Teenage Bed-Wetter

which would you rather admit to?

I often talk about my long visits to my grandma’s house in rural Missouri during childhood. Well this story really started just a few months prior to that year’s visit when I got my first period during 7th grade Art class. I wasn’t quite used to it yet, and I had failed to properly prepare for this trip by bringing extra pads to my grandma’s with me.

…I also refused to tell my grandma that I had gotten my period. Even after we made our requisite stop at the Bethany Walmart on the way to her house and she, a smart lady who knew how old I was, pointedly asked me if I needed any “feminine supplies,” I shook my head no.

“…You’re sure, now?” She was definitely suspicious. “Yep!” I lied, immediately regretting it and wondering how I was going to manage the week with the one pad I was wearing.

Thankfully, my mom had recently given me a pair of these disposable period “underwear” to try, the precursor to the probably-better washable ones we have now, and they worked kind of like a diaper, but thinner. I did manage to bring one pair of those with me to my grandma’s, and when I had worn my pad for long enough that it was starting to get really… gross… I decided to try the new period underwear with some strategically-placed toilet paper for good measure.

They looked a little something like this, but like, more 90s

A few days after my younger sister and I arrived at our grandma’s, she was to also be hosting her younger brother and sister-in-law, our great uncle and aunt, for a couple days. She was having them sleep in the guest room where we usually slept, and because she didn’t want to have to wash and remake the bed so many times, she had my sister and I sleep in the living room during the couple nights before our aunt and uncle’s visit.

The sleeping bags were warm. Very warm in the cozy, also-warm living room. It was one of those single-wide trailers with the carpeted living room with the heat vent like, directly in the middle of the floor, and I’m pretty sure I was laying right over it. I just remember it was so damn warm. So I get ready for bed, plastic-lined period diaper in place, and I snuggle into my thick, warm as fuck sleeping bag and I go to sleep.

The next morning, I am sweaty. It’s warm in there, like I said, and my period underwear is basically a plastic diaper and there is no airflow. I get out of my sweat-dampened sleeping bag and get up to use the bathroom.

While I’m in the bathroom trying to figure out how to hide my period for yet another day, my grandma is in the living room rolling up the sleeping bags my sister and I have exited. Once I leave the bathroom and come back to the living room, she’s there, looking at me with concern.

“April, did you maybe have a… an accident last night?”

I look back at her, confused. What on earth kind of accident was she talking about? I shake my head in a bewildered sort of way.

“Your sleeping bag was wet. Drenched. Right where your… where you’d pee.”

I remember the sweat, and I tell her:

“Grandma, I was just really hot last night, and I was sweating. I woke up sweaty. It’s not pee. I don’t still wet the bed!” I almost want to laugh. She seems to only hear that I woke up wet in some way and takes this as proof that I peed in the sleeping bag and on the carpet, and that I am not admitting to it because I am embarrassed. I am embarrassed, that’s true, because she thinks I have wet the bed at twelve years old, and I know that I did not. I know this without a shadow of a doubt, because I went to bed with a friggen diaper on last night.

Nevermind that I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d wet the bed, nor was it something I’d ever done as a pre-teen or even older child; if I had wet the bed, the period underwear would have prevented it from leaking through to the sleeping bag, and I definitely would have noticed it when I woke up and went to the bathroom and looked at (and smelled) it.

Of course I did not tell her this. Doing so would be to admit that I had gotten my period, and if I admitted that, I’d then have to explain why I refused to let her buy me pads, and the whole thing just seemed so mortifying that I simply could not bring myself to do it.

So, to avoid the embarrassment of admitting to my own grandmother that I had very normally gotten my period at a normal age and was normally in the middle of this very normal occurrence, I opted to allow her to instead believe that her 12-year-old granddaughter had a new habit of wetting the bed.

Grandma began taking precautions after that. I wasn’t allowed water after a certain time of the evening, which was pure torture for me, a kid who was constantly drinking water and crunching on ice. Hydration was my jam and crunching ice was my stim before either were cool, and because of false bed-wetting accusations that I refused to refute with the actual truth like that aerobics instructor in Legally Blonde who was getting lipo while her husband was being murdered, I was now being kept from one of my favorite activities.

Our great aunt and uncle leave after a few days, and we have a rare opportunity to see my dad, who has recently moved from Arizona with his second wife to a place a few miles away from my grandma. He picks us up and we head to his house.

We didn’t see our dad often as kids — maybe one day every couple years or so — so staying the night at his house was a big deal. He lived in the middle of absolutely nowhere with his wife and their horses and other various ranch creatures. We did all the country stuff we could when we were there, like walk with him to the pond where we’d get covered in leeches, or snag our shirts on barbed wire we’d climb over. We’d take the horses out. I don’t remember riding on one since nearly falling off his old one in Arizona when I was 8, but I remember shampooing a few manes.

So we’re all done with the day and we settle into the living room to watch TV before bed. I ask for some water, and my dad hesitates. “Are you sure? It’s getting pretty late…”

Oh god, I think, Grandma told him. Now Dad thinks I wet the bed. Oh my fucking god.

I huff and I tell my dad I am fine, almost in tears from the humiliation of realizing that this near-stranger whom I still want very badly to impress now believes I am a 12-year-old bed-wetter, and I definitely do not explain to him that I am on my period, actually, and that there is no plausible way that I could have wet the bed with a diaper on.¹

He gets our bed ready for us and asks me, “do you need to use the bathroom?” I glower. I have no memory of him ever asking me this question before, even as a child smaller than my current, non-bed-wetting preteen self. I go to the bathroom like I was already planning to, goddamnit, and I grumble to bed.

We arrive the next day back at Grandma’s house. My period basically over by that point, I’m at least free of that burden and just have to forget about the past couple days of sheer, false-pee-related embarrassment. She still wouldn’t let me have water right before bed, but at least I could sneak sips from the adjacent bathroom faucet if I was desperately thirsty in the night.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, Grandma had been busy after we left for the night at Dad’s: there was suddenly a brand-new crinkly plastic mattress cover under the guest room bed sheets. I protested, saying I didn’t need them, but my protests fell on deaf ears as I refused to provide my proof. I gave in, accepting that, for that visit at least, I would be known as the poor girl who was still wetting her bed too late in life for reasons no one knew.

I guess I was embarrassed, but I am still a little bewildered by my own behavior during this whole trip because my period has always been the “womanly” thing I get annoyingly loud and grotesquely detailed about all the time, and have forever in every other circumstance in my life. My mom loves to tell the story about how I made her hide my training bras under something in the cart at Target but would wave around a box of tampons like it was a trophy. I wasn’t one of those period-lovers who thought it was an amazing expression of womanhood or anything; honestly, I think I just enjoyed grossing people out. I still do.²

I’ve always been this way

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1. I told him this story a couple years ago. Sadly, he did not remember this moment, so the hilarity of the admission was somewhat lost. I will always regret not confessing to my grandma before she died, though. Just up there in Heaven still thinking her oldest granddaughter was a 12-year-old bed-wetter.

2. I presented a project in 9th grade Civics class demonstrating, as a joke, that the liquid used in TV commercials for menstrual products should be red instead of blue so as to not confuse young girls when they get their first period and bleed red. I brought curdled milk in, dyed red, and blue-dyed water with me in squirt bottles and had a friend hold up the poster board while I poured the liquid over the attached adhesive menstrual pads to demonstrate the difference. My male teacher refused to watch. I got an A and received an award for “Most Creative” that year due largely, I think, to that gross little project. I still have it. I would post a picture, but I don’t feel like hunting around storage containers for it right now.