It’s week 25 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge. This week’s blog challenge was another tough one for me – Fast. No one in my family raced cars or horses. The only fast marriage I could think of was the first marriage of my great-grandfather, Dana Ladd, which I’ve written about previously. For a topic that seems easy on the surface, this one had me stumped. I chatted with my mom to see if she had any ideas, and she called me later and said, “It’s not exactly ‘fast,’ but what about ‘fastidious?’ You can write about all the OCD people in the family.”
Thank you, Mom. That’s a novel take on the topic. I’ll do that!
No one in my family actually has OCD – Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. True OCD is a mental disorder in which people are plagued by intrusive thoughts and engage in ritualistic behaviors. I’d say in my family we have … let’s call them “repetitive quirks.” In some cases it's not so much repetitive behaviors as it is having anal-retentive tendencies. We got it from my mother. She says she doesn’t know where she got it from. She doesn’t remember her parents engaging in any repetitive behaviors, or being particular about things, nor do I. Maybe we didn’t see it? My own strange, repetitive behavior is something I didn’t recognize until it was pointed out to me, so it’s possible one of my grandparents did something similar. If I had to guess, I’d say my grandfather had some of these traits. Though at first glance he seemed like a messy person, he had a very particular way of organizing and labeling his papers.
We joke with my mom that she’s like the character Milton from the movie Office Space, who is obsessed with his Redline stapler and having everything just so. After we finally convinced her to watch the movie and she reluctantly admitted she was indeed Milton, we started calling her “Mama Milton” whenever she becomes fixated on something. When my mother worked, she had special pens, and she could only write with or use those particular pens. Using anything else bothered her. If she has candy, she can’t eat it until she sorts it by color – a trait my daughter inherited, though after it was pointed out to her a bunch of times and we teased her about it, she consciously stopped doing it. My mom has sorted candy all her life, and now that she’s in her seventies, she doesn’t intend to stop. Her alarm clock is also subjected to her behaviors. It’s set by sliding a lever over once. Once. You only need to slide it one time. She has to slide it back and forth exactly three times. When it comes to packing, she makes lists well ahead of time which she follows to a T, and packs well in advance. My daughter is the same way. If I’m going on a trip, my mom will call and ask days before, “Have you packed yet? Did you make a list?” She should know by now that my version of packing is grabbing things the day I’m leaving and either throwing them haphazardly into a bag or putting everything on the bed so my husband can pack it. He has a gift for spatial awareness. I don’t.
If anything, my brother is much more extreme than my mother and always has been. Whereas my mother is like Milton, my brother is like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory. He’s brilliant – by far the most intelligent person I’ve ever known. I’m not. We’re opposites, even though according to Adler’s Birth Order Theory, the eldest child is supposed to be the smartest, most responsible child in the family and the youngest is supposed to be fun-loving. My brother is fun-loving. He’s not some stiff, boring nerd. He has a wicked sense of humor and is extremely social, but he’s definitely smarter and more responsible than I am. He has always been a neat freak, but his behavior was so extreme when he was a kid that I think Mom spoke to his pediatrician about it. He detested dirt as a child. If he spilled something on his clothes or rubbed up against anything grimy, he had to change immediately. I can’t imagine the extra loads of laundry he caused our poor mom! A constant refrain in our household was his little voice urgently crying, “I have to wash my hands!” as he raced to the bathroom. He couldn’t stand touching anything messy or sticky and worried about germs. Me? I was the type of kid who had to be told not to touch the dead bird on the ground. If there was a pile of mud, I’d sit in it and make a sculpture. I was oblivious to food or dirt on my face and clothes. I constantly ripped the knees out of my pants. Germs? What about ‘em? My filthy fingers were always in my mouth or crammed up my nose. No five-second rule was necessary - I had no qualms about eating food off the floor. I was a sloppy mess!
Our rooms were also reflections of our opposite personalities. My brother maintained a neat and orderly room and was careful with his possessions. Everything had its place. Mom recalled that he used to have swim goggles that came packaged in a cellophane bag within a cardboard box. After each use, he cleaned them and returned them to the bag within the box and stored them on the shelf in his closet. He was like that with many of his possessions. I bet I had swim goggles too but lost them. My room was such a mess that my mother begged me to at least leave a pathway between my bed and my door so I could escape if the house ever caught fire. I couldn’t even manage that! One time when I was probably ten or eleven, I heard rustling by my bedroom door and watched in horror as Mt. Garbage started moving. Did I really see that pile of papers and candy wrappers move? Surely it was my over-active imagination. I held my breath and stood still, willing it not to happen again, when there it was – a rustling sound and movement. I leaped onto my bed and screamed for my dad! Obviously, some live creature – a mouse or God no – a snake – was in my room! We once had a snake get into the attached porch. Maybe that happened again, and it somehow made its way into the house and slithered into my room? I freaked out!!! An absolute hysterical mess, I was crying and shaking on my bed as my dad waded through my disaster of a room with a flashlight and a big, black garbage bag, throwing out trash as he went. Maybe ten minutes into Dad’s critter hunt and decluttering adventure, the papers by the door rustled again. “See!!!!” I screamed and sobbed. “I told you! There’s a snake! It’s a snake! It's a snake! It's a SNAKE!!!!” And it was at that moment we heard a stifled giggle. Dad opened the door, and there sat my brother, jiggling a coat hanger that stuck out under my door back and forth. There was no critter in my room and never had been. Our dad laughed his ass off! He thought it was the greatest prank ever. Then he told me to clean my entire room, as my brother stood behind him grinning at me, parroting, “Yeah, Julie, clean your room.” Oh, was I pissed at him!
We’ve established that I’m an unorganized, messy, packrat, slob, so you’re probably thinking I escaped any obsessive behaviors or compulsions. You’d be wrong. I have a weird, repetitive behavior that I wasn’t aware of until my husband pointed it out to me. When we’re grocery shopping, I shake things. Not everything. Bags of chips, cartons of milk, things like eggs – they’re safe. I shake boxes and cans, and I do so exactly three times before I place them in the shopping cart. On a shopping trip years ago, my husband looked at me and said in his I’m-speaking-to-a-crazy-person-oh-my-God-I-actually-married-this-whackadoodle voice, “You know, there is stuff in that box, right? It’s full.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“You shook the box. You always do that before you stick it in the cart.”
I was shocked! “I do?”
“Yeah, almost every time. You seriously didn’t notice?”
“No!”
If I’m paying attention, I don’t do it, and it’s not difficult to stop myself. It’s not as though I have a compulsive need to shake that box or can and if I don’t my head explodes, or I’m riddled with anxiety or something. I do it when I’m spacing out and not paying attention. Occasionally I’ll catch myself in the act, but more often than not, my husband points it out and says with a wry grin, “It’s okay. It’s full.”
Maybe I’m reading too much into this topic because I’m sure everyone engages in behaviors that seem odd or obsessive. At any rate, it gave me the chance to share a couple of funny family stories with you (mostly at my own expense). Hey, at least I have no problem laughing at myself!
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