prematurely and spent my earliest infancy in an incubator. Next, even on release from the hospital I was too fragile to tolerate being held much. Then, less than ten months after I was born, my brother followed, even more premature than I had been. My parents now had to divide their energy between the two of us. (I don't know, even yet, that we have ever overcome the rivalry.) Finally, with my second brother already on the way, and me at a fraction under a year and a half, my overworked mother was desperate to hurry at least one of her children out of diapers! (Mom claims that she herself was fully toilet trained at the age of six months. It will take the notarized testimony of a heavenly angel to get me to believe that. How can you possibly train a baby that can't even walk?

All in all, considering the unavoidable insufficiency of the cuddling I got as a baby, early toilet training despite having been a preemie, and living in a completely developed adult body before the age of ten, it adds up to about zero childhood. Before I even began kindergarten, I was playing the role not of a child but of a miniature mommy, feeding and changing my newborn sister.

Rules were sometimes overly rigid in our home. My parents were idealists. They mentally painted pictures of how things "should" be, then tried to force reality to conform. Their "ideal" image of a child never answered back except to say "yes ma'am" and "yes sir," so Heaven help us if we dared to venture an opinion that differed from theirs. "Ideal" home life called for perfect order and discipline; read that "inflexible rules," no matter how far out of step it put us with our classmates and neighbor kids.

One of the most persistent sources of embarrassment involved bedtime. A certified John Denver maniac, I was ten the year his "Rocky Mountain Christmas" television special aired for the first time. No matter that I loved him. I was out of luck; my 8:30 bedtime stood unyieldingly. (This was before VCR's were in common use.) Imagine how doubly bad I felt the next day at school, where so many children my own age and even younger chattered excitedly about how cool the show had been. They, but not I, had been allowed to stay up and see it! ("Rocky Mountain Christmas" aired again a few years later, and I saw it, thank God. Also, I know that if my mother had that night to live over again, she would have made a different decision.)

In another embarrassing bedtime-related episode, I was playing basketball in our driveway with my brother and two neighbor kids. I was twelve, my brother was eleven, the other kids were in the same range. It was still broad daylight outside, summertime, and certainly not a school night. None of that amounted to a lick. As 8:30 approached, out marched my mother, loudly announcing, "You two have to come inside now. It's bedtime." I wanted to fall through a hole in the ground and disappear. Of course, the neighbor kids made all the remarks I expected and dreaded: "Bedtime?! What time is it? Y'all have to go to bed this early? Wow, you must be babies," etc. It made no difference to Mom. She couldn't help it if, as she saw it, all of the other kids in the neighborhood were undisciplined. Hers had to follow RULES!

I know Mom was only trying to be a good mother. What caused so deep a resentment, I think, was a few careless phrases about "I need a break from the kids," or "I don't want to have to deal with them," or even jokes such as, "The kids are asleep. Now is when they're really good!" (I wasn't asleep, and I heard that.) Such comments made me feel as if the real reason I was being sent to bed was to get rid of me.

Now, while I still associated maturity with painful humiliation--being ridiculed for my early development--I began to associate childhood with both oppression and painful humiliation. I wanted none of it. I couldn't wait to grow up, break loose, and be done with having to obey someone else's rules. Even today, I have authority issues.

Yet, in the midst of my non-childhood, did I really, truly, want to grow up? Exactly how much more (or less) mature was I, compared to my age group? I had stopped trick-or-treating around age ten, when most others were still doing it. I considered myself too old for such things. On the other hand....

The early toilet training backfired. Some experts say it's a normal reaction to having been sexually assaulted at age five. No matter how it happened, the, um, end result...bottom line...I can't find a figure of speech that doesn't sound like a bad pun...is that I was around seven years old before I was reliably bowel trained, and I still don't trust my bladder, which is subject to sudden muscle spasms.

I'm glad, at least, that one of our strict rules was that we had to make our own beds in the morning. This helped me hide my sheets. I never told anyone, just slept in it all week until our linens were routinely washed on Saturday. It's still a mystery to me how the smell went undetected, but for the handful of times I was caught, there were many dozens of times I wasn't. This continued all through high school. I wear diapers at night now. If they leak, the difference between then and now is that I no longer sleep in it the second night without changing the sheets. Given that my younger brother was ridiculed to the point of his Christmas presents being addressed to Pee-Pot from Santa Claus, was scolded and sometimes even spanked until he outgrew his own problem, it's clear why I never told anyone. I wasn't about to open myself up to the same treatment.

Then there were the fantasies. As much as I resented, even hated being a child, I secretly longed to be one--only under a different parenting style. I wished to be sent to a foster family where I would be nurtured and coddled (not that this actually happens in many foster homes!) and I could be a baby. I wanted to be able to say, "Mommy, I wet the bed," and hear in reply, "OK, honey, let's get you changed," as opposed to, "Oh, (obscenity)! You make so much work for me!" I wanted to be able to cry when I fell down and be consoled, not lectured sternly about how I needed to be tougher than that, or "I'm going to REALLY give you something to cry about."

