Shades of Yellow:
How to Not Walk Away
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During that first week in the hospital, I escorted my father to the restroom, helped him urinate and zip up after, and realized a corner had been rounded quicker than I ever anticipated. Face to face again with the fucking shade of yellow. That color is multiple things in my world, most of them alluring yet simple: flowers, corn on the cob, sunshine, a crayon, bananas, a Cheerios box, legal pads, a bunch of M&M’s, and an aching Y2K song by Coldplay. But in our family, growing up, “yellow” was also a covert term, a stand-in more polite than piss and other crudities. Never use them in the house, my grandmother bellowed. Not even once!
For the most part, our unfinished saltbox on Cape Cod was dominated by the malodorous stench of three young brothers. Starting from toddler-ages through junior year of high school, bedwetting was the great equalizer, a bond of raw shame that drove us to silence, or, at most, a peculiar kind of self-lacerating sarcasm. My sisters, one the baby and the other, the oldest, escaped this wrath somehow. We brothers were close in age, me in the middle with a three-year younger brother, and an older one by two years. No matter how unique or talented, or developmentally disabled each one of us was, in the end, morning would come and greet us with sheets stained yellow. Our family didn’t have the money for much counseling, and pediatricians told my mother: “The boys will grow out of it, just wait and see, for time will tell.” 
Years later, a therapist of mine said aptly: “Each of you brothers, in your own fashion, were royally pissed off, and anxious as all get out.” 
Growing up, the topic of urine had a place, a stature in our house. As a kid, I remember my Dad setting the clock for midnight to wake us up, only to find we brothers had already drenched our mattresses. Christ, the frustration my poor father must have felt. Even my grandmother, a dynamo who held off death until ninety-eight, ended family visits with the credo: 
“Tank out—everyone must 
fully and thoroughly tank out!”
At times, it felt like my whole family—cousins too—were rigid with anxiety and possessed an excessive-urine gene. My parents spoke about purchasing a bed alarm clock for us that was sensitive to moisture, but they nixed that idea because the minor electrical current involved might cause a shock. In my family, people steered clear of talk about electric shock. Whispers of psychic nightmares—suicide, lengthy institutionalizations, and other miseries in the extended family oozed out to children’s ears from time to time, and after a while, skittishness and silence ensnared the topic of the brothers’ shame in the same way. 
When my dad checked on the three of us before he headed to bed, and found us wet, he never chastised us, or mocked us, just had us get some towels to sleep on until morning. My poor mom, who had to face the daunting laundry pile daily for years, was enraged not so much at us, just at the gender roles in the sixties and seventies—why she was the one that had to stay home and do the washing and drying. 
Years later, after I’d briefly “dried out,” the behavior returned to haunt me as an adult. I’d grown psychotically depressed and obese in my twenties and thirties, and doctors responded by shoveling in their meds, trying to ease the blackness. My bladder was helpless against the onslaught, and I soon found myself at thirty-two, stuck in quite a physical and psychic rut. The only decent thing about that period was that my roommate at a New Haven group home, a schizophrenic-compulsive from Little Rock, Arkansas, suffered from the same habit. We both dawdled in our dampness in the mornings, pretending we didn’t know this fact about one another. I remember thinking, “Well, at least he won’t mind the smell too much.”