This week I was hit by a dilemma. Everything seemed to be in order as far as Kwezi and I are concerned, until her teachers informed me that she has been wetting her bed during afternoon naps. To say that I was surprised is an understatement. Kwezi stopped wetting her bed around the time she stopped wearing diapers which is almost two years ago. She is the kind of child who will sleep through the whole night without waking up for a toilet break. Has she wet her bed before? Yes, but it is so rare and is always a result of an outing where she has binged on lots of soda. So what could be the issue? I wondered. I will be calling the school today but in the meantime, I am worried. In the past, I have read that sudden bedwetting in children is one of the signs that the child could be facing bullying. I have monitored her for days to see if she is keen to go to school and the enthusiasm has not waned even for a second. She may have trouble getting out of the warmth of her bed in the morning sometimes but the moment her feet hit the floor, what I have on my hands is a four-year-old who can’t wait to get on her school bus, so for now, I have ruled that out. My opinion is that she is not very comfortable talking to her teachers when she needs to ease herself, so she holds it and goes to bed with it. I raised the issue with my female colleagues who agreed with me on the issue of fearing to ask the teachers for permission to go and pee. It then brought up the question of why Kwezi would be scared of her teachers. Are they being rude or have they been rude before and it left her less confident about asking for permission? All these unanswered questions are making me uncomfortable because I, for instance, know that no teacher will ever admit to such a thing. That said, I have tried to talk to Kwezi herself and of course I didn’t get an answer. In the meantime, like any other modern mom, I have been combing the internet to see if maybe I could get clues and all I can tell you that today, Google was not my friend because all it did was scare me with ideas like possibility of urinary tract infection, constipation, diabetes and sexual abuse. I don’t want to hear of all this because it is nowhere close to our reality. It is time to call the teachers and get to the bottom of this.
