A mother in Missouri urged her son to e-mail me after reading on my blog months ago that I was a bedwetter.

He had liked one of my books, and his mother thought he might open up to me since he was a bedwetter too. She said he didn’t talk about it much to anyone, including her.

But she knew it troubled him.

We’ll call him Ian.

Ian did e-mail me, and it was clear he was bursting to talk to another older e-mailer and ex-bedwetter. Sometimes boys don’t care to be completely open with their mothers, and most bedwetters learn not to be open to anyone.

We e-mailed back and forth, and Ian’s story was devastating to hear and read about.

It was also familiar:  awakening to freezing urine in the winter, smelly urine in the summer, hiding and waiting to be discovered.

His classmates knew; they always do. Several sleepover parties had ended in humiliation and, for Ian, catastrophe. So had two weeks in a camp he dreaded going to but that his parents thought might be good for him.

It wasn’t, it was another humiliation.

Ian had one of the worst illnesses a child in America can have, the illness no one wants to admit or own, the illness that turns innocent children into ghosts.

Parents hide from bedwetters; peers are notoriously cruel. Science can’t help much.

“I hope you can help me,” he said, “I’m afraid to go to bed at night, and I can’t sleep. When I do, I have these awful nightmares, and I wake up in the smell of my own piss.”

I’d love to have been able to crawl through the phone and hug Ian and say, see, one day it stops, and you can get on with your life. I did.

I don’t need to tell him how hard that was and how painful and deep that wound can get. Or how the bedwetting experience will shape his life in ways no one can or will understand.

He’ll figure it out soon enough. His mother, who loves him, had no idea. Of course, she didn’t.

How could she?

That is not something you can easily talk to your mother about, or most fathers either.

I’ve had all kinds of problems with fear and mental disturbance, but bedwetting is the loneliest disease. There is no one to share it with or talk to about it.

It shattered intimacy, left me drowning in fear and self-loathing, gave me a laundry list of problems I am still working to solve. It was the worst experience of my life and the most damaging.

Bedwetting taught me how to be alone and live in my head. It helped me to be a writer.  I made up so many stories in the darkness while lying in my own waste.

It gave me a lifetime of panic and fear, and it took me decades to gain control of it. I didn’t realize for years that not everyone awakens in panic and soaked in sweat.

My heart broke for Ian; I’ve been there, a serial bedwetter until I was 17. My bedwetting transformed my life in so many ways, some of those ways are just beginning to reveal themselves now, and I am in my 70’s. I felt the panic in his e-mail; I could almost touch it.

I doubt that I had much comfort to offer him. We bedwetters are ghost children; we drift by ourselves in and out of the light. There is really no place to go.

During all that time, one doctor examined me and had me sketch my parents. I never spoke with him again.

Bedwetting is one of the cruelest disorders for children. There is nothing glamorous about and you will see few stories about doctors devoting their lives to bedwetters.

Parents don’t understand and are ashamed of it,  the media treats it like death, and peers are crueler than anyone might imagine.

If you want to survive your peers, inside or out of school, you don’t walk around admitting you were a bedwetter; you don’t talk about it, not if you want to have a friend or be able to walk peacefully down the school hallways again.

I am told that most parents don’t want to hear about it either; they want it to go away.

I dislike being pitied, and I have no interest in people feeling sorry for me.  Please spare us bedwetters, that. In a nation of victims, I am no victim. Neither are they. But they are sufferers.

I do not in any way feel sorry for myself. We are what we are, and all kinds of things go into the pot. I don’t want to be anyone but me.

My father was the only person who did want to talk about my bedwetting, and that was to convince me it was all in my head, and I could stop doing it at any time if only I really wanted to and wasn’t so weak.

He had no idea I would have given that Ted Williams foul ball I caught at Fenway Park to stop wetting my bed.

And he was a social worker!

I can’t sugarcoat this or look on the bright side. We learn from pain, of course.

Every bad thing we survive shapes us and can make us stronger. But it was a horror to me, a daily nightmare that would never end and that shaped my life in so many ways for good.

My brilliant psychoanalyst  30 years later said there was no point in going back so far to look for clues to my panic and anxiety and a therapist who helped me in so many ways said we needn’t waste too much time on it, it was long ago.

I told her just recently that I never really conveyed how devastated I was by my bedwetting.

So we didn’t dwell on it, and I haven’t, but there it is, a nightmare who sleeps right in my bed with me, and I can wake up in terror and shame all I want, he or she or it still hasn’t gone away, and I am guessing he never will.

I reassured Ian that he would stop wetting the bed one day, as I did when I went off to college.

But I didn’t dare stay in bed with a girl for too long; they all thought I was a prude. I was dying to spend the night with them, but the thought of wetting my bed just paralyzed me. Sometimes it still does.

I wouldn’t want to lie to Ian, but I didn’t tell him wetting his bed would follow him for most, if not all, of his life.

