Diapers and Pool Parties
Date Published: June 15, 2023, 12:00am
Written By: alex_bridges
This is my latest entry in my Tis The Season series of holiday stories about an unnamed protagonist who was put back in diapers by their partner after their accidents kept getting worse and worse. You canread another entry of the serieshere andsee the full series on my Patreon.
It was so nice of your new neighbors to host the neighborhood block party for Memorial Day. They’d only moved in a month ago, and they’d generously offered to combine their house warming with the block party as a chance to get to know everyone. You hadn’t met them yet; in fact, you hardly knew any of your neighbors.
Your partner and you contributed a cake to the celebration, patriotically frosted with “WELCOME!” in red and blue against a white background. Your partner is the baker, but they insisted you help this year. You did okay with the white icing, and they so patiently tried to help you with the lettering. Even though they had to take over, you were still complimented for being “such a good helper,” a phrase that made you happy even though it gave you pause, the generic word helper coupled with the cheery delivery, like what you’d say to a small child whose sole contribution to a task was to be present in the room.
With the help of a beer to loosen your tongue, you find yourself joining in the conversations your partner starts or joins. They’re so much better at parties than you, so much better at socializing and making new friends in general. It’s not that you’re bad at it, just that you’re never sure how to jump into a conversation in progress, how to interrupt to introduce yourself or say hello. Or what to talk about. It’s easier, though, at these summer parties, always the weather and travel plans as topics to fall back on.
You take a second beer from the cooler, and your partner notices. You notice them noticing, and you pause with your hand still on the lid until they give a shallow nod and a slight smile, more in the eyes than the lips, as though giving you permission. You smile back and close the lid, pushing out of your mind the kinds of questions you’ve found yourself happier if you don’t think about. Did I just get caught at something? Did I just get permission for something? Would I be in trouble if I hadn’t? Am I the type of adult who gets in trouble for not asking for things? Is there even such a thing as an adult like that?
Ever since your partner put you back in diapers after years of your worsening incontinence, little things like that have come up more and more. You know they were right to force the issue with the diapers, that you were only fooling yourself that your bigger and more frequent accidents could be managed any other way. And the light domestic discipline; you’d thought at first it was a sex thing, but you’d discovered it was just ordinary discipline, a spanked bottom a consequence for bad choices that your partner can’t overlook. Once or twice a year over their knee, but then once you were back in diapers, it grew more frequent. Were you really so naughty? No, your partner assured you, it was just that they’d neglected your need for discipline, overlooking certain behaviors that just aren’t okay, and just like you needed to trust them when they told you it was back to diapers - right then, not up for discussion - you needed to trust them that they knew you’d be happier and your relationship stronger if you let them give you consequences for poor choices. You consented to that too, and after a transition period that saw your bottom reddened two or three times a month, it’s now settled down to once every four weeks. Sometimes even five weeks, another of those silly things that makes you feel proud for reasons you don’t care to interrogate. Other consequences are rarer, like losing your phone privileges for a day. But some are more common, like the timeouts your partner calls pauses. Do you need to take a pause, they ask, except for those times they outright tell you to take one. Usually that just means to go sit in the bedroom or on the couch quietly for ten minutes, maybe twenty, but every so often it means corner time. Standing in the corner or sitting on stairs somehow feels even more childish than a trip across their lap. How it makes you feels more loved, more taken care of, closer to them - it doesn’t make any sense, but neither do a lot of things since your return to diapers.
Like the way everyone just accepts that you need diapers, like the way needing diapers makes other important people in your life - your parents, your partner’s parents, your sister, and even a few close friends - regard anything related to your diapers as fair topics of open conversation, like they’re talking about a toddler’s potty habits.
And what makes the least sense of all, the way those closest to you take responsibility for your diapers, checking and changing and sometimes even in semi-privacy, as though being back in diapers means you don’t have modesty or need privacy anymore, that your need for diapers supersedes those needs. Like at your cousin’s graduation party two weeks ago.
Your partner took you upstairs to the nursery to change you into dry diaper, and mid-change, your aunt walked in with your infant cousin. You were flat on your back on your changing pad; your cousin was flat on their back on their changing table, and your aunt and partner started chatting like two moms changing diapers in a public restroom. Your partner even borrowed some of your cousin’s rash cream, with your aunt extolling its value as your partner rubbed it into your bottom. It was your cousin’s nursery, your cousin needed changed (much worse than you, so at least there was that), your aunt and your partner are friendly, and your partner had been looking for a diaper cream that worked better for your sensitive skin, but surely your aunt could’ve waited outside. How did your nudity become not at all a big deal, like no one else was embarrassed by it or for you and therefore you shouldn’t be embarrassed for it or for your diapers or for needing changed or who did it and when and where anymore than your cousin should? But that’s what had happened.
