Bed-Wetting!

Trigger warning: physical and verbal abuse

"You're a pig," she said. "No, you're worse than a pig. A pig wouldn't wallow in its own filth."

The year, I believe, was 2001. At any rate I was around the age of eleven. I had just had a great summer - the first summer that I had not had to wear a diaper to bed because I FINALLY was not peeing in my sleep. Then winter came, and it started again. And because I was young and ashamed, I didn't tell my mother, I just went on wetting in my bed until the pee soaked through the mattress and the moisture caused the bottom board to separate from the bedframe in the corner where I slept.

(I've always been a corner sleeper. Maybe it stems from the early years where I slept on a couch, but I've never been very good at taking up a lot of bed space. Usually I just pick one corner and stick to it. I've only recently gotten past laying as close to the sideboard as possible.)

I won't say it wasn't gross or unhealthy - it was. But it's important to understand my position.

Some of the earliest words I can remember from my mother are "You wet your pants." I remember her tone almost exactly. The disappointment. The disapproval. The now-I-have-to-spank-you-you-filthy-child. She spanked me for years for wetting my pants (though not for wetting the bed). She was somehow convinced that if she kept it up I would eventually stop.

I did, finally, at the age of or nine. It wasn't because I finally realized it was wrong, or because the arrival of my baby brother meant that now I had to be grown-uppish. It just happened that that was the age that I gained the ability not to pee myself (and ever since I've had weak bladder muscles, which can be awkward when I get sick).

That was great, because wetting my pants was wrong and unsanitary and wrong and shameful and WRONG and only little kids who were like two years old were supposed to do it. So I was happy.

But I kept wetting the bed. And it's true that it hadn't been stigmatized like pants-wetting was, but there was still that sense that there was something messed up with me. For one thing, pee made the bed stinky and it had to be washed. For another thing, it was widely touted as "normal" for people to stop peeing in their sleep at about the age of four. (Not that those were the only people I was exposed to, but the others that I knew of were just exceptions that I was supposed to relate to. Like my jerkwad uncle who wet until he was... dunno how old.)

I think the worst part was when I transitioned from Goodnites to adult diapers. MY WORD. Not only did I wet the bed, but I was so fat that I couldn't fit into the nightwear for bed-wetters of my age (I had a similar experience with pants, but that was not quite as embarrassing). No, I had to wear diapers that were made for people much, much older than myself. I was doubly messed up.

Anyway, so when I stopped wetting the bed that summer, to call myself "relieved" would be an understatement. I was SO happy. Finally I was normal! Finally I could wear underwear to bed instead of a diaper! (Turned out I didn't like wearing underwear to bed, actually.) And when it started again, I couldn't bring myself to tell anyone, to ask for my mom to start buying me diapers again, because what eleven-year-old wants to ask their parents for diapers? Besides, I was hoping it would stop. I was still hanging onto the naïve hope that if I ignored the problem long enough it would go away.

She told me that, then. "You're an ANIMAL, because PEOPLE don't do things like this. You're a pig. No, you're worse than a pig. Even a pig won't lay in its own filth." Like I was deliberately lounging around in my own germ-ridden urine because I LIKED it. But more to the point, I now knew what my behavior meant. It meant that I was foul, horrible. I wasn't just less than human - I was used to feeling like that because of my fatness. I was less than an animal. I was probably somewhere between "slime mold" and "dog turd" because of this, because of my mistake.

And then she beat me.

She beat me for being scared. For being ashamed. For hating myself. Every blow drove my pain and shame and horror deeper into me. I must have cried. In fact, I expect that I reacted exactly as I did now, reliving the moment in my head - loud, gasping sobs, the unmistakable noise of a child in agony. It happened roughly ten years ago but as I write it out the emotions are still as raw as if it was yesterday.

What actually happened yesterday was that I remembered this incident. At the time, it felt so faint that I could hardly remember it had happened. Much less that it had happened to ME. Like a bad dream, I had pushed it out of my memory so that I could go on living like a normal human being. That's the power of the mind, isn't it? To sequester away those horrible memories so that, the next morning, you can look your mother right in the face and convince yourself that she's a good, loving parent. I had to, because my mother told me she was, and I knew she had to be right because she took her cues from the Bible and the Bible was the ultimate authority on goodness and holiness.

(She didn't learn this one from the Bible; she learned it from her mother. But that wasn't something that I was willing to question at eleven. Not when she still had physical power over me and regularly beat me for disobeying her. It wasn't worth it.)

So I went back to wearing adult diapers. I didn't stop needing them until I was fourteen, months after I'd had my first period. And then they finally ended, and I learned that I didn't even WANT to sleep in my underwear, and I shut away the fear, shame, and anguish from my childhood.

And I wonder why I don't know who I am.