Those feelings of shame, helplessness, and pure terror are woven into the depths of my soul and my neural system too. We never really know what caused it, or what stopped it.

I am a lucky and happy person in so many ways. Still,

Ian has inspired me once again to do what brave souls are learning to do, talk about something awful and bring it into the open, not to complain, but to hopefully make it easier for others to come to terms with it.

I never imagined there were other bedwetters.

The National Sleep Foundation and the Children’s Hospital of Boston estimate that between 13-2o percent of 5-year-old children, 10 percent of 7-year-olds, and 5 percent of 10-year-old children still wet the bed.

Between five and seven million children in the United States wet their beds regularly, which accounts for 10 percent of the United States population of children.

There are two types of bedwetting: Primary bedwetting is when the child has never had nighttime control over urination. Secondary bedwetting occurs when a child has achieved nighttime continence but experiences a return bout of nighttime wetness due to psychological stress or some underlying medical cause.

Interestingly, one 2008 study in the Journal of Pediatrics and Child Health showed that children over the age of 10 who continued to struggle with bedwetting were more likely to have emotional difficulties.

Primary bedwetting may be more common, but it seems that parents have more reason to be concerned if a child develops secondary bedwetting for a prolonged period of time.

Mine were not concerned. They were very concerned about their friends and neighbors finding out there was a bedwetter in our house, and they were the parents.

I told Ian I understood the shame and degradation and humiliation he felt when he wet the bed.

It was shattering to me and for me. I told him there was another side to it, we all grew out of it sooner or later, but I had to be honest with him. Some of us never completely get over it. I urged him to get real help so he wouldn’t be one of those.

After I talked to Ian, I talked to my therapist. She said I had never really talked much about bedwetting. Yes, I said, who wants to do that? I didn’t know, she said; I apologize.

Not her fault.

Bedwetting was transformative. I felt a shame about my hopeless body I never got over. I felt incompetent, weak, and dysfunctional, so different from all the other kids.

I wouldn’t go to parties or sleepovers or go on family vacations without heavy rubber sheets.

I was terrified of gyms of any kind and was until just a few months ago. I can’t imagine going to a place like Disney World as a bedwetter, not then.

The ever-present middle school bullies were all over me, creatively and unrelentingly vicious, taunting, pulling my pants down if they could, stealing my lunch and lunch money, following me home from school to call me names and beat me up. ”

What’s the matter?” they would jeer, “mommy isn’t here to change your diapers. Do you have to pee-pee?” They always made sure to do this in front of the other kids. I always ran home alone and, most afternoons, hid in the closet until someone came home.

I heard my aunt on an extension phone telling my mother she didn’t want me sleeping over with my cousin anymore. She just got new sheets and a mattress for his bedroom.

I never saw him again.

I  had no friends, didn’t date until college, hang out with peers, join a band, go to the movies with anyone but my grandmother. I would sleep over there; she had a way of changing the sheets without my even knowing it. Once or twice, I didn’t wet the bed; she never said a word about it.

I felt constant shame and disgust for myself. It went on forever; I’ll never forget those smells or those lectures from my father; I became a wizard at seeming to be asleep; to this day, I will doze off instantly when someone tries to give me a lecture.

I told Ian he had to trust in the future, it would be better, lots of kids wet their beds, it’s important to try to see past it. I urged him to ask his parents to get him some help, a sympathetic doctor, a shrink. If he was 15 years old and still wetting his bad, something might be wrong, it might be physical, or it might be emotional.

They know more about it than they used to know. But I won’t kid you, it won’t be simple, and it won’t be easy.

Ian said his doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with him, he said; his father didn’t think he needed a shrink; he thought he just needed to grew up and be a man. If there is nothing wrong with him, his father said, then why does he do it?

I know that story. Ian doesn’t know any more than I did.

“Amazing,” I said, “we are brothers; we have the same fathers.”

I still don’t really know why I was wetting my bed at age 17. I’ve had minor bladder discomforts for much of my life; perhaps that contributed. I was a fearful and unhappy child, despairing at times about my life.

I suspect that my anxiety and depression was the biggest reason I wet my bed. I am too old to hold grudges or dwell on the past. It was a different time.

Being a bedwetter was like being gay when I was a child; it was a nightmare without mercy or end. It was the end of childhood.

It is easier to be gay today, if not easy, and I don’t really know if it is easier to be a bedwetter.  I doubt it.

I see what trans children still have to go through in the world’s once most advanced democracy.

I hope it’s easier. If this post reaches one or two bedwetters and offers them some promise and hope, it was well worth writing. I never speak poorly of my life, but I do want to speak honestly.

If you are a mother and a father or grandparent or kindly aunt or uncle or older brother or sister and someone in your family is wetting the bed past five or six years old, talk to them, reassure them, get them some help.

Tell them they are good and worthwhile, and tell them better days are on the way because there are.

It’s a whole world easier to wet your bed until five or six years of age than 1 or 17.

But it is never easy.