Done Adulting Vol. 1 Ch. 104

“Ugh,” Becky grunted as she shut the gate on her SUV. “I forgot how much junk it takes to go away with a kid for the weekend.”

“Cooler’s ready, Becky. Thanks again for inviting me along.”

“Of course! We’re glad you can come, Mel.” Mel went to put the cooler in the car.

Jamie heard the conversation from the playpen. Not that he minded, but it always seemed when they were having company or trying to go somewhere for more than a few hours he ended up in the playpen out of the way, but he never could figure out what exactly made him in the way in the first place. It wasn’t like he was underfoot, at least not when he got told to get out from underfoot.

He was all ready to go. He always thought it wasn’t entirely appropriate for people to go out in public in their pajamas, even to travel, but there he was wearing his Bugs Bunny footie pajamas for the car ride. He picked them out himself so Mel could see him in them. He was sure she’d find them cute, not that he admitted to anyone that’s why he wanted to wear them in the car.

Mel came back and went up the stairs to help Amanda while Becky came over to the playpen. “You ready for our weekend away, Baby Bear?”

“Yeah. I’m excited,” he said. He was looking forward to seeing the countryside. Becky had rented a cabin at a resort on a lake. It was too cold for swimming, but there’d be other things to do.

“Let’s get you loaded in next then.” She picked him up and felt his diaper to make sure he was good for the first couple hours of the drive. When he got to the car, his bear was keeping his car seat warm for him, and he already had a bottle, baggy of snacks, and his paci waiting. He’d never traveled first class, but he figured this had to be even better; he didn’t even have to walk to his seat. She buckled him in. “Be right back.”

Becky walked back inside to find out what was keeping Amanda, but she was already on her way down the stairs. “Sorry, Mom. Just making sure I had all my schoolwork.”

“You’re taking schoolwork? Do you really have to?”

“Well, let’s start by taking it and maybe I can convince myself not to do it later.”

“You raised a goodie two-shoes, Becky,” Mel jumped in.

Becky laughed. “How many times did your mother tell you to stop calling me by my first name?”

“One fewer times then you told her it was alright.”

“She was persistent about it,” Becky said, “Everybody ready?” Everybody been to the potty?” Becky gave Amanda a knowing look. Amanda blushed. Yes, she peed a lot, and yes, there was that one time on a road trip after her mom stopped putting her in diapers on long trips when she might fall asleep, but seriously, you’d think after six years Becky would let it go.

“Yes,” Amanda said, giving Becky an annoyed look back. Not that Amanda’s potty history was a secret to Mel. She hadn’t always known, but she'd known for a while. Seeing the looks pass between them had her wondering if she was entirely up to speed. Becky and Amanda started toward the door, and Mel thoroughly checked out Amanda’s butt. Looked normal. And cute.

“I call dibs on the back,” Mel said. She wanted to hang out with her special guy.

After a half hour on the road, the conversation between the foursome became two separate conversations, the front seats and back seats. “What are you most excited about,” Mel asked Jamie.

“I want to take a boat out on the lake. It says they have boats just for littles in the brochure.”

“They do. I’ve been there before.”

“And the campfire. I haven’t been to one in forever.”

“Wanna tell ghost stories?”

“No. No ghost stories.”

“That’s good. I mean, if I got scared I probably couldn’t sleep alone,” Mel joked.

“Hmm,” Jamie said, “Did you hear the one about the hook-armed slasher who targets redheads?”

Mel laughed. “Will you tell it to me tonight?”

“Yep.” She loved the way he always said ‘yep.’ It was endearing, his go-with-the-flow nature, his happiness to please.

Jamie leaned against the side of his car seat and discovered a design flaw: it was between him and Mel. He did the next best thing and put his hand outside of it, palm up. Mel took the hint and held it for the next hour while they chatted and he shared his snack crackers with her. She rubbed her thumb on the back of his hand and held his bottle for him occasionally. His bear was jealous, Jamie could tell.

First he fell asleep, and then she did. Amanda looked back after a while. There were perks to the backseat, like not feeling guilty for falling asleep and leaving the driver alone.

Jamie woke up first. His hand wasn’t in Mel’s anymore. He couldn’t tell if Amanda was awake, but even if she was, he didn’t want to wake up Mel. He sat in silence watching the canopy of trees go by outside the window. From his vantage point, that’s what there was to look at, just the upper most branches and leaves. They were the survivors, the dark reds and oranges holding out against the browns and greys, each one striving to be the last bright leaf on its tree, maybe the last leaf to fall. Jamie could sympathize with a leaf in autumn. He had that kind of determination too; the desire to hold on when there was no point anymore made him respect each little leaf that refused to join the fallen on the forest floor below.

“Mom,” he whispered, “are we almost there?”

