Chapter Fourteen: My Life is an After School Special

If you grew up in the 1970's and you owned a television that had any kind of decent reception, you could pull in ABC, NBC and CBS. If you could pull in ABC, then you're probably at least familiar with the ABC After School Specials.

If you're not familiar with After School Specials, they seemed to be designed as coping tools for adolescents and pre-adolescents to get through the really difficult things in life, like school, friends, dating, and parents. I was always anxious to turn on the television and see what the story would be this week. Each episode dealt with a social theme. Some of them were pretty serious, and some weren't so serious, and some of them covered up the pretty serious stuff by trying not to be so serious. There were episodes about kids whose parents were divorcing, whose mothers were alcoholics, or who were being bullied at school. Every episode I watched, enthralled, because their lives all seemed to wrap up so neatly at the end of the show.

One special that I can remember so clearly was The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon. In it, sixth grade class joke, Duffy Moon (played by Ike Eisenmann), somehow forms a little company with classmate, Peter (played by hottie Lance Kerwin) and Duffy is convinced that the success of their company is directly due to his amazing cosmic awareness. Whenever Duffy comes upon a problem that he thinks is unsolveable, he puts into practice the success methods he has learned from a mail-order quack. He closes his eyes, puffs out his cheeks and begins his mantra: "You can do it, Duffy Moon! You can do it, Duffy Moon!" These words have returned to me many times over the years when I faced problems that seemed unfaceable. And there were many. Because, in my eyes, my life was an after school special.

I was convinced that every move I made was being caught by hidden cameras which were mounted in every location I ever found myself. I was the very first Truman Show. I knew that, one day, my whole life's story would be edited down to 28 minutes plus commercials asking how many licks it took to get to the center or a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop or reminding me that "relief" was spelled R.O.L.A.I.D.S. I knew that people would feel a deep pity for the girl who had to run away from her awful mother and who hid in the garage behind the car waiting for the police to be called so that she knew she was really loved. Or the time that she cut herself shaving and got yelled at for bleeding all over her mom's new bathroom rug. And the whole world would feel so hopeful for the little girl who looked out the window and wished on a star that her parents would buy her a horse.

The truth is, I did relate to some of those specials. And the things that happened in our family that really did serve as a cautionary tale were too difficult to pull into my After School Special/Neicie's Life fantasy. Like my bedwetting.

I don't understand the psychology of bedwetting. My parents didn't understand it, either, but they sure did try. I was taken to physicians, psychologist, psychiatrists, the school nurse, the Baptist preacher...there was never any explanation, and there was never any cure. There was only embarassment, shame and fear that my friends would find out, and there would be another tally on the board for the "weird only child."

It's not that my parents punished me for wetting the bed. My mother, especially, would never have punished me for this. Later in my life, she would accuse me of far worse things, but as a pre-teen, wetting the bed was never cause for punishment.

My mother had wet the bed as a child. I don't know how her parents would have handled it, because she most likely doesn't remember her parents having to deal with it. This is because when she was a very small child, her mother took off with the milkman. Literally. She was left with her two sisters, Rachel and Betty and her baby brother, James, and their father, who was a West Virginia coal miner. Their father died shortly after and the children were taken to a West Virginia children's home, and Betty was soon separated from the other siblings.

By my mom's account, certain things about living in the children's home were very difficult. The fact that she was a bed-wetter was one of them. Many time, she told me the stories of waking up in a wet bed and then enduring baths in ice water, the matron's attempt at punishing the pee out of my mom so she wouldn't do these awful things anymore.

So, because of my own mother's background and her horrible experiences for peeing in the bed, I don't believe I was ever punished for bedwetting. But the stories of my bedwetting adventures were told often enough, and that was the kind of embarrassment I didn't need to have.

The one story that my mother told repeatedly is one I still remember. At least I remember it after a certain point. Or maybe I've heard it so many times that I only think I remember it. Nevertheless, I have a clear image of that night.

There was a lot of commotion in the house. I could hear screaming, fighting, name-calling. It was my parents, fighting again. As a five year old, their fighting was disturbing to me, but the screaming marathons happened often enough that I knew I'd better keep an eye on my mom and dad so they wouldn't hurt each other, or I'd be scooped up and spirited off with my mom while she spent days or weeks with one of her friends, plotting how she was going to get even with my dad.

