I was lucky enough not to be a bed wetter as a child. But I do remember the one occasion in my whole childhood when I did have a night-time accident.
When I was five I had to go to hospital. I had an operation and was kept in for a week while I recuperated. Surprisingly the children’s ward was very quiet at the time I was there. There were a dozen beds in the ward, but only one other child was in the ward – a boy just a little older than me.
For the first few nights that I stayed there I slept normally and woke dry as I always did. The other boy, though, wet his bed every night, and in the morning he had to tell the nurses that his bed was wet.
I remember how anxious I was for him when he had to tell the nurses that he was wet. I was sure that he would be in trouble, and be shouted at and punished. But it never happened. The nurses were warm and lovely. They changed his bed and dressed him in clean pyjamas, and never said a harsh word to him.
I watched this every day and it confused me. I knew instinctively that if ever I had wet the bed at home I would have been in the worst kind of trouble. I would have been shouted at, shamed and smacked. It had never occurred to me that the harsh rules my parents lived by may not apply elsewhere. But now I seemed to have found myself in a place where the rules were different – where maybe even there were no rules.
Every day I watched this, and it confused me, but it fascinated me too. Slowly I began to feel that this was a special place where I could be safe from the fear of punishment that ruled the rest of my life. I began to feel the generous warmth and understanding of the nurses that looked after us. And I began to feel that it may even be safe for me to wet my bed too.
I’m sure that it wasn’t deliberate, at least not consciously deliberate. But the sense of safety, the freedom from fear, the belief in the acceptance of those looking after us, gradually seeped into me. Two days before I was due to go home I remember that I woke up and found that my bed was wet too.
And amazingly I was washed and dried, and put into clean fresh pyjamas and a fresh dry bed without a single harsh word. It was a revelation to me. I never felt so safe and accepted as I did then.
I suppose it was inevitable then, that the next morning I woke up to find myself wet once again.
These two nights were the only times that I ever wet the bed in my childhood. This was also the time that I felt most secure and accepted in my life. I remember the time well, and still treasure the specialness of that brief moment of freedom from fear and punishment. I often wonder if my fascination with wetting began during this special time when I broke one of my parent’s strictest rules and was given love and comfort in place of the punishment I had already learned to dread.