In my deepest fantasies, rather than being a child with an adult's body, I made myself an adult, or nearly an adult, with a child's body. No underarm or pubic hair. No breasts. Shorter, instead of taller, than most of my age group. I even coveted the speech impediment that plagues one of my aunts, who is mentally retarded. I would imagine going someplace where nobody knew me, and talking to everyone as if I couldn't correctly pronounce the letter R. Sometimes I would project my infantile images onto someone else--a teacher who terrorized me, a popular jock-type classmate who snubbed me. I would picture them wearing a wet diaper and crying. This helped me to feel less threatened and intimidated by them.

So far, it all makes understandable sense. My infantile fantasies can be explained easily in light of my non-childhood. It's as simple as wanting what I didn't have. Now I'd like to examine what does, and does not, turn me on. I'm not sure when sexual enjoyment began to fit into this, but it does, and I want to look at it. I think there is more involved than having been sexually abused. Reason I think this: such a fine line between "turn-on" and "turn-off," plus the fact that whether or not something happened to me is not the deciding factor in "turn-on" or "turn-off."

I want to stress that anyone who sexually approaches a child, or an incapacitated person of any age, should be castrated via burning certain body parts off. No degree of punishment is too severe for such a crime. Nor does childish behavior in an actual child, or in a person with diminished capacity, do anything for me. There has to be that certain incongruity, the appeal of the unexpected. Also, I no longer cope with feeling intimidated by imagining the other person in diapers. Such images have now taken on a sexual connotation for me, and I don't get off on sexual fantasies involving people I resent, just plain don't like, etc.

Spankings and other forms of pain and punishment turn me absolutely off. My siblings and I were spanked too often, too severely, and for too little reason, in my opinion. While my parents were not deliberately cruel, whack-first-and-discuss-it-later (if at all) was the general policy in our house. It wasn't discipline I lacked. It was being nurtured, and this is what I crave now.

Enemas, also often associated with infantilism, likewise do zilch for me. When my bowel training lagged, my mother used enemas and prune juice in an effort to get me to go when she wanted me to go, as I wavered back and forth between constipation and incontinence. Some people with similar experiences find enemas sexually stimulating. Not me. And I also thoroughly despise prune juice.

For me, there is a huge difference between my preferred brand of infantilism and so-called "golden showers," which don't appeal to me. I prefer that wet diapers be played off as an accident. Not "I'm peeing in my diaper right now--hee, hee," but a forlorn-sounding, "Mommy, I wet my dipey." It has to look uncontrollable. If he makes it obvious that he's doing it on purpose, it kills the whole illusion. The same goes for messy diapers, though messing doesn't grab me to nearly the same degree as wetting. I, for one, don't do that unless I'm medically ill, in which case I'm too sick to get any kind of enjoyment out of it anyway.

Terminology needs to be juvenile. Three of my four past husbands continued to call their mothers Mommy well into their adult years. By contrast, I was very sensitive to peer pressure and scrapped the use of "Mommy" in first grade, as soon as I heard the least little twitter about it. (I have, however, referred to my mother as "Mommy" when speaking to people who don't know me, pretending I still call her that.)

The fine-line elements are these: One, when a woman (think of Loretta Lynn, or the Jane Fonda character in "On Golden Pond") calls her mother Mommy, it doesn't generate the same "zing" as when a man does it. Two, since the use of "Daddy" by adults is much more frequent than an older person's use of "Mommy," it doesn't get much of a "zing" out of me either. Three, none of this means I prefer a total wimp. I want the childlike traits to be only a tiny part of the whole package. So he calls his mother (or me) Mommy, he wets the bed, he sucks his thumb, he sleeps with a stuffed animal, he cries easily and/or out loud.... I tremendously enjoy all of these. But I want him also to be a competent, rational adult of normal intelligence, able make sane decisions, carry on a coherent and reasonable conversation, hold a steady and honest job, meet his various responsibilities, etc. I've read infantilism-related fiction about grown men who are forced into full-time infancy by dominant women. While pieces of such stories do appeal to me, it is not what I want. I still want a partner, a friend, a mate, a companion, not merely a six-foot-tall baby.

More on terminology: I'd much rather hear baby talk than gutter talk during sex. If a man makes reference to his wee-wee or his dingy, there is a "zing" response, whereas certain other words for the same body part leave me, if anything, disgusted. Profanity does not thrill me.

I greatly enjoy hairlessness, but I would not ask a man to shave his body. One, many men are just plain nervous about having anything sharp anywhere near there. Two, to make the shaved look effective, a man would have to remove all body hair from the neck down. Bare private parts floating in a sea of hair would fail to achieve the desired childlike appearance. Three, since men tend to have thicker, more generous body hair than women, and it needs to be shaved more often, the whole idea is impractical. Unless a man invested a ridiculous amount of time constantly shaving everything, or obscene amounts of money to get it done permanently, he would end up looking not like a sweet child but like a scarecrow with the straw poking out. I satisfy my wishes for baby-like smoothness by shaving myself. It's easier for me. Furthermore, I have actually surveyed men via the internet. Of those who responded, the overwhelming majority said they prefer, even outside the realm of infantilism, a woman with shaved or trimmed pubic hair.

