Diapers and Depends

Life can be brutal, dealing us challenges like cards are dealt in Las Vegas, fast and furious.   The challenges of death, divorce, disease and of course, potty training your child, can almost destroy a person.  I have had the opportunity to increase the depth of my character five times, potty training my five very different children.  

With the first two I got a false sense of my parenting superiority.  “It is easy, you make a chart and you give your precious child an M &M each time they are successful,”  I preached on the playground to other mothers.  I wonder what they were doing wrong?

After my next two children, I had great compassion for parents who duct taped their monsters to the toilet.  “You are not getting off until you go potty in the toilet and not on the floor!”   At one point, I got so angry my poor son huddled in the corner with a look of terror, tears streaming down his cheeks, speechless, with me holding up another pair of soaked underwear and fire coming out of my eyes.  Not my best parenting moment.

So, with the last child in diapers, knowing that he was ready to graduate to the world of underwear, I knew I needed to embark on this last potty training expedition.  However, this time there was a kink, I had cancer.  I was really sick.  See, that is the problem with cancer, your life stops, barely moving,  consumed by survival and doctor visits, but the world around you moves on.  Your son progresses, he is ready to move from diapers to underwear, and you digress from underwear to diapers, literally.  

One of the unfortunate side effects of my unique situation is that I suffer from incontinence, which is just a really fancy word for saying that I pee my pants.   It isn’t constant, but goes in fits and spurts.  I was standing at the kitchen counter, peeling carrots, when suddenly…yup.  I rolled my eyes, and slowly walked upstairs to change my clothes.   I was sitting in the car, “Oh, no, oh, no, where is a napkin???”  I was laying in bed, not again, time to wash the sheets.  Every time I coughed, done.  I didn’t want to wear a diaper, I had my pride, I am only 41 after all!  After too many accidents and loads of laundry, I succumbed, I wore a diaper.  (Good thing Bill was infinitely patient and never had fire coming out of his eyes, otherwise I would have been in the corner crying too.)  

Now, I feel in case any of you out there need to wear adult diapers, I should write a review of the different types, you know, a consumer reports type thingy.  One of the reasons I didn’t want to wear a diaper is because I was convinced I would smell like a poorly run nursing home, like stale urine stained sheets.  Additionally, who wants an diaper line showing through their pants? Little did I know that technological advances have also hit the adult diaper world.  Bill bought me several different kinds and I learned you get what you pay for, spend the money folks, spend the money.  The best kind whisks away moisture, neutralizes the PH, absorbs all odors and can barely be seen through even yoga pants.  Apple got nothin’ on the incontinence diaper industry. 

So, one morning I was feeling a bit better and ambitious and decided I was home all day anyway, I might as well start Andrew on his diaper free path.  I was laying in bed and Andrew bounced in.  I looked at him and declared with a sunny voice,  “Andrew you are getting so big!  You are such a big boy!  Let’s get some underwear and put them on!”   He responded, “NO! I don’t want to.  I wear diapers.”  I was surprised by his response.  He is almost as big as Sam and thinks he is bigger, so why wouldn’t he want to wear underwear like his brother?  “Andrew, why don’t you want to wear undies?”  He walked over to my bed, getting close to me, looked at me with his big brown eyes and said, “Mom, I want to be just like you.”  

It took me a minute to understand what he was saying.  He must have sensed my confusion.  He pushed back my covers and pointed to my diaper, while also showing me his diaper and said, “See!  Same, same!  Same, same!”  Tears welled in my eyes.  I am not sure why, but they did.  So I dropped it, for the next month we made it a badge of honor, we were the same,  we both wore diapers.  Although, he asked why mine had a purple bow on the front and his didn’t.  I asked him right back, why did he get to have Elmo on his diaper and mine didn’t.

In February I had a good streak and graduated myself back up to underwear.  I thought Andrew might want to do the same.  I showed him that I wore underwear now.  Did he want to wear underwear too?  He agreed.  We went to the store, bought him some underwear and got him Star Wars toy as a reward for when he filled out his potty chart.  I am happy to report that Andrew hasn’t had even one accident; he decided and he was done.  I, unfortunately, have not done as well as my three year-old.  Maybe I need to print myself a potty-chart.