I’ve had OCD as long as I can remember, at least since I was 2 1/2 years old. One of my very first memories of my life is being in a doctors office because my mom thought I had a urinary tract infection. I guess I started going to the bathroom every 1-2 minutes! The doctor told my mom that nothing was actually wrong with my bladder, but that this was a mind thing. He thought I’d had a virus that made me go a lot initially, and now I was convinced I had to keep going all the time.
My parents had to retrain me, so they’d set the timer…one minute, two minutes, five, ten. And about one month later, the bad habit was in check.
I don’t think my parents thought much about OCD. For a long time, I didn’t even know it was a thing. Still, there were parts of my childhood that felt very overwhelmed with superstitious, ridiculous rituals.
Chewing gum involved chewing two times on the right side, then two on the left. I hated checkered floors because I had to take an even number of steps and use an even number of boxes, but couldn’t step on a crack. Or the awful game of “I have to be done vacuuming before eight minutes have passed for no apparent reason.”
But the worst part was the bad feelings I got when I failed at these tasks.
I accepted life this way, largely because I figured everyone dealt with these things. And because my parents never catered to my compulsions, whatever plagued me was kept in check and eventually would go away on its own.
People occasionally joked I had OCD, but it wasn’t until 10 some years later that I realized it was a a real thing.
For a long time, my OCD was kept completely under control. It didn’t control me and the older I got, the more rational I became. I’d almost forgotten about it entirely when I started having miscarriages. One, two, then three losses…suggestions started flooding in. After the fourth miscarriage, people started suggesting louder: don’t eat that, you need to take this supplement, don’t do that activity.
And suddenly it happened: jeans felt imprisoning-were they really cutting off blood flow to my uterus? Restaurants felt filthy- did they use gloves? Were they using real ingredients? Bleach felt poisonous to the point of making my skin crawl. Grocery stores felt dirty to the point of scaring me. On and on it went.
Yet I fought it. I knew it was wrong. Knew it didn’t make sense. Knew these thoughts weren’t from God.
I have a blood disorder that I was treating (which is believed to have been the main cause of my miscarriages), and I knew my family’s lives were resting in God’s hands, so I tried convincing myself that I shouldn’t worry about all of the little things.
God saw me struggling and He reached out to my fearful heart. During our year of waiting on Him after having miscarriages, He changed me. He grew me and made me depend on Him in ways I never had.
Then I got pregnant again and He gave me peace, kept strengthening me, opened my eyes to His sovereignty and power and love. I saw Him create and sustain.
I was amazed, and convinced that pregnancy was one of the most uncontrollable situations in the world, especially in those early months. All you can do is pray, wait, and trust God.
In later months I became fearful again, but God taught me to trust, and the name we picked for our son reflected that. His middle name means “protecting hands”.
God was in control, and by His grace alone, I believed it, felt it, lived it out. I kept my eyes open and chose to keep my OCD in check.
And then I did something terrible. I let my guard down. I quit fighting as hard because it felt unnecessary. OCD did not own me, and I felt free from it. Until…
The Misplaced Mom 
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