And I cooked again

Yes, I cooked. Not just in the microwave, which I do quite often. I cooked on a regular stove.

Over the past weekend, I fixed a simple vegetarian pasta dish. It tasted good. Even Larry, who says he’s a carnivore, not an omnivore, liked it and asked for seconds.

It probably sounds ridiculous that a 50 year old person is happy about cooking a simple dish on the stove.

I’ve written about why I don’t cook very often before. If you’ve read about my OCD obsession with stoves, you know that I have had a really hard time in the past cooking on a conventional stove.

Most of my problems with the stove are in the past. This is the way it was:

It was all wrapped up in the obsessions I had about safety. I worried that I was going to leave the stove on and cause a fire, which would hurt or kill my family.

So when the cooking was done, I compulsively turned the stove off and then on again, off, then on again, over and over. I stared at the stove, trying to convince myself that it was really off.

And then there were the contamination fears. I worried that I wouldn’t clean up after the food preparation, and errant crumbs and spills would draw ants and bugs and mice. And then there would be more contamination.

So I compulsively cleaned, wiping the counter over and over, eyeing it from every angle to make sure it was clean.

It was easier to just not cook.

I eventually learned that my compulsive acts did nothing to help me. OCD is tricky like that. Nothing calms the uncertainty for long before more compulsions have to be done.

The real way to break the OCD is to NOT give in to the compulsions, but rather, deal with the anxiety in other ways.

What worked for me was to leave the scene and get busy doing something else. Or I sometimes focused on the anxiety itself.

Whatever I did, I could not indulge in compulsions. In other words, once I turned off the stove, I had to walk away. I couldn’t check it. I couldn’t turn the knob to “make sure” it was off. Likewise, once I cleaned the counter—one pass over with disinfectant and water—I had to leave it.

My OCD has been better over the past several months. And I started thinking about cooking again. Larry and I eat out a lot. Both of us need to eat healthier. I decided that the best way for us to do that was to eat at home more and eat homemade food.

So I cooked Saturday night. I decided I could do it with a minimum of anxiety. And if I did get anxious, I had the tools to push through it.

I turned on the stove, cooked, and then I turned off the stove. I had a little bit of doubt. Then I turned away from the stove. I did OK.

I don’t think I’ll ever love to cook. It’s just not something I want to do a lot of. But if I can cook a healthy meal and feed my husband and myself at home, then I have accomplished something.

Have you cooked anything good lately?

My OCD is like this

  I recently wrote this poem to describe what obsessive-compulsive disorder can sometimes be like for me.

  The poem is based in part on an experience I wrote about in a previous post.

OCD

By Tina Fariss Barbour

I stare until there’s nothing to see.

The stove hasn’t moved.

The stove hasn’t changed.

The stove hasn’t given me the answer.

I stare once more for fifty times.

I beat my hands against the wall.

Help me, God, no more.

Why not my head?

Why not my head

against the wall?

It explodes me,

leaves nothing but

promises not to do it again.

It is a prayer to God.

I won’t do it again.

I’ll do it just once.

I beat my hands against the wall.

No more, please God.

Why not my head?

Why not my head

against the wall?

OCD and why I don't cook

I actually own some cookbooks and have a couple of my mother's recipe boxes.

It’s messy and there’s the whole stove thing.

I don’t cook because cleaning up during and afterwards brings out my contamination and cleaning obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms.

No matter how careful I am, I sometimes spill food onto the kitchen counter when I mix together ingredients. Or I put down a bowl that held one of the ingredients and it leaves behind a ring of sauce, milk or whatever.

If I have to use the can opener, then I have to carefully wipe that off after I finish using it.

I worry that in cleaning off the counter, I may miss a spot and then ants or bugs might come around.

I don’t cook because a lot of cooking requires the stove. I can turn on the stove OK, but turning it off brings checking behavior with it. Is the stove really off, or do I just think it is? If I leave it on, a fire could start, or my husband might lay his hand on the stovetop, not knowing it was on, and burn himself. So goes my thinking.

Pans on the stovetop can also lead to food on the stovetop, leaving another surface to carefully clean and worry about.

Cooking anxiety

I have all this anxiety even though I’ve come a long way in my contamination and checking OCD symptoms.

I used to wipe the counter over and over, leaning down to view the countertop from different angles to make sure every bit was covered with cleaner. Then I’d clean it again. And again.

I used to check the stove for literally hours, staring at the on/off button, turning it on and off again and again, trying to get to the place where it felt “right” that the stove was off.

I no longer take so much time cleaning and checking the stove. I don’t follow through with all my compulsive urges. I can actually clean fairly quickly and turn off the stove in one attempt.

But the obsessions about cooking are still there, and it’s hard to face them every time I want something to eat.

So I avoid cooking.

Oh, I’ll put something in the microwave. But it’s rare that I mix ingredients and cook them on a conventional stove.

When I do cook, it’s a burden. There are so many things to worry about.

And I just don’t like to cook. I don’t read recipes with the same enthusiasm as my mother, who was a wonderful cook when she was still able to do it, and many friends, who discuss cooking like I would discuss a good book or movie.

I wonder if my dislike of cooking is directly related to my fear of cooking. I would guess that there’s at least a partial connection.

So how do we eat?

Breakfast is easy enough with oatmeal or grits cooked in the microwave, cold cereal, fruit or yogurt. I can eat sandwiches or snacks for lunch. My husband and I eat out for lunch sometimes, for dinner a lot.