“Not quite. We just got off the highway, and we’re going to make a special lunch stop.” Jamie figured this would be the best time for it and filled his diaper. That had gotten easier, maybe even too easy, and certainly more frequent since he began nursing. Amanda had undersold the laxative effect of the breastmilk, and timing his bowel movements to ensure he never had to wait long for a change had gotten more challenging. And Becky had been right. His poopy diapers didn’t stink as much as before he’d started nursing; he was enduring three or four changes a day, and he was having to endure seven or eight diaper checks, including in public, as Becky and even Amanda took the precaution of checking to make sure he was clean just in case, something even Becky rarely did before.

Still, for all that, nursing from Becky was more than worth it. He felt closer to her every day. Their relationship wasn’t like what he had with Amanda. It was as intense though, and what made it different, he decided, is she felt more to him like his mom now than his guardian. He thought about the mall daycare incident and contrasted it to his experiences growing up. He got in plenty of trouble bouncing from foster home to foster home, and except for when he lived with Mrs. Vilalba, that meant getting screamed at most of the time, hit some of the time, and left alone and crying just about every time.

Becky never raised her voice to him, not ever, and when she was done giving him a consequence on the two occasions she felt it necessary, she didn’t send him to his room alone to cry. She held him, talked about what he’d done wrong, and let him cry out his feelings, knowing they had nothing to do with the consequence itself. He remembered how distressed she sounded when his head was buried in her shirt, the strain she put on ‘please’ when she pleaded with him to tell her what was really upsetting him.

She loved him so much his own emotional pain her hurt too. Jamie couldn’t say from childhood experience, but that struck him as a very ‘mom’ thing to feel, an essential emotional connection without which there was no real bond between parent and child, big and little, Becky and Baby Bear. The more time he spent in her arms, more these past weeks than since he arrived, the more he stopped thinking of her as his big, even as his big whom he called ‘Mom.’ She was just his mom now.

“Ughh,” Amanda said groggily, “Are we stopping soon.” So she had been asleep.

“Almost. Do you need the potty, baby,” Becky asked. Amanda rolled her eyes, hoping her mom wouldn’t do this all weekend.

“No, but Jamie does.”

“My goodness,” Mel joined in, having just been dozing. Jamie hadn’t been paying much attention. He’d gone kind of a lot, and they were right. He was one stinky little boy.

“Almost there,” Becky said.

“Sorry,” he said shyly, blushing.

“Aww,” Mel said, reaching over to ruffle his hair, “You don’t need to be sorry for that,” she said as she rolled down a window.

Becky pulled off the road into the gravel parking lot of a cabin with a badly weathered but still legible signboard out front. It looked like the kind of place you’d find in the woods off the main road, but Jamie knew it had to be good or the lot wouldn’t be nearly full and the cars wouldn’t be so nice. It looked like a destination restaurant, the kind of place that made its reputation and became a must-stop eatery on the road to the resort area they were heading to, the reason Becky called it ‘special.’

Jamie didn’t want to be in the same space as his diaper and could hardly blame everyone for bailing from the car like it was on fire. Becky unbuckled him and Amanda grabbed the diaper bag from the backseat.

“I got him, Mom,” she said as she closed the door.

“No, I think this is definitely a ‘mom’ responsibility,” Becky replied.

“Really,” Amanda said back, “Consider it my thanks for the trip.” Becky shrugged and handed Jamie over. She was more than fine not dealing with what felt like a two-alarm diaper resting on her forearm.

“C’mon, squirt,” Amanda said as she followed the sign for the restrooms around the back of the building. They were pleased to see a family restroom, but when Amanda opened the door they found it wasn’t the modern changing-tables-automatically-cleaned-in-the-wall-style restroom so much as a poorly-ventilated-bathroom-in-an-eighty-year-old-cabin-style restroom.

“Ugh,” Amanda said. She only had so much fortitude. She looked at the picnic tables a few yards past the building. Would anyone be using them now that it was too cold to be eating outside? She opened the door to the lady’s room and let it close before daylight could spill in. “Do you mind doing this out here?”

“Compared to in there? I’d rather just sit in it than go in there.”

“Good. Gonna be a little chilly for you though. Sorry.” She carried Jamie to the table and stood him on top of it while she spread out a changing mat and laid out his supplies. “Turn around for me.” He did and she felt his diaper. “Geez, Jamie. Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah,” he scoffed.

“Then are you feeling noticeably lighter?”

“Too bad there’s no audience for your clever zingers,” he retorted.

“I think the safest thing to do is take your sleeper all the way off.”

“Really?”

“If you want to be sure to keep it clean.”

“It’s cold out.”

“I know, buddy, I’m sorry. I’ll be as quick as I can.” She unzipped him, and he put one hand on her shoulder for balance as she helped him step out. He put his arms around himself and shivered, wearing only a full diaper.

“What are you doing,” he asked as she looked inside the sleeper thoroughly.

“Making sure your sleeper is, in fact, still clean … Yep, it’s good.” She turned him around again. “And a close call. If you’d laid down first we’d be changing your whole outfit. Can you lay down while keeping your butt off the changing pad?”

“Yes,” he sighed. At least they were the only ones out there. He thought there was nothing left about wearing and using diapers that could humiliate him, but there he was on a picnic table behind a restaurant wearing an over-used diaper and about to be completely naked and in need of a thorough wiping. Either this was the most embarrassing thing that could happen because he wore diapers, or his imagination was too afraid to speculate about rock bottom.

