My parents separated when I was 2 so for the majority of my childhood I spent every other weekend with my dad and the remainder of time with my mom. Boy was it like 2 completely different worlds. I remember being around 5 years old when my dad reached his boiling point (he was the patient/kind one) with my bedwetting and he took my sister and I to Sam’s club to get diapers for me because at the time I was day/night wetting. I remember being such a cry baby and sobbing the whole time. I was sitting in the child seat in the shopping cart and we went down the baby isle all the while I was peeking through the side of my eye to see what he would end up getting. I can’t get over how much of a cry baby I was being but I also remember being so excited deep down inside. At first he picked up a box of Huggies, and I remember crying a bit louder then the initial sob, but being even more excited, and as we left the isle he stopped and swapped out the box of baby Huggies for pull-ups. I had already gone back to sobbing quietly with my head down, but I remember an initial sadness when he swapped boxes for the pull-ups, for some reason I wanted the Huggies more.
I remember getting home that day, my dad put a movie on for my sister so that he could spend some time getting me situated. He had already been restricting my liquid intake for 2 hrs before bed and requiring me to go to the bathroom and “try to pee” even if I didn’t have to right before bed. But this time I showered, he made me try to empty out any remaining liquids and he helped me get changed into the new pull-ups. I remember he just called them underwear, never said diaper, pull-up or anything other then underwear. After I got dressed and ready for bed we worked out where I wanted to keep the pull-ups. To be honest I wasn’t sure what he was asking. I didn’t know what the options were, but he immediately suggested that if I wanted to I could hide them in the closet behind the hamper, so that my cousins wouldn’t see when they came to visit (younger cousin was also a bedwetter, and the whole family knew, but I think my dad knew that I had been mortified enough for the day going to get the pull-ups with him at the store and he just wanted to help me regain whatever confidence or self respect he could.
Eventually we got a trash can for my closet too, and he would empty it out once I went to my mom’s house at the end of the weekend, and my “underwear” would be restocked during the week when he didn’t have us to spare me the embarrassment.
I remember that first night laying down in my pull-up. We had a strict 9pm bedtime but I had to stay up past midnight just laying there in my top bunk. My sister had already fell asleep and I couldn’t have felt any safer in my life. Honestly, to this day I don’t think I’ve ever felt as safe as I did that day. I eventually knocked out, but I did so knowing that I would wake up with no one angry at me if I had an accident, no one screaming at me or spanking my (dad never did, mom was a bit aggressive and became abusive later in life).
As I got older, the pull-ups with the designs kept being replenished at my dad’s house, they eventually lost their designs as they turned into the first goodnites. At the age of 9 my dad moved half way across the country and when we went to visit for the whole summer he had the same system in place. My “underwear” were already stocked and hidden for me and we never made it seem like anything other than normal. Unfortunately by the time I turned 12 my dad was basically out of my life and all I had was an angry abusive mother who blamed me for the bedwetting issues and didn’t really care to find any solution.
All this to say, never once did I hate diapers. When I had them I felt safe, I knew I wouldn’t wake up to someone “whooping my ass” for “being too lazy to wake up and pee in the bathroom like a normal person”. It was a warm feeling (and I don’t mean when wet). It was a warm bed I went to sleep in and a warm bed I woke up in, unlike home with my mom.