It is not easy being the parent of a child with OCD.  I don’t say my son suffers from OCD because he doesn’t.  I do.  The machinations I have to go through to maintain his comfort level are sometimes very painful to me and at times it doesn’t work and I suffer great levels of stress.

    I’ve tried to find support in other ways, but they were not satisfactory.  My family is so caught up in their own drama that the only thing they do when I talk about my life is offer suggestions and criticism without understanding the problems.  OCD doesn’t just run in my family, it trollolups and plies in giant circles through the room and plants big wet kisses on everyone it meets.  I have a niece who is so obsessive about cleaning I once watched her disassemble and reassemble an entire kitchen three times  one week, scrubbing every inch like it had never been cleaned before.  Another one obsesses about her kids and knows everything there is to know about raising everybody’s kids and isn’t afraid to tell you what you’re doing wrong.

    Sorry for the rant there.  It has been my opinion since I started dealing with this that OCD should be considered as a member of the Autism family.  I’m constantly reminded of Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Rainman.” His entire world revolves around his comfort zone.  He has to have a certain brand of underwear from Kmart.  His things need to be arranged in a certain way.  He wears a certain shirt on a particular day.  The more I live with my son and his OCD the more I see the same kind of behaviors.  I see some of the same things in myself.  I have to have my food organized in a certain way on the plate or it’s uncomfortable to eat it.  When I was young I went through many rituals.  We went to a park with a beach for one of my birthday’s and for a long time afterwards I felt sand on the end of my fingers and would try to blow it off.  For some reason I started shaking my hands when I felt stressed.  It drove my sister crazy but I couldn’t stop it.  One by one the rituals would go away and another would take its place.

    The fact is Aspberger’s Syndrome has been linked to OCD and it is on the Autism spectrum of disorders.  OCD is also associated with high IQs and a whole alphabet soup of other mental disorders like PTSD.  OCD is often brought on by a trauma of some kind, even though it is an inherited tendency.  My particular brand was brought on by a life-threatening illness when I was six.  I am a survivor of the German measles epidemic of the early 1960s, but along with the measles I caught chicken pox from my niece and nephew.  I had such a high fever I was delirious for days and the doctor told my mother to prepare for my death.  After it was over I became a different child, overly shy, unmotivated, and fearful.  I’d missed a lot of school and had to stay in at recess time to make up my homework.  I never got ahead of it again.  I would start the new school year and be behind by the end of the week.

    As hard as things were for me to deal with nothing has ever been as hard as what has become of my son.  He was a happy child, popular among his classmates and teachers.  He even took my divorce from his father in stride.  Where things started to go wrong was when I remarried his father.  We had to move into another school district and he had to adjust to being around people he didn’t know in second grade.  He had a terrible teacher and an even worse principal.  He had trouble making new friends.  He started to hate school and fought against doing his homework.  On the home front his father had a drinking problem so there were different battles there.  We moved again in between second and third grade and he went back to his original school, but his friends had moved on so he was still without friends.  Within a few years his dad’s drinking got so bad he tried to drink himself to death.  He tried to rush things along with a knife one night and the only way to get the knife away was to get him to give it to my son.  That night he was hauled off to jail and the next few days were very tense as Dad had to be taken to a treatment facility in another state.  My son started experiencing mysterious illnesses in the winter that caused him to miss a lot of school.  My loving family told me I was spoiling him.  Now I can look back and see that it was the beginning of his OCD.  It started in first grade with hand washing.  That was after we married again and moved out of the house we’d lived in since my son was two.  He was now six and had to give up most of his toys and belongings to move into a tiny apartment.  Everything would start out fine at the beginning of the school year, but every winter after the Christmas break he would have trouble getting into the routine again and would soon be sick.  He would miss weeks of school.  More than once I was threatened with tickets for truancy, but what are you going to do about a child who appears to be seriously ill? 

    I’d been taking him to counseling for years because he was oppositional.  No matter what I wanted him to do he would fight me and I couldn’t get through to him.  The counselor never got OCD from any of the symptoms or situations.  It wasn’t until years later, when he was in 8th grade, that everything came to a head.  He had been through a lot.  I’d left his father again because he could not maintain sobriety and neither one of us could listen to him beg for death anymore, I’d moved us to another state halfway across the country to live with a boyfriend who was not who I thought he was, I got sick and spent two months away from him, leaving him with said boyfriend, we moved back to where we lived before.  While we were living there he was in eighth grade.  It was a new school.  His best friend went there, but had a crop of friends of his own who did not welcome my son, though the girls seemed to be turning themselves inside out to get his attention.  He started noticing that other boys didn’t wash their hands and touched EVERYTHING.  He started feeling and seeing the germs every where.  He got more and more uncomfortable as the days went by and within a month of the start of school he was already feeling sick.  The school and truant officer started making threats almost immediately.  I tried explaining what I thought was going on.  His counselor started making plans to have him go into a hospital for testing.  His father, who never saw the symptoms, wouldn’t believe there was a problem, Again I was “spoiling him” and I should make him go to school because “I am the mom.”  What the heck does that mean?  One day just before Christmas, when we were waiting to hear from the hospital that they had room for him, he was particularly agitated, by then we had figured out that OCD was the culprit.  The school called and insisted that he had to go to school until we heard from the hospital.  I was on the phone arguing with the nurse when he grabbed one of his belts, wrapped it around his neck and tried to hang himself from a plant hook.  He was in the hospital that afternoon.  You would think the school would be more helpful after that wouldn’t you?  No.  After vacation they started again in earnest.  Finally after fighting and arguing for months and both of us getting truancy tickets I pulled him out of school and filed a form with the State to home school him.  I’d fought against it because I was sure he wouldn’t do anything to obtain an education.  I was right. I tried online high schools, but he wouldn’t even log in to do the classes or assignments.  Finally I just let him go.  He read about whatever he wanted to read about and actually got a pretty well balanced education.  At 15 I gave him Pre-GED tests and he aced them all.  The only thing standing in the way of getting his GED is he has to take a class and he has Agoraphobia so he can’t go into a classroom with other people, but he’s talking more and more about doing it.  For an Agoraphobe with OCD that is a really big thing.


http://www.webmd.com/anxiety-panic/news/20000427/ocd-possibly-hereditary