Amanda helped him down and laid his sleeper horizontally across his chest so he would have at least a little warmth. She untaped his diaper and lifted his ankles high to keep the changing pad clean. She cleaned him as quickly as she could, set Jamie down, and rolled up the nasty diaper. She smeared him with rash cream until he felt sticky, dusted his new diaper with powder and sprinkled some on his belly because his skin soft and made him smell sweet, and got him in a new diaper.

“Why a nighttime diaper,” he asked as she helped him back into this sleeper. They always kept one in the diaper bag, but they’d never used it.

“In case you do that again,” she said as she hugged him and vigorously rubbed his back to warm him up. “And you are getting bubble bath when we get to the lodge. You warm enough again?”

“Yeah, mostly.” She picked him up and sat down on the bench.

“Mind if we have a little talk?”

This concerned Jamie. Had he done something he shouldn’t have? Was she worried he’d be too affectionate with Mel? “Um, no,” he said.

“It’s just been a while since we talked about it. I didn’t know if you felt you could still talk about it or not, so I wanted to ask you if you’re still okay with the diapers.” That was a relief to Jamie; a much better conversation than one about him being affectionate with Mel.

He took a deep breath. “I’m used to it.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to keep wearing them.”

He thought for a moment. He’d thought on this periodically, so it wasn’t something he had to think long on. “I think you were right. They did ... They did help me, us … You know what I mean?”

“Mhmm.”

“And I,” he paused and blushed. “… They … I like the way they feel now; not always, I mean when, well, you know, um, but … well...” He opted to stop talking and just blushed instead.

“I know what you mean.” She remembered what they felt like. She had no desire to wear them again, but she knew they didn’t feel bad and sometimes even felt very good, not that she’d ever confess to anyone except Jamie.

Left unsaid, and maybe only subconsciously known to Jamie, was that his relationship with Becky and Amanda was different than it would otherwise be because he wore diapers. The doting care he received from them, the the playfulness with which they treated something objectively unpleasant to their senses, were reassurances of how much they loved him. No job was so dirty that they didn’t approach it cheerfully, reassuring him they’d fix it with a smile because they loved him.

“And I like that we get to have these little moments and talks,” he added.

“I like our special time together too,” Amanda said, “I like it when my little bear needs me to make it all better. I’ll always be here for you to make anything all better.”

He hugged her tighter. “I hope you know I’m always here for you too,” he said.

Amanda expelled the air from her lungs hard with the sudden swell of emotion. Another thing she’d learned from having a little that she hadn’t known before: they can all of a sudden make you feel such a strong, sweet, almost painfully deep sense of love with just a word or gesture or expression. She had imagined that it would never feel like an organic relationship, that it would instead always be artificial, just a figure of speech to call him her little brother. But he was her brother, and she was his sister, and they both knew it.

“Me too, buddy.” She put both arms around him and squeezed hard before standing him back on the table to keep the soles of his footies clean while she packed away their things. “Ready for some lunch?” She put the diaper bag on her shoulder, Jamie on her hip, and asked him to carry the used diaper to drop in the outside trash on their way inside.

“Geez, I did that,” he said when he felt the weight of the thing.

“Are you sure you’re feeling okay? You haven’t had a tummy ache or something?”

“No.”

When they got inside, sighing at the warmth given off by the wide fireplace, and found Mom and Mel, Becky asked Amanda what took so long.

“Not easy changing a bomb like that on a picnic table,” Amanda defended herself. “I had to completely undress Jamie.” He turned red; he didn’t mind diapers, but he still felt mildly embarrassed when they were openly discussed, especially when the topic was what he’d done in one.

“Why didn’t you change him in the restroom?”

“Because they’re gross.”

The waitress overheard as she approached. “Is there a problem with our restrooms, Miss?”

“Well,” Amanda said apologetically, “it dirty and smells awful in there.”

“In those,” the waitress asked, pointing down a hall past the dining room.

“No, in the ones outside.”

“O! Those are closed for the season. They should be locked; was one of them open?”

Amanda closed her eyes and rubbed them with her thumbs and forefingers.

“Seriously,” Jamie asked, “I … just … I’m cold and would like some hot tea,” he said. He flipped up the hood on his footies, brushed his bunny ears out of his eyes, and folded his arms across his chest.

“Two,” Amanda said, her head down and eyes still closed, holding up two fingers. “Stop laughing, Mel.”

“How do you know I’m laughing,” Mel said, trying to sound like she wasn’t laughing.

“I can see you laughing through my eyelids. You too, Mom.”

“I’m laughing at how cute Jamie’s ‘serious face’ looks in his bunny outfit,” Becky said. She picked him up out of his chair, kissed him on the cheek, and set him in her lap, rubbing him down to warm him up more. “My adorable boy. I’m sorry that happened.” He smiled at her and hugged her back, confident she was laughing with him and not at him.

“I’m laughing at Amanda,” Mel said without a trace of an apology.