Random 5 Friday: The last day of January

Happy Friday to you on this last day of January! Can you believe the first month of 2014 is almost over? It seems to have flown by.

I’m joining Nancy of A Rural Journal for Random 5 Friday. Check out Nancy’s blog to find more posts where bloggers share their random facts.

 

Snow on the camellia bush.

One

We had another snowfall this week. We were supposed to get mostly flurries in our area, but we got more than that.

The roads were treacherous Tuesday night. I had to work at the newspaper office into the evening, but Larry came to the office and followed me home in case I had trouble getting up any of the hills. I made it fine, but it was nice knowing he was behind me.

Two

My work week at the newspaper wasn’t as hectic as I thought it would be. A trial set for Wednesday went to a plea last Friday.

Three

My schedule seems to be different every week and can change at the last minute. That makes it hard to have a lot of week-to-week routine.

I am working on finding a more peaceful morning routine. It’s hard for me to get up early before it’s light outside, but I feel so much better when I get an early start.

I have got to stop hitting that snooze button.

What time do you get up in the morning?

Four

My skin is suffering from the cold, dry air of winter. My hands look like claws. They’re not like they were when washing OCD ruled my habits, but they are dry and rough. I have dry patches on my face, too.

I probably don’t put enough lotion on. I don’t like the thick feeling of too much lotion, and it seems to make my face oily if I’m not careful.

What lotion do you use for dry skin? Do you know of anything that moisturizes without leading to breakouts?

Five

Chase Bird loves to curl up in small, dark, warm spaces, especially during the day. To accommodate him, we arrange a kitty blanket over different chairs, wherever he’s hanging out, so he can hide away and sleep.

Here’s one we fixed in the den. It’s where Larry usually sits when he’s watching TV. But he gives up the chair for his Chase Bird.

Waiting for an OCD rescue

The other night I was folding some laundry leftover from the weekend.

More laundry was in the washer and dryer. Larry had started washing cat blankets and beds, and I followed him with a load of clothes.

As I folded the laundry, I thought that the last of the kitty laundry was dry. It was time to empty the dryer and fill it with a new load, the clothes.

So I started to ask Larry to empty the dryer for me.

After all, that way I could avoid having to clean the dryer filter “good enough.” I wouldn’t have to worry about stray pieces of lint floating around and causing a fire. I wouldn’t have to worry about finding the dryer sheet hidden in the laundry, just waiting to ride upstairs in the laundry basket, ready for the cats to pounce on and eat and get sick from.

Yes, those are some of the things I worry about when it comes to laundry. And there are even more things I worry about when doing laundry.

But the other night, as I was folding laundry, it hit me.

I needed to take the kitty laundry out of the dryer myself.

I needed to stop waiting to be rescued.

I needed to stop depending on Larry to do the tasks that I didn’t want to do because of OCD. I needed to stop avoiding what I was afraid of.

I went downstairs and took care of the laundry myself.

I’m still avoiding certain tasks and situations because of OCD. And I’ve been expecting Larry to do some of those tasks and take care of some of those situations.

For example, I leave several cat care duties to Larry because of my OCD.

I don’t like to change the water in their bowls because if I have to wash the bowls first, then I’ll worry about getting all of the soap residue off before I fill it up with cold water for drinking. And I will have to check over and over to make sure it’s cold water and not hot water that I leave in the bowl.

I avoid washing the cat food bowls for similar reasons: I might not rinse them well enough and soap residue might make the cats sick.

I don’t clean the litter boxes because it’s just too messy and sometimes hard to look at.

Yes, OCD is a strange disorder.

I’m depending on Larry to carry a chunk of my OCD load for me. That’s not fair to him. And it’s not fair to me in that I won’t get better in those areas if I don’t try to push through the anxiety related to them.

I’m going to have to study my routines to find other things that I’m relying on Larry to take care of because of OCD. And I’m going to have to start helping with those tasks.

And stop expecting an OCD rescue.

Have you ever leaned too much on someone else to carry the load because of OCD, depression or some other issue?

Wash, wash, rinse, rinse: OCD and the dishes

I hate washing dishes.

I can’t believe that when I was a small girl, I actually liked it. That was before obsessive-compulsive symptoms caught on to what I was doing, and I could just enjoy swishing around the water and soap.

As I got older, washing dishes became a painful chore.

Push the plate down in the water. Submerge it completely. Lift one edge up. Use the dishcloth to wipe the eating side. Turn the plate over. Wipe the bottom. Turn the plate over. Wipe the eating side. Turn the plate over. Wipe the bottom. Turn on the water. Rinse the eating side. Rinse the bottom. Turn the plate in circles. Rinse the eating side. Rinse the bottom. Rinse the eating side. Rinse the bottom. Rinse the eating side. Rinse the bottom. Turn the plate in circles. Rinse the eating side. Rinse the bottom.