It’s a good thing that people are endlessly adaptable, and you’ve adapted. You can’t really say you have any restrictions; it’s not like you live with a list of rules. Well, except one: no telling your partner no when they tell you in no uncertain terms how it’s going to be. You tested that boundary a few times - more than you would admit - and your bottom paid the price.
But even still, your partner is reasonable and sweet and loves you unconditionally. You’re usually hiding your face behind your arms during changes, but not once has your partner, that you’ve noticed, ever even made a yucky face chasing your dirty diapers. They did back before they put you in diapers, back when you were having so many accidents in your underpants and your partner helped you clean up sometimes, but never to an accident in your diaper. They don’t even call them accidents anymore. “Accidents are when it happens in your undies,” your partner explained, “but you’re supposed to use your diapers. You don’t have accidents anymore, just incidents.” You liked that, the way your partner found a clever way to make you rethink your problem.
You are happier now than before that Thanksgiving when you went back in diapers. Happier in every way. You’re even happier when your partner tells you no, not right then but later because you keep finding they were right, just like when they said it was time to stop pretending you didn’t need diapers.
So what does it matter if you maybe kinda sorta without meaning to asked permission to have a second beer? You didn’t, not really, you quickly decide and rejoin the conversation. And after a while, your partner suggested you go get yourself something to eat. “Do you want me to bring you something,” you ask.
“No,” they say, “but thanks. I’m going to go find Carol and ask about her trip to the beach last week. I’ll find something later. Why don’t you go introduce yourself to our hosts?”
You couldn’t pick Carol out of a crowd, but your partner, as always, seems to know everyone. As you wait in line at the buffet, you have a flashback to Independence Day last year, waiting in line for a snow cone when your partner appeared from nowhere swatting you out of line and admonishing you to never wander away in a crowd of strangers. How embarrassing that was and how absurd the entire notion that you - an adult - couldn’t go anywhere you want was. Did they tell you to go find something to eat and not come with you because the crowd is smaller or because she knows most of the people there or because you at least can recognize people if not out a name to the face? You don’t know, and you don’t even ask yourself the question.
And all the food looks so good. This time you do ask yourself questions. Can I have two hotdogs? Can I have two desserts? But you don’t ask bigger questions, like Why am I asking if I can rather if I want to or if I should? Can according to whom?
With a full plate, you scan the backyard for a place to sit or stand, and someone you recognize but don’t actually know calls out, “Come sit with us.” A brief pause as you look around to see who said it. “Over here. We got an empty seat.”
Though you don’t know their name, they know yours, and seemingly without any effort, they’ve managed to make you a part of conversation with five other people. A few are a little younger; a few are a little older than you. It somehow seems effortless, like this person has adopted you into the friend group, like you’ve made a new friend you’re drawn to, the charisma, the their welcoming nature. You admire them, oddly enough, such a strong emotion for so small a gesture and so brief an acquaintance. But it’s been a long while since you made new friends. Adulthood is hard like that. You receive an invitation to their house; it’s just half a block down, and they have a pool. How about some swimming and staying for the barbecue they’re putting on for some other fitness and family this evening?
You quickly accept the invitation and go to tell your partner. You spot them across the yard, and they spot you coming. “I saw you with that big plate,” they say. “Did you get enough?”
It’s not reproachful. Just the opposite. You eat responsibly, mostly at their insistence, but holidays are cheat days, and your partner is happy to see you digging in.
“We got invited to a pool party snd barbecue for dinner,” you tell them after affirming you had enough and then some. They’re proud of you for stepping outside your comfort zone and making a friend. “Do you wanna go,” they ask.
“Yeah, I was gonna go home and change. They were heading home now and said to come over whenever.”
“Gimme just a sec to say goodbye to someone and I’ll come with you.” You wait patiently and your partner returns, walking back to your house and asking, “Are you gonna swim?”
“Mhmm. I was going to change into my bathing suit and walk over.”
“Sweetie, aren’t you forgetting something?”
Such a silly question. If you were forgetting something, how could you know it? And anyway, you weren’t forgetting anything. But your partner wouldn’t ask if they didn’t think you were forgetting something. You step inside into the cold air conditioning. Goosebumps rise on your forearms. It’s going to be a hot summer.
“First things first,” your partner says. Your shorts are open at the fly with the flick of their fingers at the button, and their palm presses against your diaper. Of course you’re wet; you knew that. Two beers plus water; how much easier it’s been since going back to diapers for your partner to keep track of how well hydrated you are and admonish you to drink more water anytime your wet diapers are even a little darker than straw yellow.
