Tuesday morning I wet the bed again and she told me that I could consider the spare bed my own. She said she had no intention of letting me sleep in her bed again. She forced me to wear diapers to bed every night and started making me wear diapers during the day on the weekends. After a while, things settled down and both of us got used to having me wake up in wet diapers. She seemed to get over her anger and allowed me to parade around the house wearing my diapers in the evenings after work.
Almost imperceptibly, I started to regress after that. I’d wake up with my thumb in my mouth and several times she caught me sucking my thumb while we watched TV. I tried to hide it but the urge was too strong for me. Half the time I was unaware I was doing it. It was difficult to remember at work and I began sucking on the ends of pencils and pens to keep my mouth occupied when I wasn’t speaking of eating.
That week the director called me into his office. Despite the events of the past few weeks (or perhaps because of them), I had managed to solve some seemingly intractable problems that we had been working on. The director told me he was pleased to tell me that the board had decided to share a percentage of the profits the patents were expected to produce. He told me that this would be a legal assignment of a share and would be unaffected by whether I stayed at the lab or choose to leave in the future. The director reminded me that Dr. Land of Polaroid-Land had become a millionaire in just such a way. He slapped me on the back and told me that if the projections of profitability materialized, I could expect to be a wealthy man in a year or two. He also told me that he had asked the Board to name me as the executive director of the lab. The work that I had done had convinced him that I was the right man for the job. He said I could expect to hear the decision of the Board by the end of the week, but he had been privately assured that the appointment would be approved. I thanked him and went back to my office in a daze. Too much had happened to me in the past two months. I simply wasn’t capable of dealing with everything that was going on.
The situation became more difficult at home as Pauline stopped discussing family and household issues with me and merely told me what decisions she had made. I was annoyed by her treatment of me, but I couldn’t see any way to get her to respect me again. Frankly, I was ashamed of how I was acting and didn’t want her to comment on it. My thumbsucking became more conspicuous at home and her dealings with me became more and more condescending. She never called me by name, but only by the endearments, Honey or baby. If it became necessary to explain something to me, she would tap her foot impatiently and tell me in excruciatingly simple terms. She wouldn’t allow me to drive anywhere but work by myself and insisted on overseeing my performance of the smallest tasks. I felt like I was being scrutinized constantly under her watchful eye.
My appointment for executive director came through with a substantial increase in pay. I was given management authority over all pending projects as well as a staff of my own. Life had become a study in dichotomy for me; at work I ruled my own fiefdom with full authority and autonomy while at home my privileges were becoming more restricted and childlike. It seemed like the more honors that were heaped upon me professionally, the more contempt I was held in at home. I started having stomach pains from the stress and was taken to a specialist in Internal Medicine by Pauline. His diagnoses was that I was showing the initial symptoms of an ulcer. The doctor gave me a prescription for Tagamet and told my wife that she should restrict my diet to bland foods served with plenty of milk. She smiled as she assured him that she would see that would be all I ate.