Tag Archives: OCD

Hey guys, it’s me.

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I haven’t written in so long.

Not literally. I’m actually writing more than I’ve probably ever written before in my adult life because when the kids went back to school in August I took a look around and realized that I’d spent the last few years getting everyone’s mental health in check and now I had time to return to being me. Not Harmony the mom, but Harmony the writer.

Here I am!

For work, I’m writing other people’s stories; this is the where I share my own.

In March of 2020, my oldest son tried to hang himself. He was 11 years old. My youngest child witnessed the entire thing–she’s the one who alerted me. She was 6 years old. Our middle kid, who was 8 at the time, was in the house but didn’t see it happen.

When we walked through the hellscape that came after, we knew this wasn’t a situation that would easily be resolved with a little medication and therapy. There were multiple people involved, and it’s not easy to find someone with the skill set to help a 6-year-old process the kind of trauma that comes with hearing your older brother say “I’m going to kill myself.”

But the pandemic came, and it smeared a suffocating layer of trauma and worry across our already full Trauma and Worry Plate, and all I could do was focus on doing the next right thing. Which for me, meant not relapsing, because the very last thing these kids need is a drunk mother.

Since then, we have rotated between so many different types of therapies (occupational therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, intensive outpatient therapy) and experimented with so many combinations of medications (under a psychiatrist’s care, obviously) that I consider myself sort of a pro at this sort of thing. But then last year, Asher decided to go and have a total OCD breakdown that almost landed him in the hospital because he wasn’t eating or sleeping, and I turned all of my energy to him. It took almost an entire year of intense work, but he’s so much better — and now he’s seeing a therapist virtually that specializes in pediatric OCD, because HOLY FUCKBALLS IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND A THERAPIST WHO CAN SEE KIDS WITH OCD.

Now that you have a little background, I’m just going to tell you: I’m not sure if I have processed any of this shit. I see a therapist and I do my best to be honest, but there is only so much time and energy I have in a day to devote to falling apart. I have to do it as I can.

Apparently, kids operate the exact same way.

Pepper with her cat, Daisy.

Asher never spoke about the incident with Maverick at all. I tried to talk to him about it, we carefully watched and listened for any sign that he was disturbed or needed to talk or ask questions or share concerns.

Nothing. Crickets.

Three years passed. And then, one random Friday night at the pool several weeks ago, Asher fell apart. He ran home to find his brother and threw his arms around him, sobbing. He kept saying “I just needed to see that he was okay.” It actually relieves me to see him talking about it, because as long as he’s sharing, he’s not bottling it up inside.

Asher just started giving us hugs this summer!

Which leads me to my next point: Pepper and Maverick’s relationship. He felt terrible that she was there to witness the darkest moment of his life. I remember him talking to her, all of us talking about it together. But that was also a week before the pandemic hit and our lives came to a halt, and the older she’s gotten, the more questions she has.

Today I picked her up from Girl Scouts and she asked me, “Why would Maverick want to commit suicide? I’m so mad at him for that.”

My first instinct was to shut it down. I hate talking about it. I hate thinking about it. I hate even considering the idea that any of my children could or would harm themselves, and I cannot even when I hear the word “suicide” come out of my little girl’s mouth. Just nope. She shouldn’t even know what that word means.

I wanted to crank up Taylor Swift and sing Shake It Off and maybe crack a few jokes and distract her until she dropped it. I wanted to dismiss her hard feelings for the sake of my own damn comfort. That’s the same part of me who wants to drink when faced with a super scary thing I don’t want to deal with. I LOATHE FEELING UNCOMFORTABLE. Strangely enough, I keep fucking doing it — being uncomfortable, forcing myself to walk through a situation sober — and I have no idea why I’m putting myself through this torture except that I am literally doing it for my kids. And for myself. And Robbie. But mostly for the kids, because they already have enough problems and I already have enough guilt.

I took a breath and suggested that she talk to him about it.

“But Maverick gets mad at me when I bring it up,” she said. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

And that is when I told her no one wants to talk about it, but that’s exactly why we must. I told her he has shame and guilt and horror every time he thinks about it, and she got really quiet. Later on, when we sat down for dinner, I asked Maverick if he would mind talking to Pepper about the time he tried to kill himself because that’s excellent dinnertime conversation.

He inhaled. I watched him do it, watched him brace himself. I could see that he wanted to jump out of his chair and run far, far away, but he didn’t. He stayed put, and quietly said yes, he didn’t mind talking about it. That alone made tears well up in my eyes. That is what years of therapy teaches us: to stay in our seat when we want to run. To look directly into the eyes of our loved ones and be honest with them about our demons.

She asked him so many questions.