We fix a couple of meals at home each week, usually using the microwave. We usually cook things separately, since I’m a vegetarian and Larry is not.

Sometimes my husband fixes spaghetti, with one pot of meat sauce and one pot of meatless sauce for me.

I want to cook

I want to cook more. I want to make food so we eat at home more often than we eat out. Cooking would result in healthier meals for me and for my husband. It would save money.

I want to enjoy cooking, because I feel like I’m missing out on something. I even recently bought a new vegetarian cookbook.

And I want to stop avoiding cooking. I want to stop giving in to the OCD and just push through and cook.

  Do you have any suggestions on how to do that? Do you like to cook? What about cooking do you enjoy? How did you get to that place of enjoying cooking?

Stare. On. Off. Stare.

My mother was a beautiful cook.

She no longer cooks. She lives in an assisted living facility and has her meals prepared for her now.

But she was a true artist in the kitchen for most of my life.

She loved to try different dishes, and she read cookbooks like other people read novels. She understood how ingredients worked together and mixed them creatively.

During the holidays, she made beautifully decorated cookies, fruit cakes, hermit cakes, coconut cakes and all kinds of pies, all from scratch.

She learned to cook in home economics classes in high school. During at least one of those years, her teacher required her to cook one meal at home each week. Her family, which included nine siblings, looked forward to her night to cook.

Both of my brothers do some cooking, but I, her only daughter, do very little. I have never developed the love for cooking that my mother had, and I never seemed to have a knack for it.

But I think I have avoided cooking mostly for OCD reasons. Cooking can be messy, and making sure I’ve cleaned everything well enough can be very difficult.

Cooking also usually involves the use of a stove, and I don’t like stoves.

In one of my early posts, I wrote about the different ways obsessive-compulsive disorder showed itself in my life.

One group of symptoms that made my list was checking. One of the things I have checked countless times is the stove.

The compulsion has been to check and recheck the stove to make sure I turned it off after cooking.

The underlying anxiety is the fear that if I leave the stove on, a fire will start and burn the house down and my loved ones will die. The fire could spread, and then others would be harmed.

My favorite recipes call for microwave cooking or no cooking at all.

The “checking the stove ritual” used to be a tremendous source of anxiety and fear. I don’t suffer as much from it now, but I still have that anxious feeling when I cook, and I still start my checking ritual almost without thinking.

I am able to cut off the ritual more easily now, but I have to admit I give myself a blanket reassurance by asking my husband to check behind me.

Even though I don’t go into a frenzy over the stove like I used to, I know that my life continues to be affected by this aspect of my OCD. I still don’t cook a lot. I still almost panic when I’m asked to bring a dish to a potluck.

I wonder if I would be a “top cook” (what my father called my mother) if I didn’t have OCD?

Here’s a picture of what my stove-checking ritual looked like at its worst. I had experiences like this one mostly in my late-20s, when I was in graduate school.

It’s 9 p.m. I need to study, but first I need to clean up my supper dishes, which are stacked next to the sink in my small kitchen in my small apartment. I don’t look at the stove yet.

I wash the dishes and wipe the counter first.

To cook my frozen dinner, I used the microwave, not the conventional oven. No cooking on the stove. I seldom used it.

But the stove is still at the end of the counter. I haven’t used it in weeks, but every night I check it. I may have left one or more of the stovetop eyes on the last time I used it. Or in checking it, I might have left it on.

I turn each knob on, then off, trying to be sure that it’s off. There’s no convenient “click” to tell me when the knob is back in the off position, so I have to press the knob back in a counter clock direction and apply just the right pressure so that it doesn’t bounce back into an “on” position. I’ll do each knob one time, I tell God. I promise Him.

The problem with these knobs is that the line over the word off doesn’t measure perfectly against the word off. Or they don’t seem to measure perfectly. I stoop and stare from different directions. I close my left eye and look with my right eye, then switch eyes. In some positions the knobs look okay. In others, they don’t.

Maybe I didn’t do it right. Maybe they’re not all off. I tell God that I just need to do each knob one more time. I ask Him to forgive me for lying to Him, and I promise Him, this is it.

I start from scratch. Twist the knob to the on position, twist it off, feeling for the right pressure, squinting to measure the line against the word. I pray out loud: “I’m sorry, God. I’ve got this awful feeling inside. I need to do this one more time. Please forgive me for lying to you. I know I’m an awful person. I lied to You, God! But I am promising You, this is it.”

I feel a rhythm. It’s not a song, just a beat that’s going on inside of my head. I turn the knobs on and off to the beat. If I get out-of-step with the beat, I have to start over again. On, off, on, off. Feel the burners. Analyze the heat. On, off, on, off. Forgive me God. One more time. On, off, on, off. Analyze the heat. On, off.

I am going to explode. I jump up and down, then slam my hands against the wall and cry. I wish I had the courage to bang my head against the wall and die.

Back to the stove. The rhythm. The prayers. The tears. The waiting. I’m waiting for that feeling inside me that tells me the stove’s okay. I don’t know where the feeling comes from, but I know I need it before I can walk away.

When I finally feel it, I try not to think about it. It’s not a strong feeling of reassurance. But I am so tired. I am so tired. My legs hurt from standing in front of the stove. My hands hurt from the banging and from the careful examination of the burners.

I pull one of my back-up actions. I walk around to the closet where the breaker box is. I turn off the switch that controls the flow of electricity to the stove.

I’m done. I did what I needed to do before I could start studying. But I can no longer focus my eyes enough to read. I fall on top of my bed. The clock says 3:30 a.m.