Needless to say, it's a pretty big relief not to constantly have a little wet spot on my underwear that I have to worry is going to soak through my pants. In a way, it kind of put me back into the head space of those years when my control was at an all-time low, about 4th through 8th grade: I was always wet, always worried about getting caught, and always wishing that there was some way to just give up on trying to stay dry at all and wear diapers full time. Obviously the leaks I was having weren't even close to the major pantswetting issues I was having back then, but the fact that my recent spell of incontinence also included a bedwetting incident shook my confidence a lot, and it brought up a lot of the same old feelings.
As much as those feelings centered around nervousness, frustration, and wanting to have normal bladder control, they also included a fetishization of the act of loosing control. Shortly after the small, frequent wettings I was having went away, I felt the urge to stage a few deliberate wettings.
I would come home from work and go into the bathroom, but instead of sitting down on the toilet I would just stand in the shower and let go in my pants. The urge came on days when I had been under particularly high pressure at work. By deliberately refusing to be responsible for emptying my bladder in an appropriate and socially acceptable way, I was able to blow off steam from a job full of other responsibilities I didn't want.
You'll recall that the leaks I was having started at work. Well, the diaper I was wearing as I wrote my last post was actually came from work too. No, I wasn't working at a medical supply store or pharmacy. I was working a temp gig at a Halloween store.
Odd, I know. Imagine my surprise when I opened a box labeled "costumes and accessories," and found a pack of adult diapers, which, for all intents and purposes, seemed like off-brand Bambinos. The package was all transparent cellophane, so you could see what was inside. The smell when I cut open the shipping box was exactly the same as when you open a fresh pack of diapers.
Pulling them out, I saw that they were individually wrapped inside so that they could be displayed on a peg. As I tore off the outer packaging and hung them on the wall, all I could think was, "These are costumes. Everything else in this store is fake. There's no way these could be real diapers ... right?"
After a few days of contemplation, I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to buy one to find out. All employee purchases had to be approved. There was no way I could go to my boss and tell him I wanted to buy a diaper. I had to know though ... so I waited for my opportunity and slipped one into my bag when no one was looking.
Pretty astonishing, right? The package just says what it is, like it's no big deal that you are going to buy this with the intention of wearing it in public, presumably with no pants. Most of the people I saw buy this were pre-teen girls who came in with their mothers. What their motivation was for choosing this particular costume and why their mothers allowed it, I have no idea.
Here's what it looked like unwrapped:
Here's a final shot of me wearing it:
Halloween is an interesting holiday. It gives people a space in which to live out fantasies which would not be acceptable on a normal night. Clearly, there must be enough people out there who fantasize about wearing a diaper to justify the cost of manufacturing these items for sale as costumes. Although I would not be surprised to find that the demographic of people who will walk into a Halloween store and buy one of these had a disproportionate number of people with fetishistic tendencies, I can't imagine that all of them would be Diaper Lovers.
I wonder if the thoughts which go the heads of the non-fetish crowd as they put on their Halloween diaper would be familiar to us DLs? The curiosity; the exploration of how they look in the mirror; the feeling of the thick padding-- so different than normal underwear. Is their feeling of mischievous silliness compromised by a nervous embarrassment? What was it, on a night when they could be anything, wear anything, that made them choose this? Was there some hidden part of their subconscious that playing this role was stroking?
Perhaps we are all fetishists, differing only in our sense of self-awareness. To some extent, everyone's sexuality seems tied to providing something which their subconscious mind has realized is lacking in their life. Even among the fetish community, there is a range of self-awareness. I have spoken to people in the diaper community online who tell me "Hey, I really like your blog," but when I ask them about their own memories and experiences relating to diapers, they tell me that they don't remember anything. This is either an absurd lie or an example of deliberate repression. Perhaps what they mean is that they don't want to remember because it would mean confronting the emotional realities of their life.
On that note, I have two more memories of early childhood that have floated the the surface recently. These are hardly big revelations and I've thought on them from time to time over the years, but I haven't yet had the opportunity post them here.
The first must have been very early, because it is of my mother helping me to use the toilet. After I had finished my bowel movement, my mother pointed at it and said, "Look, aren't you glad that isn't in your pants?"
"Yeah!" I said. I remember that this was a deliberate lie. I was completely unsure of how I felt about it, but because it was a leading question I was afraid to answer otherwise. This is engrained in my memory because there were several early masturbation sessions where I remembered her saying that and imagined what it would have felt like to have gone in my pants instead.
The other memory is of this:
This was a toy that I really wanted when it came out back in 1989. It's hard to explain exactly what the attraction was for me since it didn't explicitly have anything to do with diapers. Perhaps, in making the toilet into a villain to be defeated by my heroic Ghostbusters figures, I saw it as a means to express my desire to fight my potty training in a socially acceptable way. My mother explicitly told me that she wouldn't buy if for me because it would make me afraid to use the toilet. Both this and the previous memory seem to indicate that she felt there was a possibility of my backsliding on potty training-- back into diapers.
Maybe it was because I had a lot of potty accidents even after I was officially out of diapers. Maybe it was some other reason. Perhaps when she was first potty training me, I did do a little back sliding because I wasn't old enough yet.
There is a photograph which I was surprised to see the last time I was visiting my parents. It shows me in a diaper, standing next to my grandfather. It is hard to tell exactly how old I am in the picture, but I am standing on my own and looking not quite three. I can't be younger than two, at any rate, so this picture doesn't really jive with my mom's story of me being fully potty trained by that time. Looking at that image, I grew suspicious that the miraculously early potty training my mother so often talked about was an "on-again, off-again" kind of thing where I wore underwear sometimes and diapers others. That might have created some confusion for me, and a desire to simply stay in diapers rather than going back and forth.
My mother's refusal to allow me to have the toy seemed at the time like it was related to her ban on "potty talk," that is, the tendency most preschoolers have to find ways of incorporating "pee pee" and "poo poo" into any conversation, usually as an attempt to be funny, or sometimes in place of a more adult swear word. I suppose it all ties into my mother stopping me from expressing, either verbally or non-verbally through play, my actual thoughts on using the potty. Instead, she wanted to offer her own affirmative statements for me to agree with, reminding me how glad I was not to be in diapers.
Way back in my first post, I cited how indulging my diaper fetish in my late teens and early twenties led to me overcoming a lot of my "shy bladder" inhibitions, including being able to stand up when I peed. Medically, the condition of not being able to urinate except under certain conditions (when alone, when in your own home, when it is quiet, etc.) is called "paruresis." Urinary retention due to paruresis is often linked to overflow incontinence.
In summary, it seems likely that my mother's overbearing attitude during potty training was what caused me to become self-conscious about my toileting. In my attempts to escape her interference, I might have developed both a shy bladder (necessitating privacy) and a desire to escape the toilet altogether by going back to diapers. My urinary retention, combined with a natural tendency for "giggle incontinence," created a perfect storm of pantswetting commonly referred to as "mixed incontinence".
The years of my heaviest incontinence which I referenced above were also the years surrounding my parents' divorce. This, and the fact that all of my bedwetting after the typical age when it is expected has been during high stress moments, point to psychological factors as another thing contributing to the mix.
At any rate, I would guess that the persistent pattern of wetting accidents that emerged from these causes is what reenforced my preexisting desire to wear diapers to the point where it began to manifest itself as a fetish.
I've covered some of this ground before, but I feel like one of the functions of this blog has become to refine my understanding of what makes this fetish tick. That's it for now though, because my diaper is getting wetter as this article gets longer, and at this point I'm overdue for a change.
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