Done Adulting Vol. 1 Ch. 40

Jamie spent the rest of the evening alone his room except for dinner and a bedtime bath. He was glad it was Becky who gave it to him and got him ready for bed. In a way, she was blameless. She didn’t and couldn’t, apparently, know. Amanda, on the other hand, didn’t have that excuse.

He wondered what it meant for Amanda to be okay keeping him in diapers when she knew he didn’t need them. Even if she believed it was emotionally therapeutic, she knew it was physically unnecessary, and yet she not only went along with it but actively participated in it. She touched him down there – several times a day – and thought nothing of it. As much as she treated him more maturely than anybody else, if she did it knowing it was unnecessary, then she also did it clearly in the belief that it didn’t matter whether it was necessary or not, and that his feelings about it were a secondary concern.

What was that? Demeaning? Violating? Yet he knew Amanda would never demean him, not intentionally. She’d more likely cut her arm off than knowingly violate him. All Jamie had to do, he knew, was to tell her he felt those things, and she would stop, and she’d find a way to force her mother to stop.

But Jamie knew she didn’t intend to demean him, and he did not believe she’d do this for selfish reasons, nor to please her mother. Those motives weren’t in Amanda, not when it came to Jamie. If her motives were not unkind, that only left kind. Amanda went along with keeping him in diapers, Jamie decided, because she cared about him and believed in what she was doing. She may have been misguided. But then, maybe she wasn’t.

Still, that evening Jamie was mad at her, or at least he wanted to be. She took such good care of him. Jamie thought hard on that. He asked himself, how many people in your life took care of you, not because they had to but because they wanted to; not in some perfunctory way, but with dedication and tenderness?

He wished she hadn’t told him. He had become resigned to it, or at least it was getting easier to ignore, and now it was front and center again.

And it complicated his feelings toward her. Up until that day, there was nothing complex about their relationship at all: she loved him unconditionally, he trusted her in every way. The former had not changed. Jamie didn’t know if the latter was still true or not. Is it possible to still trust someone after discovering they knew they were doing something you had plainly said you didn’t want, something as personal as this?

So Becky bathed him and put him to bed. Amanda noticed. It wasn’t that Amanda always did those things. She didn’t. It was more that Jamie didn’t say much during dinner. He didn’t follow her around in the evening. His hug wasn’t as tight as it was all the other nights. It would have hurt less if he just yelled at her.

And the person Amanda always talked to when she felt uncertain or anxious or down was the one person she couldn’t talk to about it. Nor could she talk to Jane about it. Nor did she think it appropriate to talk to Mel or, god forbid, Donna. The person she wanted to talk about it with made it pretty plain he didn’t want to talk to her right then.

Amanda and Jamie both went to bed feeling gloomy.