To be truthful, I never paid much attention to the OCD aspect, even though W herself has admitted to having OCD. I think there are variations of this, as with any other disorder. She does create piles of stuff, thinking she will need it for something, though once she piles it she never seems to look through it again (she is keeping and using materials for her classes though). She has a bad habit of having to clean house just at the worst time, such as just before we leave on a trip, or late at night when the kids should be in bed (part of this is resentment that she let the kids make the mess in the first place). She also gets WAAAAY too engrossed in what she does and cannot pull away to do other more important or time dependent chores, which is why she still hasn’t cleaned all her stuff up. She doesn’t really want to clean it up and so lets herself get sidetracked on the computer until she is out of time to clean up.
This is not the severe checking the door 85 times type of OCD. But I do think she has it and I also think she uses it as an excuse to avoid her responsibilities. Sometimes it is easier to do as you please, not clean up, blame it on ADD or OCD, and rationalize away to imposition on others.
To Blackfoot’s comment, I think this is anxiety driven, but I understand OCD is nothing more than a set of habit and way of thinking to avoid stress. The “habit” gets so engrained that the emotional Pavlovian response sets in whenever an anxiety producing situation occurs. W knows enough to not fall into a really severe OCD ritual. I don’t think she is that severe, but the thing that is striking a chord with me is that her emotional response seems SOOO ingrained, not matter how much she (and we) have gone over an issue. She can understand it, agree to handle it differently, but once the situation arises, she falls right back to the same old behavior. To her credit I have seen some changes SLOWLY come about.
For instance, as you know, she and D13 have been at odds for a few weeks. Last night W told D13 to again clean her room (which D13 had found a way to put off the night before). D13 began to argue back. I intervened and told D13 to just finish her homework, then pick up her room like she had promised me the night before. I told W there was no need to curse at D13 (W was just starting up with a few curse words). I told W that she was coming off in a very commanding tone and D13 was reacting to it. W had a crumpled piece of paper in her hand and toss it in the air toward me as she walk past and huffed something about not telling her what to do. I ignored it, went up to talk to D13 and things settled down. She did her homework, I checked in with her about 3 more times to let her know I was monitoring her, and she did pick up her things.
But my point is that as soon as the familiar confrontation with W’s authority arises, W immediately reverts to her old roles. The emotional anxiety just takes over. This is an OCD trait too. W is very much a creature of habit, but I also believe part of the anxiety she feels is because she never learned, or was taught, how to handle daily life issues that many of us take for granted. She complains a lot about her inability to organize. I personally do not see any truth in this statement. I think she is as capable of organizing as anyone else, but never learned or paid attention to how others organize. She feels she has to create new ground to make a system to keep track of her stuff. But in reality, she is just not educated about organization, nor does she seem to appreciate the fact that organization takes and discipline to keep the system running. This just makes more stress for her and results in a lot of negative self talk. To handle this she copes with some OCD tendencies. So I am still trying to learn more how this issue.
BTW, apart from the incident with D13, last night was a peaceful night. I had asked W on Sunday night if we could have sex again. She did not answer but seemed to be thinking about it. I did not raise the subject again. Monday night was busy since her meeting that day was postponed to Tuesday. So she used the time to better prepare her papers. Last night she took D15 to the book store to get some school assigned books and got home after 9:00. She did some other chores and cleaned up. I copies some more classroom CDs for her and got in bed about 10:30. She came down to get ready for bed, then asked if I still wanted to have sex. I was pleasantly surprised since it would have been late enough for her to opt out any other time in the past. Afterwards I thanked her.
