Recently I was chatting with someone who has a relative struggling with OCD.  It was a healthy conversation but the one thing that I remember is when she said, “It’s like she’s not herself anymore.  She used to be such and such, but it’s all gone now.”

I loved that she didn’t just say “she’s not the same.”  She said “she’s not herself.”

I remember days feeling that I was having some kind of out-of-body experience, where I watched myself think and act and do and wondered who that was.  It wasn’t anyone that I recognized.  It wasn’t just a different person, it was no one.  I felt an absence of personality in my life.  An absence of identity.  A vacuum where there once was a whole world of ideas and interests and talents.

On the other side, I know that I was never lost.  I was still in there, somewhere.  But it was like a bulb planted in the cold ground, lying dormant and waiting for the right conditions, for new warmth and light and life to make it grow.

It’s true, I’m not the same anymore.  But it’s the same me.  I’m not a different person, just a new one.  When I began to awake from the winter of my struggles and sufferings, I found that the dead branches had been pruned and the healthier ones had begun to leaf.  God was cutting and shaping my heart even when I didn’t remember that it existed.  He was resodding ground that had lain dormant for more than the length of my lostness, and when I awoke I remembered more about myself.  I began to rediscover my true self.

My days are filled with new things – studying nutrition, tutoring math, painting walls, revamping old objects, beautifying boring ones.  I didn’t know that I liked to craft, I didn’t know that I could delight in 13-year-old faces understanding a new mathematical concept, I didn’t know that I could find the impact of B vitamins on the body so fascinating.  But they fit into my life; they match pursuits I forgot I dreamed of as a child.

The wilderness times gave a chance for the old growth to burn and the buried roots to take life again.  I am a truer version of myself than I remember being since I was 11 years old.

And here I am.  With this baby that I pray learns to stay true to herself from the very beginning; to not allow the weeds of poor friendships and the thorns of pressure and the chaff of busyness make her forget what she loves and who she wants to be.

And here is my blog, with new things added to the old favorites.

I am a sorter.  And while I do plenty of sorting in my home, I primarily like to do it in my mind.   In fact, I don’t just like to do it – I have to.  I keep stress at bay and I feel in control by being able to classify my various thoughts and feelings – are they sin?  Are they just fleeting emotion?  Do they need to be acted on?  Have they been properly fleshed out?  Do they need to be revisited?  You get the picture.

Lately I’ve been sorting a lot, because I feel a tremendous emotional and psychological change taking place in me – this change to motherhood.  There are all these new thoughts and a massive re-prioritization going on that I am trying to deal with carefully.

One particular area of importance lately has been my daily household habits.  I want life this fall to be about taking care of the Bumpkin, not about maintaining a rigorous standard in my home.  So I’m sorting through my habits, to eliminate the stress-filled ones and keep the healthy ones.

Now, there was a time when the OCD-driven habits were clearly distinguished from the normal habits, as they were marked by stress, pain, confusion, and entrapment.  However, as time has gone on, the stress has begun dying away and I am no longer as certain which things I do because I think they are good ideas and what is leftover from my OCD rituals.

For example, do I ask people to remove their shoes because I am terrified of “street juice”, or because I want to keep my home clean and fresh and take care of my carpets?  Do I refuse to allow anything but food on my kitchen counters because of OCD, or because it’s good kitchen hygiene?

The core of the question is, does it matter that any of these things were originally rooted in my OCD?  Should that affect my decision to continue them or not?

Andy and I, in sorting through what practices to ditch and what to continue sticking to, have asked two basic questions of ourselves.

1. Does the violation of the practice cause a revert to OCD-style stress and depression?
2. Does the practice have any good points that justify continuing it?

I’ve found these two questions invaluable to sorting through my remaining habits.  If I can watch a practice being violated by a guest or a family member and still enjoy their visit and keep my post-visit clean-up to a minimum, then it isn’t harmful to my psyche to continue.  And I am happy to report that most of our household practices mean that our home requires less attention, work and thought than if we ditched them.  For example, my counters stay clean, my carpets don’t need vacuumed often, my cabinets do not get sticky-finger marks that need to be scrubbed.  If a practice means we have less stress and less work to do, it usually means that it is helpful to continue, unlike compulsion-driven ideas that almost always involve increased mental stress and rigid chores.

