I Looked Up at Mom

By D.B. Jon

 

            I looked up at Mom, who was standing at the door with a stack of freshly laundered clothes in her arms. She had pushed the door to my room open with her toe, a door that I had locked, but had clearly not latched. So it had swung wide open to reveal her 8-year old son sitting on the floor of his room clad only in his little brother’s plastic pants. Timmy, age 4, toddling along behind her, poked his head around her legs, stared at me, and started giggling when he saw the baby pants. The blood drained from my face as I looked at the two of them, and I blushed a bright red. Grandpa Storey always said he had never seen a boy who could blush so darned red in his all his years, and I was certainly doing him proud.

            I was the third oldest in a family of 4 kids. My older sister, Lil, was 12, and featured herself a ballerina in the making. Dad said she was a threat to all mankind, endowed with blond hair and blue eyes that would make Helene of Troy weep. Brother William was 16, about six foot two, and spent a great deal of time fussing with his very red curly hair in front of a mirror in his room. Girls had cooties, so I didn’t understand this strange behavior. But he made it clear that a man his age was above any truck with his childish little brothers and sister – which didn’t exactly explain why my toy soldiers seemed to march into his room all by themselves from time to time. He’d given them all to me a year ago, but always seemed a bit cross, when I played with them.

Somewhere, along the line, I seem to have gotten the short genes in the family, because I was only about four foot six, with brown hair and eyes that Mom called chestnut. While my older siblings were tall, thin and graceful by habit, I was neither, though not pudgy, my square little frame was more solid than slim. Dad said it made me the cute one, and always teased me about my little up-turned nose and freckled baby-face.

            Mom strode across the room, set my clothes on my bed, and matter-of-factly told me that if I wanted to wear Timmy’s baby pants, to put on a pair of shorts before going out to play in the yard. “Take him with you dear. I’m not going to straighten up your rooms with the two of you plaguing me.” She pulled a pair of dark blue shorts out of the pile of laundry, with a T and handed them to me.

            Still blushing madly, I pulled the shorts up over the plastic pants, and skinnied into the shirt. Mom made no further comment until little Timmy giggled that TJ was a baby. “You should talk,” she said – and winked at me. At age 4 he still wore his cloth diapers to bed – with no sign that: “the evening tide was going to recede any time soon,” as Dad put it! In fact, many the times he would come in from the yard, shorts wet down to his socks. Mom would just shake her head, pull them down, and bundle shorts, socks and thick wet training pants into the wash. Tim would just grin happily as she fussed over him as he went back into diapers for the day. At age four and a half, he would run around in them without the slightest bit of shame. I guess I envied him his freedom and guiltless pleasure. I was pretty sure that those “accidents” weren’t accidents – and was surprised and a little jealous that Mom seemed to mind not a bit.

            Shamed as I was to be caught, the plastic pants felt wonderful. I just wished there was a diaper to match my brothers. He had played his tricks this morning, and the two of us were otherwise identically dressed in bright blue shorts, yellow and green striped T’s and bare feet in the large yard behind our house. Mom seemed to always pick the same clothes for the two of us, and William always gave me a hard time about “the little kid shorts I had to wear”. Mom said that the shorts kids wore these days looked silly coming down to their knees, and that these made a lot more sense. It embarrassed me a bit when I played with the guys around the neighborhood, though I thought them really cute on Timmy because I could see his plastic pants whenever he spread his legs or climbed on the backyard gym. It was the hugest you could ever see. Dad had groaned in mock agony at the cost when it had been installed. It had three towers connected by two tunnels, one at ground level, and one above, swings, teeter-totter, monkey bar, ladders, a fireman’s rope, and a slide. All the kids in the neighborhood used it. We arrived in the yard to find Mikey and Sean, two boys half way in age between the two of us already playing at war from the towers. Seeing them made me acutely aware of my underwear, particularly given my shorts. If I could see Timmy’s diapers through the leg holes on his: it was pretty sure they would see my baby pants if I started climbing around with them.

            I don’t know why, but even still I climbed right up and joined their game. Somehow, the very thought that they might see, made the pants feel just more exciting. As the morning went on I became more and more daring, climbing around above them on the ladder between two of the towers while they pretended to shoot at me from below: but somehow neither boy paid much notice, and Timmy kept what he knew to himself.

            At noon, Mom called us in for lunch: tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, which were enormous favorites with us both. Timmy sat in his booster seat opposite me, with Mom in the middle. It was fun because we had Mom to ourselves. William, he always wanted to be called that – Willy was for little boys, was off with the Church youth group, and Lil had already taken off for her Saturday ballet class. During lunch she admonished both of us to chew with our mouths closed, and not to slurp our soup like little hippos – which made us giggle.

As we were finishing, she smiled at the two of us, “I think you both need to take a nap, you’ve had a big morning out on the gym with your friends, and I don’t want two cranky cowboys this afternoon.”

This didn’t bother Timmy a bit, as he always took an afternoon nap, but I complained loudly.

“Mom! Why do I have to take a nap? That’s for little kids!”

