Bed Wetter!

 

Imagine, if you will,  a lovely green park, with flowers and a gentle breeze keeping the summer sun at a balmy and pleasurable level. The sounds of birds in the trees, and the occasional buzz of a passing, busy bee. Suddenly, you feel the urge to visit the bathroom. Looking around, you spot a public convenience, and run towards it, barefoot on the lovely, vibrant and soft grass. Dashing into a cubicle and fighting with your underwear, you notice a small wave of panic. Is this real? Have you imagined this necessary oasis for bodily functions, as this has happened before?  Stretch out your hands, feel the rough surface of the painted door in front of you, scrape your fingernails along the bricks either side of you, and the mortar between those bricks, the cold sharp surprise of wood and porcelain beneath you as you sit. One more time, push against the walls either side of you, then pinch yourself to make sure you are actually, really, awake and sitting on the loo. Convinced that all is well, the sheer relief of pent-up urination begins, and the pressure begins to fade. But wait! This cannot be! Why is there a sudden and inexplicable warmth spreading around your thighs? Horror and terror snap you out of your lovely dream, for that is what it was. Just a dream. Again. That’s when your heart begs itself to stop beating and let you just die. Yet another nightmare of a wet bed. You know what the outcome of this will be. No matter the balancing act of trying to sleep perched right on the very edge of your sodden mattress, or the knowledge that you will be severely beaten for doing this again, obviously on purpose. Because, as everyone knows, no-one enjoys a public, humiliating and extremely painful leathering for something they have no control over, day after day, after day, for years on end.  It’s clear to anyone with even half a brain that this continued, repetitive punishment will not break this disgusting habit, as that is obviously what it is. Willfully making every bedtime/night-time more and more frightening every 24 hours or so, it’s a weird fetish all right. Knowing the coming joy of realizing that, even though you’ve drunk nothing at all after 5pm in the evening, you have the utter pleasure of knowing that your own body and mind can fool you into thinking you are safe to go for a wee safely. That you have the sheer delight of having no control over your own bodily functions, the complete self-loathing and self-hatred as there is nothing else to be felt at that time. The beating that will follow the next morning’s (expected) discovery by one’s care givers, (and I use that term most loosely), fills your entire being with cold, heavy and wretched dread.  There is no way that any beating or other punishment, however elaborate or cleverly thought through, (!!!!), can make you feel worse or more disgusted with yourself than you already do.

Perhaps a better way of dealing with this is not to punish. At all. Maybe try something a little more intelligent, if that’s at all possible by the folks who just hit to solve ‘problems/bad behaviour/bad habits. There is always a reason for bed-wetting, and it is never, I repeat, NEVER, because a child is doing it on purpose, or to piss you off or any other pathetic reason those ‘people’ tell themselves it’s ok to physically, psychologically, spiritually or mentally attack a child with this particular problem. It is literally a cry for help, only made possible when all that child’s defenses are down, (i.e; unconscious).

Mine was brought on by a family member’s sexual assault on me when I was 5 years old.  I still remember the disgusting stink of a the over 55 year old man’s swollen and angry-looking thing that I now know was his penis. He wanted me to meet his little friend, and for us to be friends together. I almost puked as he encouraged me to touch it, and when I refused, he suggested maybe a little kiss would be a good idea, pushing his crotch closer to me. If it liked me, it might spit at me but apparently, this was a good thing. This man had shown me nothing but dislike for as long as I could remember, so his suddenly wanting to be friendly meant a great deal to me. (His wife and mother-in-law had me visiting every weekend, mainly to give my abused and over-worked/overwhelmed mother a break for a couple of days, dealing with 2, 3 and then 4 more children younger than myself and her useless sack-o-shite of a husband. This weekend getaway was my respite too, from exactly the same thing, including said sack-o-shite’s obnoxious, cruel, narcissistic and violent behaviour to all and any who were younger, smaller and weaker than himself).  I didn’t actually have to connect my tiny little girl lips to his revolting bit of gristle, as his wife burst through the unusually closed kitchen door, (it was always left wide open), and ordered me out. The door slammed shut behind me as I was pushed out of the room. There was an almighty, deafening silence that seemed to go on forever. Eventually, the wife came out, saw me cowering in an armchair in the corner, and spat out the words, “Least said, soonest mended”, and stomped off, clearly furious. Eventually, the old pervert came out of the kitchen, saw me, glared at me as though he could kill me, and went out for a while. Nothing was ever mentioned about that incident ever again, but it haunted me for years. There was no comforting, no explaining, nothing. Just complete silence for the next 40-odd years. When I did mention the incident to her all that time later, she told me I was wrong, it wasn’t me who he had attacked, it was her own daughter, not me, and anyway, it was donkey’s years ago, so didn’t matter anymore. I couldn’t tell either parent, as they would have stopped me from going to spend my weekends with my Nana, (who I adored despite appearances of the opposite), and I really needed that time away from what was laughingly known as ‘home’.

Ever since that incident, the pervert continued to treat me with utter contempt, openly hostile towards me every chance he got. No-one challenged him about this, as far as I’m aware, the consensus being that he felt pushed out by me, (a baby!), so had reasonable cause to be ‘grumpy’! Pah!

Eventually, after lots had happened to ‘home’ and ‘family’, (thankfully all disbanded), and after a particularly nasty few months of bullying, (the culmination of years of it), I took an overdose of barbiturates, stolen over weeks until I thought I had enough to do the job of finishing me off. It didn’t. However, whilst still under the influence of such strong drugs, he leaned over me one afternoon, and hissed some vileness into my face. Bad move. I don’t know how I did it, but I sank all of my very sharp fingernails into his miserable, grey, ugly and hate-filled face.  The bellow he let out pleased me no end, and brought his wife rushing into the room to see what all the noise was about. His face was scratched to bits, I believe I even left a couple of nails embedded in his bony phizzog, and he bled. It didn’t assuage any of the thousands of beatings his revolting behaviour 11 years previously had caused, but I can relive it, time and again, and each time wish I’d carried on scratching, kicking, biting and beating the little shit of a ‘human’ being it thought itself to be into the miserable oblivion it deserved.