Seeing other grown women with no pubic hair is also a major yes for me, but without the stiletto heels and the black lace lingerie and the horny facial expressions, please. Those things undermine the whole concept. Again stressing that this is a competent, normally healthy and consenting adult woman, either keep the accessories and background minimal, or put her on a large-scale baby blanket, hand her a doll, and stick her thumb in her mouth. THEN let her flash her bald self.

Bottles, pacifiers, bibs...kind of neutral. I have an adult-sized pacifier, but unfortunately, I had forgotten that I am allergic to latex and had quite an uncomfortable reaction to it. I'll have to stick to sucking my thumb. I enjoy playing with toys. Legos, dolls, coloring books and blocks are among my favorites. This is not necessarily sexual. I just like to play with them.

On clothing, accessories, and appearance: Using the excuse that I have long hair and need to keep it from tangling at night, I sleep with it in two pigtail braids. Of course, one of the reasons I deliberately keep it long is that I happen to like wearing pigtail braids. I also sometimes wear pigtails, braided or not, during the day. To anyone who would say I'm too old for that hair style, I respond phooey. Protests have become fewer, actually. Heck, I've even got my mother wearing pigtails now. The only thing that keeps me from wearing the little-girl bows, ribbons, and plastic barrettes is that my hair is too thick to hold them. I'll probably make myself some larger scale ribbons and bows. I'm quite good at that. Also, I would like to acquire an adult sized sleeper suit, complete with attached feet, zipper down one leg, and a nursery print. Excuse: I get very cold at night, which I do. Real reason: you know.

I haven't really thought of an excuse to wear those ruffly, frilly Shirley Temple type dresses, the lacy anklet socks, and the Mary Jane shoes, but I'll come up with something. Halloween, maybe? I do own a pair of pink ruffled rubber pants, a gift for which I am grateful. Fortunately they do not seem to be made of latex; they have never broken me out. Underpants with little-girl prints on them don't seem to be available in my size; at least I haven't been able to find any by regular shopping.

I can be a baby or a mommy; in fact I discovered the fun of playing Mommy through the fact that two of my four ex-husbands were incontinent for medical reasons and also needed to wear diapers at night. I have already mentioned that three of them still called their mothers Mommy. Two also called me Mommy. One sucked his thumb. All four cried a lot, sometimes out loud. And these were men of normal intelligence. I chose them as husbands. This is not a coincidence.

But there are times when I, too, need the cuddles and coos and nurturing. I want to be loved by a man who will baby me now and then, himself want to be babied now and then, and will always be partner and friend even when nobody is "the baby."

[Simba]

Wow - this has to be one of the longest posts I have come across recently! <_>

But also fascinating... very introspective by clearly a very intelligent young lady. Each of us has our own reasons, whys and wherefores for liking our nappies/diapers, or being a baby in all its forms, or any stage in between. Wetting beds, humiliation, pain and the whole shooting match of childhood experiences both good and bad are different for us all.

Thank you for this insight. I could post my own, but maybe better later on... unless a true interest is there. That being the case, just message me and I'll comply. There are quite a lot of similarities!!!

Thank you Baby-Mommy.

Simba

[enfant]

Baby Mommy, I just wanted to say what a wonderful post that was. I see a lot of myself in it, too, though there are some differences. But I definitely had that same drive as a child to act like an an adult, and I think it has a lot to do with my having wound up with this fetish.

I hope to find time to answer at more length later.

(BTW, what happened to your cute icon picture?)

[Three Rivers]

Baby Mommy, Thanks for sharing your thoughts, well said.

[Kaidus]

Even though I may not want the full baby treatment myself, I always wonder what it would be like despite the fact that I have a nephew and four nieces (I'm an uncle but not a father).

[Fulldiaper]

Thank you for explaining your self discovery to being a Mommy, but also needing the attention of an infant or small child Ma'am. It is interesting to discovery who or what you are and how you want to live your life. It's like a multiple orgasm when you discover yourself and either your inner child or the id that makes you who you are. I know for many years I went through binge and purge cycles. Wanting to be diapered and babied by a Dominant Woman or Dommy Mommy was my fantasy and in my twenties, it became a reality, I thought. Before I married my ex, she knew all about my AB/DL side and we played on the phone and eventually met and she babied for nearly 5 years before we got married.

[Ishigreensa]

I so wish I could have adopted a girl like you described in the beginning part.

[Diaperderpy]

I go through many of the same things, only i didnt have a babyhood at all. My birthmother tried to kill me many times, and successfully killed my little brother. This happened throughout ages newborn-2 and a half. Im sure this is the cause of my infantalism.