“Yes it is,” she stated firmly, and gave a meaningful glance down at my midriff, that made me instantly blush.

She had me, and we both knew it. I guessed this was where I was going to pay the piper for my morning indulgence, and I resignedly started up out of my chair. Before, I was on my feet, however, she scooped up Timmy, and headed up the stairs, telling me to follow. Timmy’s room was next to mine, with a shared bathroom connecting them, and she went straight into his and set him down on the large-sized changing table. Underneath were stacks of white birdseye diapers on one side, and plastic pants on the other. I was surprised to see that she had gotten out some of Williams old diapers, which were larger than Timmy’s, and had put them next to a stack of his. When William was “Willy”, he had wet the bed. In our no-nonsense household, that had meant diapers. I had only been 6 when at age 14, he suddenly became William, dried up, and his evening clothes were retired to a box on a basement shelf.

Mom and Dad were firm believers in cloth diapers and plastic pants. No disposables had ever graced any young bottom in our house. Paper was wasteful, polluting, and expensive. So all us kids had sat in the sand box with our fat little bottoms next to our more thinly clad playmates.

I watched as Mom changed Timmy, assuming that he had graduated to a larger size diaper, I was surprised when she used the smaller ones. This puzzled me until she lifted him down, gave him a pat on his double-diapered rear, and looked over at me.

“Your turn?” she asked.

I looked at her with my mouth open. She just smiled.

I blushed mightily. Mom was going to let me wear diapers! My head swam. I looked at her, eyes wide.

“TJ, you’re not the only little boy in the world who ever wanted these,” she said. “It/s OK.”

“Mom?”

She just nodded her head and looked down at me and winked.

I took a deep breath, and then gave the smallest – the very smallest – of nods.

She took one of the large diapers, laid it on the table where she folded the two sides over to meet in the middle, and then spread out the ends to make an hourglass shape. Reaching beneath the table, she pulled out another, and doubling it over itself, making a long rectangle, laid it down the center of the hourglass. This brought back an old memory of myself standing by my brother’s bed when he was twelve, seeing her do the same thing for him.

She reached down, put her hands around me like she did Timmy, and lifted my small frame up in the air. She gave me a big hug, and then set me on the table. As I lay there, my whole body seemed to vibrate, literally thrilling with anticipation, as she pulled off my shorts and Timmy’s baby pants. As they came off, my fanny landed squarely in the middle of the hour glass, and my eyes widened again as I felt the thick diapers being pulled up between my legs, and pinned tightly around my waist. It was heaven. I looked at her, smiling as she brought out a large pair of frosty white plastic pants and slid my feet through the leg holes. She stood me up on the table, pulled them up over the thick diapers, and checked all around the leg openings to make sure all the cloth was tucked-in.

I was set down with another large hug on the floor next to my wide-eyed brother, who started to say something, but got a stern glare from Mom.

 “You’re just like your brother Willy.” She said, and gave me a gentle pat on the rear. “You look so cute!” I was doing a lot of blushing.

 “OK, you two, off to bed.”

I headed to my room through the bathroom, closing the door to Timmy’s room behind me.

Before going into mine, however, I stopped to look at myself in our bathroom mirror, twisting around gazing at my padded rear and front, squeezing my legs together to feel the diapers and plastic pants between my legs. It felt so good! They looked so good – just like they did on Timmy. The cloth was so thick between my legs I toddled a bit as I went into my room. This made me giggle a bit, as it made me feel even more like Timmy. I liked that feeling. As I climbed up on my bed, a sudden pang of apprehension came to me. What if Lil or William came home early and happened to see me in my room while I was napping?

By the time Mom came into my room, apprehension had turned to tears.

“What on earth is wrong dear?”

“Mom – what if- what if-“ I stammered, “What if William and Lil find out.”

She laughed. “TJ – You don’t think your brother Willy really wet the bed until he was 14 do you? Like I said, you’re not the only little boy in the world that ever wanted to wear diapers!”

“But he wet them all the time?”

“Well of course,” she said as she pulled the covers over me, “and I suppose you will too.”

As she closed the door to my room, I slowly felt the deep pleasure of my first wet diaper in four years.

To my surprise, when Lil arrived home that evening, it was my brother William that got teased as much as me about my new underwear. Mother insisted on changing me after my nap, and so I had to greet my whole family.

“Secrets, dear, are not healthy,” she said.

Dad just smiled, and had me crawl into his lap as usual for a story before bed.

I have to admit, that there was a period, some years ago, when I was 15 or 16 or 17 or even 18, when I was Thomas James, not TJ, and my diapers went into a box in the basement. It was kind of a disappointment then, when I went back to TJ in college and got my own apartment, that Mom informed me I would have to buy my own diapers, as what were once mine, now seemed to belong to another boy. I stretched after puberty but retained that baby face, so even now, thirty-five and married with my own kids, I look as much a boy as a man. My wife says, all things considered, my looks fit me, and we wonder if the family tradition will carry on with our three little boys. Grandpa Storey says they will, and I guess he ought to know.

 

Inspired by a short personal story I found on the web.