“Any messes,” they ask. It’s rhetorical because they check even when you say no, like right then as they turned you around, tug out the back of your diaper along with your shorts, and peek down. “Clean,” they pronounce you as you button your shorts again. In fairness to you, you know when you’re messy. In fairness to your partner, you don’t always know. Smaller, runnier messes sometimes sneak past you. Even they’re surprised on occasion, laying you down to change a wet diaper and discovering a teeny tiny mess. It doesn’t bother you any more than it does them, and it’s only because you’re ticklish that you giggle when their fingers tickle your belly with the playful announcement, “You had a sneaky one!”
Just by the location, your partner knows which couple is hosting the pool party. “Did you mention your condition to them,” your partner asks.
Of course you didn’t. Why on earth would you? Your partner took the liberty of telling family and close friends when you returned to diapers, believing it would make it easier if they just knew so you wouldn’t have the stress of trying to hide being back in diapers. A few not-so-close friends and causal acquaintances knew or were told, but there just seemed like no reason to tell your neighbors you just met, especially at a party.
“Of course not,” you told your partner.
“I think before you get in their pool, you have to tell them.”
You’re taken aback. “W-why?”
“Because it’s not a public pool. What if you have an incident in it? They have a right to know that might happen before you get in.”
“But … I don’t wanna tell them. I just met them.”
“I know them, and they’re very nice people.”
“But I … I don’t know them. Can’t I just … It’ll be fine.”
“It probably will be, but it would be very inconsiderate to take the risk. And what about out of the pool? Were you just going to come home, change out of your diaper into a bathing suit and just go over there?”
“Well, yeah; just for a little while,” you say, your voice falling as you say it.
“Baby,” your partner calls you, “you can’t be out of diapers. Not even for a little bit. You haven’t been out of diapers except for bathing and air time in almost two years.” Air time, that embarrassing time every so often when your partner decides you need some air on your diaper area and leaves you bare bottomed sitting on a pad or open diaper. It does help stop a little irritation from turning into a diaper rash, but that doesn’t make wandering around the house with your butt hanging out carrying a diaper to sit on, which always proves necessary even if it’s just for an hour, any less embarrassing.
Your partner can see you are disappointed and they are sympathetic. “So here’s what we can do,” they say. “We can call over there right now and talk about your problem, and if they’re okay with it, then you can wear a swim diaper in their pool and then we’ll change you into a regular diaper when you get out. Or if you don’t want to ask them, you can go over in your regular clothes and you can put your feet in the pool. Or, if you want, we can stay home or go back to the block party.”
“But I already told them I’d come.”
“We can make up some excuse.”
“But I wanna go.”
“Then you have two choices: tell them you need swim diapers and make sure they’re okay with you in their pool, or you can just stay out of the water.”
Swim diapers. Your partner bought some for you last summer, and you’d stayed out of pools entirely. You really like to swim; you just can’t imagine they wouldn’t be obvious under a bathing suit and uncomfortable and heavy. The disposable ones and the washable ones. You still went to the public pool a few times, waiting in line at the gate and reading the rules board out of boredom: All persons who are not potty trained or are incontinent must wear a swim diaper or plastic pants. A rule that on any given day at the pool almost certainly applies only to the babies, the toddlers, and to you. You just stuck your feet in, stayed in your street clothes, and felt hot and out of place. You mostly sat under an umbrella at the snack bar thinking of your partner’s plan to slip into the disabled changing room discreetly so no one would see you two going in together and wonder why you would need help changing, especially as you emerged wearing the same clothes you were wearing when you went in.
“Do you wanna try the swim diapers,” your partner asked you when they got them. They thought they were getting you a surprise, that you’d be happy to be able to swim despite your condition. “I promise they’re not really noticeable.” They tried to prove it to you last year, put you in the disposable kind and the reusable kind and both at the same time, taking pictures of you before and after you stood in the shower to show that dry or wet, they weren’t noticeable. They told you over and over you only thought you could tell because you knew and that other people wouldn’t be able to tell.
You shake your head at the thought of telling the neighbors you need to wear diapers in case you soil in their pool. “But I already said I’d go swimming,” you reply, whining more than you mean to in a tone that announces you’ve already giving up. And what does it matter if you’d said you were going to get in the water? You sound like a tween embarrassed to have to back out of something because your mom won’t let you. It’s like the time your bedwetting had returned and you’d agreed to a sleepover thinking you could convince her you could go one night without your protection, but she wouldn’t let you. She offered to call your friend’s mom and explain, promised the grown-ups would help you keep your secret, but your fear of being found out was greater than the embarrassment of having to tell your friend you couldn’t come after all. And when your friend was disappointed and kept pressing you to come and asking why you couldn’t, you admitted that your mom wouldn’t let you, which felt like a childish reason for a tween. That you’d been told no; and you couldn’t even say why you were told no. It was a long time before you got invited to another sleep over. Not that the memory is springing to mind. You’re repressing it, your mind doing the hard work of pushing the apt comparison aside to avoid the harder work of confronting it and the cognitive dissonance it would create between your self-image as an independent adult and the reality of your dependence on diapers and your partner as voice of reason and more and more as a provider of care and guidance.