She wanted to know what he was thinking, why he would do that to her, why he didn’t consider the fact that she would be TRAUMATIZED and DEPRESSED (she really did say those words much louder than the others) for the rest of her life, and what if she thought it was a good idea too? Then Mom and Dad would only have one kid left.

I asked if they wanted me to leave because it was the most honest and adult conversation I’ve ever witnessed between two children but they both said I should stay. I wanted to leave. I wanted to hide. These kids are just kids and they’re talking about death and depression and self-loathing.

But if they don’t know that it helps to talk about it, how would they ever know to talk about it?

People act like it’s some big mystery, why the world is so chaotic and awful all the time — it’s because no one talks and no one listens and emotional needs are shoved aside and people don’t feel safe to be themselves and assholes breed more assholes and they all try to outasshole each other.

Now I have to get back to work so we have enough money to pay for all of our therapies.

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When doing nothing is the answer

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Why bother?

Because right now, there is someone

out there with a wound

in the exact shape of your words.

***

I saved this image to the desktop of my computer because it’s getting to the point over here where I don’t have the desire to write. Why add my voice to the already-crowded chaos of things happening on the internet? What more is there to say or to add?

The exhaustion of these past few years is taking a toll, and I’ve done everything I can think of to avoid writing. I’ve organized closets, vacuumed cobwebs from the highest corners of our ceilings, picked up paint flakes that my middle child peeled from the inside of his closet, and stared into space for countless hours.

People who aren’t writers don’t understand this. My therapist, who is a therapist, tells me to write. “You’ve put this off long enough, Harmony.” I don’t know – have I? There are still so many completely random tasks I’ve yet to consider doing. Maybe first I ought to sand down the frames of a pair of stained glass windows I bought at an estate sale last summer. I’ll start after that.

***

They tell me it is not my job to take away my child’s pain. Growth comes from overcoming difficulty, and if there isn’t difficulty, then there isn’t growth.

I dislike this tremendously.

I see other parents working to remove their child’s pain. Why can’t I do it, too? I want to rush ahead, clearing a path free from obstacles and difficulties, sweeping sticks and pebbles to the side so that each of my three children could walk barefoot if they so desired.

That is how I show my love: by doing. It suited me in early marriage and parenthood, when there were so many tasks to complete. I showed my love for these people all damn day and half of the time they didn’t even realize it, but I sure did work my ass off doing all of the things. And even though I was resentful as hell and rocketing towards a mental breakdown, I never felt like I was struggling to do nothing.

Doing nothing wasn’t even on my radar.

Over the past few years, mostly through working in therapy and in the rooms of recovery, I’ve learned that sometimes there is nothing to do. Like, DOING NOTHING is very surprisingly often the right thing to do. Talk about a mind fuck for an uptight control freak who overcompensates for what she lacks by doing. This is why I also hate doing recovery work, because this shit infuriates and confounds me.

Right now, I’m navigating a really difficult time in parenting where my job is to sit and quietly listen. There is no shouting across the house. There is no broadcasting “DO YOUR HOMEWORK!” on the Google Home Device. Shouting either falls on Asher’s deaf ears or stresses him out and he ends up in a ball on the floor. He needs me to walk to wherever he is, get down on his level, and ask him in a normal-to-quiet tone to brush his teeth. Then he might need me to say it again once he stands up, because by then he has forgotten what it was that I asked him to do (attention deficit disorder).

Then he will walk into the bathroom, begin counting flooring tiles, and forget again what he was supposed to be doing (obsessive compulsive disorder). By then I’ve usually gone back to the kitchen and it’s 45 minutes later before I find him, still in the bathroom counting, teeth un-brushed.

The deal with Asher is, he is who he is and I am the one who needs to adjust and figure out how to best reach him. He doesn’t respond to the things that work with his older brother, so it’s like re-learning how to parent a 10-year-old all over again. He requires a finesse that I don’t come by naturally, and sometimes, I have to sit on my hands to keep myself from JUST TAKING OVER AND DOING IT FOR HIM, MY GOD. Thankfully I married a man with finesse and patience, and he’s great at taking over when I hit a wall.

I often feel sorry for myself when I’m drowning in the midst of meeting my kids where they are, until something snaps me out of it and I realize how fucking lucky I am to get a front row seat to see these people grow into themselves.

Full stop.

Forcing myself to quietly sit next to my 5th grader while he picks a pencil apart instead of finishing the last few questions on his homework assignment is an exercise in self control I otherwise wouldn’t have. Digging deep and keeping my mouth shut when my kids make choices I know aren’t in their best interest is hard as fuck, but it’s the best thing I can do for them as their mother despite the level of discomfort it causes ME.

Motherhood, from beginning to end, is an exercise in growth. The kids are growing — anyone can see that. But so am I, in ways I didn’t even realize.

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The Biggest Sin.