I was obsessed with not cleaning the dishes enough. So I compulsively washed and rewashed them. I was also obsessed with rinsing all the soap off, because if others ate soap, it would make them sick. And it would be my fault.

So I washed and I rinsed. And I took a lot of time doing it.

My mother criticized me for the time I took and the water I used. It was a waste, she said.

When I was about 12, I was trying frightfully hard to be good, though I came up with plenty of sins to confess in my compulsive prayers and chants.

I decided that I needed to help my mother around the house more. So I offered to wash the dishes for one meal a day without being asked.

What a torture I was putting myself through!

Around the same time, I stayed with one of my aunts while my father was in the hospital and my mother was with him.

I felt like I was in the way, so I offered to help by washing the dishes.

And I set about it in my usual way.

While I was washing, my aunt received a phone call. I heard her say, “She’s washing the dishes.” Pause. “Well, she’s a little slow.”

I remember that I felt like I was being unhelpful after all.

Today, I have a dishwasher that takes care of most of the dishes. But we still wash some by hand, including the cats’ bowls.

Even today, though I don’t have the same problem with the washing, I still rinse the dishes longer than my husband does. I have a holdover fear that I’ll leave soap residue on the dishes and someone will get sick. And it would be my fault.

Have you ever had obsessions and compulsions about washing dishes? What household chores did you have to do as a child?

Washing my hands

Sometimes still I examine my hands and wrists and imagine I see a discoloration, almost like a tight glove pulled up over the area that is slightly darker than the rest of my skin.

My husband doesn’t see it, so I think it must be my imagination, a mental image leftover from when my hands were discolored.

I wash my hands a lot, but not with the ferocity that I once did and not for so long a time. My skin is dry, but that’s probably due more to the fact that I don’t dry them properly and put lotion on them afterwards.

When I was a child, the first manifestation of OCD that my parents seemed to notice was my use of water. When I was around eleven, I began washing my hands with a diligence that I had never had before.

The water had to be hot and running fast, and I had to rub and rub my hands under the water with soap until I got the feeling that my hands were clean enough.

I was afraid that if I didn’t get my hands clean, I would pass my germs on to someone else, or to something else, like a bowl or plate, that someone else might touch and be contaminated with.

The running of the water is what caught the attention of my parents. We lived on a farm and depended on well water. It was a good well, and there was probably little danger of it going dry, but my parents were conservative with water.

So they told me to stop running so much water.

That should have been enough. I was an obedient child ordinarily.

But the pull of OCD was stronger than my parents’ voices, and I continued to run water behind the closed door of the bathroom, washing and washing until I felt clean.

My parents fussed at me and ordered me to stop wasting water.

I had no real sense of the amount of water I was using or the time I was spending cleaning. I was focused on getting my hands clean. Time was not a factor.

Finally my mother had had enough. She brought a gallon plastic jug to me one morning and said that the water in the jug was all that I could use that day for washing my hands. I could flush the toilet and take a bath, but the gallon of water was all I could use for washing my hands.

This devastated me. For one thing, the water was cold, and I knew that cold water was not as effective at killing germs as warm or hot water.

And it was very difficult to first wet my hands, put the jug down, soap up, then pour enough water out to get all the soap residue from my hands. I also had to think about leaving enough water for what I would need for the rest of the day.

I cried and raged against the plastic jug, and after a few days, I abandoned it and went back to the faucet. I was more careful, though, and tried to run the faucet at a slower speed, thus more quietly, so that my parents might not notice it as much.

The compulsion to wash my hands waxed and waned as I grew older and after the first episode in my early adolescence, I didn’t have a noticeable problem with it until I went away to graduate school.

I lived alone in a series of apartments, and I could run as much water as I wanted with no one to fuss at me.

I discovered liquid soap, which I loved. I didn’t have to worry about a wet soap bar dripping from the soap holder, and then becoming sticky with thick residue.

After washing my hands, I didn’t dry them very well. I couldn’t be sure of the cleanliness of the towel I was using, so I preferred to kind of shake them and rub the back of my hands on my clothes.

My hands and wrists became red and raw. Sometimes they would bleed.

I don’t remember any of my friends saying much, if anything about my hands. If they did, I didn’t tell them what I was doing. I didn’t tell anyone that.

Here’s a photo of me from around 1986 or 1987. I was a student at the time and was taking a break in a park with a friend of mine. She took the photo.

I found the photo the other day, and I could see how dark the skin on my hands and wrists was.

The only time I remember someone really seeing my hands as a problem during this period of my life was during a visit to the university health center. I think I was having some problems with my ears.

After the nurse led me to the exam room, she quickly turned and walked down the hallway with the doctor. I turned to watch before I entered the room. The nurse was telling the doctor something while pointing to her hands and shaking her head.

Oh, I thought. She noticed my hands. What was I going to say?

I held my breath when the doctor came in. He didn’t say anything at first, but later on he asked me about my hands in an offhand manner. I told him my skin was really dry and got really chapped in the cold. He didn’t say anything else about it.