“Let me call Joyce,” your partner offers.
“Who’s Joyce?”
“The wife of the person who invited you.” They know your name, and your partner knows their names and their phone number. There’s something vaguely childish about it, your blissful unawareness. “I’ll explain it to her. She’ll understand, and she’ll make him understand.” Like your mom offering to explain your bed wetting to your friend’s mom. It didn’t make it any better.
Nor does stamping your foot make it better as you cry, “It’s not fair!”
“What’s not fair, sweetie?” Your partner and their many pet names for you. Some playful and teasing, most of them sweet and heartfelt. Throughout all the years together, the worsening incontinence, your obstinance, you’re upset with the return to diapers, they’ve been so endlessly patient and caring, but you still can’t always help, in your more frustrated moments, taking out your disappointment on them.
“You. Just let me go the way I want.”
“Is that what’s really not fair in this situation,” they ask Socratically. That’s their favorite form of lecture when you get like this and when you’re in trouble, the Socratic lecture, asking you questions to help you arrive at the right decision through your own logic rather than having their logic forced on you. Well, except sometimes it does need to be forced. This time they don’t wait for an answer.
“What’s unfair,” they say, “is that you have this condition. It’s not fair, but it is what it is. What would be l unfair to Joyce and Frank is if you pooped in their pool, especially without a swim diaper on. And it would be unfair to get in their pool, even with a swim diaper, without letting them decide whether they’re comfortable with that. Swim diapers aren’t perfect, and it’s their pool.”
All of that is unfair. You know it is. And it’s not your partner’s fault. It’s unfair that swimming, something you grew up doing and still love to do, is impacted by your condition more than any other hobby. You’ve basically given it up.
“And,” your partner continues, “you don’t have accidents anymore. If you go into their pool without a swim diaper and make a poopoo, that would be an accident, your first accident in almost two years. That would be much more embarrassing than me talking to Joyce and Joyce talking to Frank. It would embarrass you and and ruin their barbecue. That would be unfair. So isn’t it better to not risk an accident and be prepared for an incident instead?”
This time they want you to answer for yourself. You ignore the blunt yet childish references to what you might do in their pool, or maybe you’re just used to them.
“Yes,” you say weakly. You sniffle, and your partner steps across the few feet separating you to wrap you in one of their enveloping hugs.
“I know this is hard. We’ll make it work. Do you want me to talk to Joyce today, or would you rather wait?” You think about it, and your partner interjects with, “It’s okay to wait. You can just put your feet in and if your friends wonder why you aren’t swimming just tell them you don’t feel like it. If they think you’re not cool just for that then they’re not good friends for you anyway.”
Why would your partner think that’s what you’re worried about? Is that what you’re worried about? Having said you’d go swimming, are you worried your new friend will think less of you for not getting in the water? Are you trying to impress this person you just met. It’s just silly when you think of it like that. You’re all adults; of course no one is going to judge you for not getting in the water. But somewhere deep inside, is that what you’re worried about? Like that kid you used to be who was worried about being judged by their friends, first for needing nighttime protection and then for backing out of a sleepover?
Nonsense. Of course you’re not. That’s what you tell yourself. “I don’t want to tell Joyce today,” you say to your partner.
“Okay. We’ll go, you can put your feet in, and I’ll talk to her later this week, alright, hun?” You nod. “But before we go over there, I want you to take a nap.”
“I’m not tired,” you protest.
Your partner knows you need a quick nap. They know you’re tired and that you’ll want to stay late at their pool party, maybe have another beer or two. They know the more tired you get, the more likely you are to make a choice that needs a consequence, and they don’t want to have to take you home from the party early or put you over their knee before bedtime or give you a timeout. But they don’t explain any of that to you because you don’t need to know it. You just need to know that you are tired and need a nap, and failing that, to know you need to do what your partner tells you. So all they say is, “You are tired. I can see it in your eyes. You’ll feel much better if you lay down for twenty minutes. You want me to lay down with you?”
“Mhmm.”
“Okay; go hop in bed and I’ll be there in a minute.”
They consider taking your diaper bag to the party and decide against it. You can slip away for a quick change if you need it. They climb into bed and make themselves the big spoon, and thirty minutes later, you’re both awake and you’re grogginess only proves the point. They start to change you into a fresh diaper, and as soon as they open it, they declare, “You made a sneaky one! Not surprised after all that beer and junk food and sugar.”
You’d have had an accident in their pool almost as soon as you got there. Not that you think about that, but your partner does as they clean you up. They’re right as usual, and they’ll talk to your new friend’s wife and make sure they understand and help you be friends.
See the full series on my Patreon.