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My mother, who I had not talked to in several days, called me.

I was just starting dinner when the phone rang. She had surgery this week, and the last time I saw her, she was still in the recovery room. I was happy that she was calling; I wanted to find out how she was feeling.

I turned off the stove as I strained to hear her. She sounded weak — just tired, she assured me — and right on cue, my toddler poured a cup of water all over the floor while my back was turned. My mom was still talking, but I couldn’t hear a word: all three of my kids were running around in the widening pool of water as the tile grew more and more slippery.

“I know this probably isn’t a good time to call,” she said, likely because she could hear muffled sounds of distress as I rummaged for towels and herded my wet children out of the kitchen.

If we’re being honest, no time is a good time to call me.

“I have it under control,” I told her. “Just hang on a minute.”

That is when I saw my 23-month-old daughter get down on all fours and lap up puddles of water like a puppy.

This is an example of what my days have been like lately. As open as I am about many parts of my life, there are some things I don’t talk about at all. I think most people are like that. Being a woman is complicated, right? I’ll wait while you nod your head in agreement.

I have been stewing for awhile over how quickly women jump to tear each other apart, because quite frankly I am over it.

Judgy look.

We all bear an insanely heavy load; each one of us wade through life loaded down with stuff. It doesn’t matter how “together” or “perfect” a woman seems — good or bad, SHE’S GOT STUFF.

Yet, for reasons I am unable to fully comprehend, even though we are all doing the best we can, even though we are all struggling with our stuff, even though we are supposed to build each other up instead of tear each other down, even though ALL OF THIS, women still get shredded up over absolutely anything and it’s generally at the hand of other women.

I know because it happened to me recently. Want to know why?

Because I’m a good housekeeper.

Let me explain: I cope with the chaos of my life by following behind my family and cleaning up their mess (or asking them to clean up after themselves). Yes, it’s exhausting. Yes, it’s pointless, because the messes never cease. I don’t do it because it makes sense. I do it because if my house was a wreck to match my wreck of a life, then I would have a nervous breakdown.

Everyone who knows and loves me accepts this. They are all aboard the OCD train, because no one wants to see me lose my shit. Keeping order makes me feel like things aren’t so terrifying. I can’t stop someone I love from getting sick, but I CAN keep the bathroom from smelling like pee.

I can do that.

It makes me feel better.

Recently, a friend came to my house. Later on, she posted something on Facebook about how clean it is over here. She didn’t name me — she just said, in jest, that her friend who claimed to have a messy house in fact has an abnormally clean one. AND her kid’s beds were made. AND she answered the door in an apron. Triple sin.

My friend probably didn’t realize that every person in her friend list seemed to be sitting around on social media on a Saturday night with nothing better to do than to tear apart an unnamed woman for keeping a clean home. She did not intend for it to be a bash-fest at all — she was actually trying to poke fun at herself for having a messy home — but that’s what happened, because people suck. Women are criticized and judged for having a messy home, a clean home, for their parenting choices and their career choices, and for how they spend their time — which is no one else’s to spend.

We are blasted for being too fat, too thin, too vain, or for “letting ourselves go.” We are judged from the time we get up until the time we go to bed. There is never a time, ever, when everyone is happy with what I’m doing. My children, husband, mother, neighbors, and self are never all happy at the same time for a choice I make at any given time. Even when I do something like drink that third cup of coffee, I do so knowing that if my mother was there she would say “That’s not good for you.” My husband would say “That’s why you can’t sleep at night.”

But my kids don’t care if I do it. None of them will throw a fit … so it’s a win. I’m having that third cup.

Displeased.While I accept that this is how the world works, that you really and truly cannot make everyone happy, it is still wearing on the spirit. And even when you don’t know the people who are criticizing you, as was the case with the Facebook situation, it still hurts. I stood in my clean kitchen wearing my clean apron reading the comments from total strangers who don’t know me or my situation, and I swear … if I could have reached into my phone and bitch slapped some of them, I would have.

I have opinions. I am guilty of making snap judgments of others. There are things I totally disagree with, and things that make me uncomfortable.

I have stuff. You have stuff. We’re all struggling. So why can’t we cut each other some slack?

By far, the biggest sin is tearing another woman down.

The truth is, I’m not a good housekeeper. I have a stressful life and I cope with it by cleaning. I’m sure there is a name for my disorder, which you only know about because I took the time to tell you.

I recently wrote a letter to my daughter telling her that other women will try to tear her apart. I dread that day. In the meantime, at 35 years old, I had to look at myself in the mirror and command myself to SHAKE IT OFF BECAUSE I AM AWESOME AND I DO NOT HAVE TO APOLOGIZE FOR MY AWESOMENESS.

Now go forth and be awesome … and cut a bitch some slack.

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