CHAPTER EIGHTEEN -- ESTABLISHING NEW ROUTINES
Emily stared at the floor of his playpen and nodded. Melissa praised him for being a good baby, and once again left to resume her tasks in the other room. Emily was now sitting alone, restrained in his playpen, with only the television and a few pathetic baby toys he didn’t feel like playing with to entertain him. He felt just as bored and silly and low as he had when he was here earlier, and now he also had a dirty diaper taped to his waist as a constant reminder of just how far he’d fallen in a single day. The babyish TV program now seemed to be openly mocking him as well. A cheerful, repetitive song about learning how to use the potty for the first time was now playing on the television. He looked on in utter shame as the bright, jubilant screen displayed a cartoon toddler being sat on a plastic toilet and praised by his mother for using it successfully, followed by another scene of the same character clutching his belly and failing to make it to the bathroom in time, which the boy’s mother promptly scolded him for. All the while, an annoyingly repetitive song about learning to use the potty bounced up and down from the speakers like nails on a proverbial chalkboard against Emily’s ears. To Emily, it seemed that even these programs for actual infants expected more from their audience than his mommy now expected from him.
Once the program ended, Melissa came waltzing back into the living room with a look of tender love in her eyes. “Ready for your change now, poopy-pants?” She called out to Emily teasingly.
By now, Emily was done crying, but he was still feeling miserable about what she’d forced him to do. After sitting there unresponsive for a few seconds, he eventually gave her a sad, submissive nod. Melissa paid no mind to Emily’s misery, instead she simply walked over to Emily and undid the restraints holding him against his playpen. She then opened the gate and ruffled his hair playfully.
“Alright Emily, go ahead and crawl up to your nursery. Mommy will help get you into some nice, clean Pampers now.”
Emily began to crawl on his hands and knees out of the playpen, heading across the living room in the direction of the stairs. Melissa followed closely behind, giggling to herself while she watched his big padded bottom sway in front of her from side to side. Unbeknownst to Emily, she found herself unable to resist the opportunity to reach for her phone and snap yet another picture of her diapered sissy daughter. So cute. The girls are going to love this one, she thought to herself.
By now, Emily was a bit more used to the feeling of being in a messy diaper, but the weight of all his mess sagging behind him still felt extremely odd, especially when he began attempting to climb up the stairs. Melissa noticed how much slower he was moving and giggled.
“I’m not a bad mother for letting my baby crawl up the stairs all by herself, am I?,” she pondered aloud. “If only you were a bit lighter, Emily. Then Mommy would be able to carry you.”
Emily tried not to pay attention to his mommy’s light teasing, actively ignoring her and focusing only on getting changed out of his messy Pampers as soon as possible. He already felt like enough of a baby as it was, so the last thing he needed was her humiliating commentary on top of it. Within moments, they both arrived at the entrance to Emily’s nursery. Melissa graciously opened the door for Emily, since he was still too low on the ground to be able to work the doorknob. After leading him inside, Melissa immediately ordered Emily over to the changing table, which she helped Emily onto, before instructing her to lay back submissively onto the padded mattress.
As Melissa unpinned Emily’s loaded diaper, Emily cringed with another wave of shame. The smell the open diaper released was terrible, and Emily felt like a fool lying there on his back with his knees and feet in the air as his Mommy had him raise his bottom so that she could slide the diaper off of him. In addition to the horrid smell, Emily could feel how messy his rear-end was, caked as it was with the mess he’d been sitting in. He wanted to vanish, and since he couldn’t do that, he simply turned his head to one side and shut his eyes, nursing heavily on his pacifier.
“Oooooh, someone made a BIG surprise for their Mommy,” Melissa said in a lightly mocking tone. As Melissa dumped the messy diaper into the diaper bin and sealed the bin shut, her words made Emily cringe, but it was hard to deny that the baby wipes Melissa was using to clean him up were a huge relief.
“Mommy’s girl is a sweet girl . . . ” Melissa sang. “Mommy’s gonna get her sweet girl all clean . . . ”. Her silly, almost-lullaby-like singing went on like that as she worked to clean Emily. The baby wipes were cool and wet, but mostly in a refreshing way. Emily’s eyes were still closed and full of tears, but as the clean-up continued, he felt his little weiner throb in its cage. If he somehow blocked out how absurd everything that was happening to him was, the physical sensations of it were not so bad: the refreshing wipes, Mommy’s soft touch all over his most intimate areas, the comfortable surface of the changing table, and his Mommy’s soft, soothing voice. The last almost two days had been unspeakably awful for Emily: he’d gone to Lauren’s party as a fifteen year old boy, then been reduced, in the eyes of his friends, to a young girl at the party, only to come home this morning and find that his status had been reduced even further. It was all so humiliating and scary, and a part of him relished just lying there, eyes closed, ears full of his Mommy’s comforting voice, body supported on the changing table, and brain able to not have to think about anything.
