After the Wave

Chapter 7
Domestic Dispute

Chapter Description: Tyler's story continues. He still sees himself as a teenager... but his parents sure don't.

Chapter VII: Domestic Dispute

Things were quieter in Tyler Jetter’s household that night-- but not by much.

The diapered teenager with the love-hate relationship with the urinal was in the darkest of spirits. Foremost, he couldn’t get the goddamned pacifier out of his mouth. He just kept sucking and sucking away. Clawing at it didn’t work. Even a pair of pliers didn’t work. It wasn’t until dinnertime that he realized that his parents were the only ones capable of divesting Tyler of that rotten rubber gunk... by simply pulling it out with a single hand.

And dinnertimes were a real bitch. Since he was dressed as a baby, his parents saw him as a baby. Forever. Meaning there was no hope of Tyler trading up from his soaked, sloppy crinklies to a pair of something more befitting a boy his age. It was a clean diaper he was wearing when Tyler, from his new high-chair, reluctantly accepted the applesauce spoon-fed to him by his parents. Slow going. Tyler was distraught, and not merely by virtue of the embarrassment of the situation. He didn’t want the meal to end and the pacifier to be back in his mouth.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

His parents had gone all-out. By the time their little boy toddled home from school in booties and wet baby-pants, the Wave had already done a job on their minds. They acknowledged that their son possessed the body of a teenager.... but they also knew that what he needed wasn’t rescue. What he needed was all the baby things they could get their hands on.

In a matter of just a handful of hours, the Jetters’ SUV was packed to bursting. High-chair. No-tears shampoo. Custom-made changing table. Baby food. Enough diapers to choke an elephant. And a ton of wood that, given the proper attention, could, conceivably, become an oversized crib.

Tyler sat amidst all that in a safety seat, a belt buckle fastened tightly over his diaper. His crying was historical. Not because he was a two-year-old in a two-year-old’s head-- but because he was a 13-year-old in a 13-year-old’s head. And it wasn’t crying so much as it was sniveling... the boy was still pumping his pacifier, his cheeks swelling and deflating twice a second. All his parents could think to do was shush him and soothe him and coo as he messed his diaper, its seat becoming perilously close to full.

He’d been granted the bowel control of a four-year-old, as well.

And Tyler was still obsessing over what his friends would think of his new station. But he needn’t have. His parents had already signed him out of school; what sort of baby requires a seventh-grade education? Babies require a playpen and a stash of blocks, and they’d made a special trip to get those things. Babies require stuffed animals, as opposed to video games. Babies require lots and lots of bottles of powder.

Oh, that’s the other thing, kids. And this is actually kind of funny:

Ten minutes after the family returned home from their shopping binge, Tyler lay upon his -- his! -- changing table as his parents argued over who would have the privilege of cleaning their teenaged son’s poopy butt. Only I’m not being sarcastic. Both of them truly wanted the privilege.

“Well, you get to breastfeed him!”

“Well, you get to bounce his cute little bottom on your knee!”

“You can do that! You’ve got knees! I don’t have breasts!”

“Tell you what... I’ll give you, outright, bouncing him on your knee, if you give me changing his diapers... and reading to him the baby books at night.”

“Fine, but you also have to give me bathing him.”

“Fine. But we have to take turns feeding him the strained beets.”

All the while, Tyler was still taped into his loaded diaper, helplessly waving his bootied feet in the air, crying around his pacifier. He had no idea it was possible to feel as humiliated at he did at that moment. And the realization that he was going to spend the rest of his life living that of a baby’s, simply because he hadn’t been able to find the “zipper” on his diaper in time to release his aching bladder, was a blow to the heart.

Ultimately, his mother did indeed clean Tyler’s gunky bottom, powder him, and seal him into a crisp new disposable. The issue remained of how to get her son to stop crying. After feeding the petulant youngster in the high-chair, the woman took him to the couch, and she and her husband took turns rocking him, humming lullabies to him, and kissing him on the forehead. Whichever parent wasn’t employed with that task was busying himself or herself in the boy’s bedroom-- ripping down his posters and replacing them with decals of baby teddy bears, making sure his diaper pail was in the most convenient location, and, of course, assembling his crib.

The teen’s strength eventually ran out. His tears wore to a trickle, then stopped coming, as Tyler surrendered to drowsiness. His father was holding him at the time, so he gently untied Tyler’s booties, walked the groggy boy to his room -- its modified appearance striking the youth with silent horror -- and helped him into his sleeper.

As Tyler drifted off to sleep, swaddled in his new sleeper and new security blanket, clutching his new teddy bear, crinkling in the new, confounding diapers into which he had been imprisoned, he realized that, if he ever wanted sexual gratification again, he’d have to learn how to hump a crib mattress. But that could wait until tomorrow. In mere minutes, the boy was asleep, a mobile spinning idly above him.

It was just after eight o’clock, after all.