from her sister. We are both big fans of the author, and whenever his stuff is in the New Yorker we like to read it aloud. She and I decided that it would be fun to spend the day cuddling in bed and do the whole book that way.It was around the story “In the Waiting Room” that my girlfriend had to stop and use the restroom. We were both laughing so had we were afraid we would wet our pants. She suggested that I should probably go as well, that or put on a diaper.
So ... have you ever noticed that if you laugh really hard you get an erection? Maybe it's just me. Anyway, I couldn't use the toilet pointed up like that, and even though that position generally makes a diaper less effective, we both figured it was better than risking our new sheets. Even though my control has been pretty good since my middle teenage years, it plateaued around that time just short of being complete. There is a certain point when I am laughing where I have always been unable to maintain control. I'm lucky that my girlfriend has come to recognize when I am getting to that point, because during “Town and Country” I completely wet myself. Luckily, I had taken the opportunity during one of the less sidesplitting stories to point myself down for maximum absorbency.
It was pretty embarrassing whenever I have genuine accident like that, because it reminds me that my control still isn't complete and probably won't ever be. Still, it is incredible to just be able to put a diaper on if I need one. When I was younger I used to love Jim Carry movies, but I knew that I would wet myself at least once every time I whenever I watched one. Though funny movies were the worst for it, the same went to a slightly lesser degree for a lot of things, even just visiting friend's houses. If I was going to be there all day, laughing and having a good time, I knew there was a good chance I was setting myself up for a wetting accident. If I had had Pull-Ups on hand for occasions like this, I could have been able to have fun without my enjoyment being compromised by bathroom worries. A friend's mother once remarked to mine that “That boy uses the bathroom more than any other kid I have ever met.” It didn't surprise me either. I was forever running to the toilet in hopes that it would keep me dry. It never really did. In fact, I probably wet my pants more often at that friend's house than anywhere else. My constant vigilance did make sure the inevitable wettings would be smaller though, and that helped to hide them.
Anyhow, my mother responded to this comment by telling her that I had been potty-trained at a very early age. Thinking back, it occurs to me that this answer may have been an even better explanation than my mother realized. The thought has crossed my mind that perhaps something about straining the muscles of my bladder before they were ready may have damaged them or caused a some loss of sensation. Stress incontinence (the kind where you wet when there is stress on the muscles like laughing or sneezing) is most common in children whose muscles are still weak down there. My mother's overeager attitude toward potty-training may have ironically been the reason why I was never totally able to master it.
It's funny, I actually had a pretty bad wetting accident this summer when I was at my mother's house. I was watching this video. Being around all my younger siblings in that old house, trying to hide the fact that I had wet my pants, I felt like I was in elementary school again. I had a tough time getting away to change my pants, but I managed it. I had to sit in wet jeans for over an hour before I got a chance to slip away for a moment. Luckily, we were sitting at the computer when it happened and there was enough going on in the house that no one was really paying attention. At the time, I actually thought for a moment that I might really get caught in front of everyone on this one. That would have been something: outed to my whole family as a pants wetter just a few weeks away from my twenty third birthday. I wonder if my mother would even have been surprised.
Oh, one last note ... that last diaper meet-up was another one where it was just me and one other person. His name was Kevin, and he had just come to the City for an internship at a publishing company. It was another nice, normal meeting-- further backing up the case that there are people out there interested in building a friendly, social, real-life fetish scene.