Suddenly, he snapped fully awake again, his eyes opening. Wasn’t that what they wanted? For him to give in? And if he did, what would be left of him?
“Easy, baby girl,” Melissa said, pushing Emily’s torso back down onto the changing mat. Mommy’s not quite done.”
Soon enough, Melissa had Emily cleaned, powdered, and pinned into a very thick disposable diaper. “Baby needs to get used to her new schedule,” Melissa cooed. “Change then dinner then bath then bedtime.”
Bedtime? Emily wondered. It’s not even 4 PM. What is she talking about bedtime for?
“Now,” Melissa said, “since the diaper I just changed you out of was your very first baby diaper that Mommy ever put you in since we started treating you right, well, Mommy and Dr. Thurman wanted to make sure you had time to focus on just that diaper and nothing else, honeybear. But now? Well, Mommy hasn’t spent the last few months buying her baby girl that most precious wardrobe in the whole world for nothing has she? So let’s get my Emily girl alllllllll dressed up.”
Still lulled by the rhythmic touching and the sweet singing of his diaper change–in addition to being exhausted by the last two days–Emily did nothing to resist as his mommy cooed and fussed over getting him dressed for dinner. A pair of lavender, nursery-print plastic pants were stretched over his huge diaper since, as Melissa explained, “if Mommy’s baby girl is going to be making such big surprises for Mommy, then Mommy better take some steps to protect baby’s clothes and Mommy’s house and its furniture!”
Next was a pair of lacy white ankle socks, with lavender trim on the lace. Then Melissa had Emily sit up on the changing table so that she could put a beautiful white satin toddler dress over her head. It had short sleeves and a short skirt and lavender trim and the whole thing seemed to be a fountain of frills and lace. As Emily sat there passively, being moved around like a big doll by his Mommy, he thought of all the times he’d begged and pleaded with Melissa for big presents for Christmas or his birthday: a set of Transformers toys that combined into one big robot, a track to race Hot Wheels cars on, the latest model Playstation. He’d wanted them all, begged and whined and pleased with her for them, and she’d always said they didn’t have the money. As this confection of a baby dress fell over his head, and as he looked into the nursery closet to see tons of other dresses and rompers and onesies waiting for him, it wasn’t lost on Emily that all of this had to have been expensive. As the toddler dress’s short skirt fell into place and made it obvious that his diapers and plastic pants would still be on display even if he were allowed to stand up (which he wouldn’t be), Emily realized that his Mommy had spent a ton of money on all of this. He didn’t want any of the things she’d spent money on, and all of those things embarrassed him, but on some level, it was nice to be fawned over and spoiled, even if it wasn’t in the way he’d imagined or wanted.
The finishing touches were a lavender barrette in Emily’s hair and a pair of white Keds sneakers with lavender ribbons in place of shoelaces on his feet. As Melissa helped Emily off of the changing table and made sure that she knelt on the floor, he wondered dully why he’d been given shoes at all.
“Look at you, Miss Priss!” Melissa swooned, again taking her phone out and snapping tons of pictures. “Who says the life of a baby is boring? Every afternoon Mommy will bring you into your nursery and help you get alllllllll dressed up in a different beautiful outfit and then you’ll get to sashay your prissy self right down to the kitchen for dinner! Won’t that be fun? Why Mommy bets you’re going to be the most fashionable girl on the block soon! Well, the most fashionable toddler girl anyways!”
With that, Melissa directed Emily to crawl out of his nursery and back downstairs to the kitchen. He still felt so absurdly stupid, crawling on the floor as though he couldn’t walk. And the huge thickness of the diapers and plastic panties between his legs made him have to crawl with an especially silly-looking wide gait.
In the kitchen, once he finally got there, his high chair awaited. As Melissa strapped him into it and buckled all of its restraints down, Emily reflected glumly: It’s my highchair. Mine. I have a highchair now. And a nursery. This is really happening. It still didn’t seem real. He still couldn’t process the enormity of all the rules Dr. Thurman had laid out for him the last time he was in this chair.
