When I was a child, I wet my bed at night. I did this until I was 14 or 15. In many ways, this shape parts of my life, especially my dreams. My father insisted on sending me to overnight camp, he thought it would make me stronger, it was a horror, I hid and ran away until I was sent home. I probably should have stayed.

Bedwetters are a tribe, a community of sorts. No one mentions this affliction much, sometimes it is a physical one, sometimes an emotional disorder. I could not sleep over anywhere, and often had accidents in school, so I was branded in a particular way and every night, my father would wake me, scold me, lecture. I learned how to lie still in my own accident, to shiver in the cold and sweat in the heat and pretend to be asleep when the lectures came, the exhortations to be strong, to have character.

I learned to be still, to wait for the light. I wrote about this in one of my books, sometimes we message one another, compare notes, commiserate and offer support. We remind one another to never do that to our children. In all those years of therapy, I never got to it, really, the experience was woven into my genes.

Once, they took me to our pediatrician, he had me draw sketches of my parents, but he never told me what he thought they mean.

I don’t wed my bed any longer, of course, but I often remember those nights, they are a part of me,  I wake up from my dreams, I lie still in bed, I wait for the morning. I tremble and shiver and feel great fear. Maria asks me why I don’t get up, read a book, meditate, I try to explain to her that I can’t, I wait for the morning, for the light, it is a helpless feeling.

My father was a good man in so many ways, he believed bed-wetting to be a flaw in character, a moral weakness, he told me every night that I could stop it if only I had the strength and the will. I stopped responding after awhile, there was no point to it, I put myself out of his reach.

I cannot be lectured to to this day, I slip into a state of drowsiness, I anesthetize myself. I construct a shell of the mind around myself, I turn inward and become invisible to the world.

It is one of the very few things Maria does not understand about me, why I have to be alone with the fear. I suppose she is right in a way. Those days are so long ago, I am often amazed that I still feel those nights so strongly, they are still so vivid to me, the smells, the fear, the same, the paralysis. I am so easily brought back to my childhood bed.

Once I had those accidents, I entered in a state of utter hopelessness, there was no escape, no respite, no change. Until one day, I just stopped wetting my bed. I waited for my punishment, awash in my shame.

I think it is the feeling of shame that paralyzes me still during those nights sometimes, I don’t write this in lament, my life is good, it is filled with love and purpose. There is nothing more important than to be fulfilled, and I remind myself of that in the night sometimes, and it helps me. Sometimes in my dreams, I return to speak with the boy and tell him it worked out, in a faraway time my nights are so different, we have come so far, I say, I sleep with my arms wrapped around someone I love, someone who cares for me, and that is the morning, that is the light.

It lives inside of me, in the heart.