I never heard what these arguments were about, exactly. I only heard what happened while the arguments were taking place, and the situations were always very scary. This was the case on the night I woke up to all of the commotion in my house.

Apparently, and this is the part I don't really remember, I climbed out of my little bed, toddled my little five-year-old feet down the hall, and plopped myself on the big rocking chair in the living room. The chair was cushier than usual, something padding my butt from the usual hardness of the chair where my mom rocked me during the day, singing Paul Simon's "Love Me Like a Rock." The screams and name calling had come to a peak, doors were slammed, threats were made, and then, silence. The doorbell rang. I opened my eyes. In my living room stood a police officer, talking to my mother who began crying and became hysterical, anger pouring from her with each word she spoke about my father. The officer stood, nodding, writing down each word. He didn't ask to talk to my father because he wasn't there. My dad had literally run away. He had left the house just as the police car had pulled into the driveway and ran through the yard and was hiding in the cornfield. I can still picture, as I did that night and for many days after the incident, my pitiful father crouching there between the rows of mature corn, hiding from all of the noises, the police lights, the flashlights that scanned the field for any movement, hiding from the officers who were looking for this man whose wife had called the police on him, looking for him to take him away from his little girl who was sitting in the rocking chair hoping that he was all right.

They eventually gave up looking, the police lights disappeared, and the house was silent. Not until then did my mom notice the little daughter, rocking, with her wild brown hair poking out in all directions. There I was, sitting, soaking wet, on the rocking chair. "I thought I was on the potty," I told her apologetically. She picked me up from the chair and looked down sadly at the pee-soaked owl cushion she'd just finished embroidering earlier that day.

Somehow, I woke up the next morning in my clean bed, with clean clothes. My father was back in the house. There were no explanations. There was no shouting or name-calling. There didn't seem to be any reconciliation. Things were just...back to normal. Except for the embroidered owl cushion, which was gone from the rocking chair. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last time, that my father ran when my mother called the police.

Many mornings, all the way through my eleventh year, I woke up to wet bedsheets. My mom tried not letting me drink for an hour before bedtime. She tried making me go to the bathroom before I went to bed. She tried waking me in the middle of the night to make me pee. I can remember so many nights, sitting sitting half asleep on the toilet, a trickle of water running in the sink to stimulate my bladder, and knowing that just absolutely nothing was going to come out. No matter what my mother tried, I'd still awake to pee-soaked sheets and my mother, while frustrated and angry, would never punish me. I just couldn't seem to wake up to go to the bathroom. So many times, I

When I was a teenager, there was another special, kind of like an after-school special, but I think it aired later in the evening. It was called The Loneliest Runner, and this time hottie Lance Kerwin played the part of 13 year old John Curtis. John was a bedwetter. As a punishment for his actions, his mother would hang is wet, stained sheets out the window when he went to school, and he would run home to take them down before anyone would see them. John's running serves as training for his eventual reward of an Olympic Gold Medal.

At the time, I didn't realize that this was a partially true autobiography of actor/director Michael Landon's life. What I did realize, however, that I was not the only kid who had problems with wetting the bed. I'd like to say that it served as a confidence builder for me, but instead, I was further embarassed as kids at school talked about that "stupid show" where they kid couldn't stop "peeing the bed."

I was twelve when I stopped peeing in the bed. I don't know what made me stop, I just did.

Some experts say that kids wet the bed because their bladders aren't fully developed yet. There's also the possibility that the child just sleeps too deeply to awaken to empty her bladder. But the reason that makes the most sense to me now, in my adult brain, is stress and abuse. If it would have been a weak bladder or too deep of a sleep, it wouldn't have gone away like it did. Instead, it gave way to other neurotic behavior.

My kids laugh now when I tell them that I thought that my life was an After School Special. It does sound pretty funny. But the truth is that I really wanted people to know what was going on in my house, in my family. I wanted a way to cope, to deal, to lighten things up a bit.

And I wanted it to be all neatly wrapped up by the end of the show.