Once he was strapped in, Melissa retrieved a bottle of breastmilk from the fridge, warmed it up, and held it in place for Emily–whose hands were pinned beneath the high chair tray–so that he could nurse it. “Mommy is really proud of you for not talking during your diaper change, sweetheart,” Melissa said, looking down as Emily drank her bottle. “Mommy knows all this is new and hard, but Mommy’s also betting that her baby girl was too embarrassed to even know what to say while Mommy was changing her.”
Emily, with the teat of the bottle still firmly planted in his mouth, nodded yes.
“Mommy doesn’t want you to be embarrassed,” Melissa said with a sympathetic face. “Because you’re a baby girl, and so there’s nothing embarrassing at all about you being treated like a baby girl. Your embarrassment comes from your clining to what Dr. Thurman calls your false sense of self, baby. Basically, you still see yourself as a fifteen year old boy. But that’s not what you are, and Mommy and Dr. Thurman and all the nice women at A Caring Place are going to help you see that, honey. We’re going to help you feel it, deep deep down. But first we’ve got to break and scrub away that rotten false ego of yours. Just give in, baby girl. Just know that all you have to do, ever, for the rest of your life, is not think and just do what Mommy says. Then you won’t be embarrassed at all. Won’t that be great?”
Emily shivered. What his mommy was saying to him was terrifying. If he wasn’t embarrassed about being a fifteen year old in a highchair, breastfeeding, pooping in a diaper . . . well, if he wasn’t embarrassed about those things, he’d have to be so far gone, mentally, that there wasn’t anything left of him.
When Emily’s bottle was finished and Melissa replaced his pacifier, he expected to be fed some solid food. So he was excited when Melissa stepped away from the high chair and began making dinner. She started making a homemade red pasta sauce Emily loved, and after the hard days he’d had, it was a joy for Emily to sit in his highchair and smell the lovely smells of garlic and olive oil and tomatoes as she made up a pot of that sauce. Emily had had nothing to breastmilk to eat all day, and so a pasta dinner sounded delicious to him.
That’s why he was dismayed when Melissa, after finishing the sauce and making some spaghetti, only prepared one plate, not two. She then sat down at the kitchen table and ate the pasta herself, ignoring Emily’s moaning and wailing behind her pacifier as she (Melissa) read her phone, drank a glass of wine, and enjoyed her meal.
Emily, getting more and more frustrated, began kicking his legs. Given that the highchair set him up so high that his feet did not touch the ground, this didn’t accomplish anything except getting Melissa’s attention.
“Stop,” she said, turning in her seat and pointing a finger at him. “Mommy can feel you about to spit your pacifier out and complain, and if Emily doesn’t want her baby bottom blistered, she better stop right now. Mommy knows you wanted some spaghetti. But you’re a baby now, Emily. A baby. And babies don’t eat spaghetti. Babies eat baby food. You’ll never eat spaghetti–or any other kind of adult food–again as long as you live, and you better get used to that fact right now. Let me say that again, in case you missed it: you will never, ever, eat adult food again. Never. Not as long as you live. Mommy’s breastmilk and the baby food Mommy gets from A Caring Place have all the vitamins and nutrients Mommy’s little baby girl will ever need.”
Emily, unable to comprehend the enormity of what her Mommy had just said, began to weep quietly in her highchair.
And, about 20 minutes later, after Melissa had finished her own meal and cleaned the dishes, baby food is exactly what Emily ate. Melissa produced several jars of it from the refrigerator and dumped them all together on the highchair tray, forming a vivid pile of glop. Then, around Emily’s neck, she attached a lavender and white baby’s bib that read “Momma’s Messy Eater” in a baby blocks script. Only then did she remove Emily’s pacifier, warning her not to talk, and began to spoonfeed her daughter.
The whole ordeal was humiliating for Emily: to smell and see food she loved only feet away from her, to be denied that food, to have to sit with nothing to do and nothing to watch while her Mommy took care of herself, to have the only bodily control available to her be opening and closing her mouth, to have her Mommy baby-talking syrupy babble at her, to have to choke down the rancid puree of the baby food, to struggle to keep up with Melissa’s feverous rate of feeding. It soon became totally overwhelming: Emily, her face and bib covered in the distisgusting glop soon began to cry harder. Her crying escalated quickly. Soon, full body sobs racked her, making it impossible to keep up with Melissa’s spoon-feeding. And then the floodgates opened, not just in her eyes, but all over her body. As Emily wailed, she flooded her diaper. Melissa, with a mother’s intuition, reached under the highchair, pressing her hand lovingly against the fat, plastic-covered diaper bulge between Emily’s legs.
“That’s it,” Melissa cooed. “That’s Mommy’s baby girl. What a good girl you are. Now, let’s go get you changed and then it’ll be baby’s first bathtime!”