It is rather healing to realize that out of all of those bad habits grew a few healthy ones.  It is also healing to be rid of the last shreds of guilt that arise when someone looks down their nose at how I run my home.  I can finally say in my mind, in regards to at least some things, that I do them because I want to and choose to, not because I have to!

When I lie in bed in the morning surrounded by piles of downy blankets and pillows, as comfortable as it’s possible to be, watching bits of blue sky through the slats in the blinds and asking Bumpkin to talk to me and praising her each time she kicks, it seems like I’m living a dream.

In those moments I know that I was readied my whole life for this, that it’s the right time, the right place.  That I’m prepared, that God has me here now because this is what he wants, and what he thinks is best.

I didn’t know when it would be time.  I’m just glad that it is.

*******

For years pregnancy was, in my mind, the Final Frontier.  Through my struggle with OCD I’ve always had, emotionally, a sense of desperation associated with my first pregnancy.  Would I be able to care for a baby properly when I seemed hardly able to care for myself?  With a baby, unlike with guests or with babysitting, there was no going back, no starting over, no putting my world back to rights if something dirty happened.  No longer would my OCD comfort be the most important thing in my life, but the care of a little, helpless baby and, eventually, messy little kids.

So what to do?  Three years ago, the possibility of taking a child for a walk and not washing the stroller blanket, of having a child coming home with grass stains and mud seemed like disasters of giant proportions.  But I believe in normal, healthy babyhoods and childhoods of crawling and playing in the grass, of pond swimming and fishing, of mud football and holey jeans.

Well, my biggest motivator throughout my struggle with OCD has always been a love for others and a desire to serve.  So, early in my counseling, I harnessed this personality trait and I focused it on the most needy, most helpless beings that would ever grace my life – my future children.

I repeated often and with conviction to my counselor that my big goal, the goal that was the most important to me, was to get better not for myself, but for my future children.  I wanted my baby(ies), should I ever be so blessed, to lead a normal life.  And I wanted to enjoy them, to give them what they needed without exhausting myself with stress.  I wanted to be a good mother.

And so I worked hard.  No matter how happy I was, no matter how happy Andy was, no matter how easy it was to stick into a rut, I worked harder and harder with that goal ahead of me.  The closer and closer the time came that we had always planned to try for a baby, the harder I worked.  And as I got better, that goal became, to my heart, a reward.  A joy unparalleled to be experienced for all my hard work.  A light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

*******

Last week, my sister Bee and my brother J stayed with me.  They went to the park, they played basketball, they played hide and seek in the dark, they spilled every imaginable goo all over my living room, they fell in the parking lot and they got mud stains on their pants.

And every day, when I nestled into the corner of the couch while they wedged on either side of me, resting their heads on my shoulders and sneaking their little hands onto my belly in hopes of feeling these teeny kicks I speak of, I thanked God that the right time had come.  That he had brought me this far.  That he’d given me a goal born of love and that he had blessed me for my work motivated by a care for others.  That I had no doubts in my mind that this Bumpkin will be the most loved and cared for baby in the history of the world.

There is something ecstatically joyful in the experience of peace, and I know it.

I’ve always been an active person.  I always studied, socialized, babysat, worked, kept up hobbies, maintained relationships.  I was a hard worker and a hard player.

Then suddenly one day I found myself in a pleasant and sunny apartment on the edge of a pond filled with geese and ducks, and my husband went off to work and I found myself suddenly free of everything.  Free of a job, free of school, free of commitments, free of local friends, free of much of the mental anguish that had dogged me for years, free of pretty much anything.

In the midst of the vacuum, I sat back with a book in the corner of my comfortable couch and I decided to let what would grow, grow.

Last night I lay in bed and I realized that for the last seven months I’ve allowed myself to simply be.  I haven’t pushed much on myself.  I operate on a lot of whims.  I spend a lot of time alone.  I meanderingly lose myself in daydreams more than most 25-year-olds probably have time to.

Out of all of this quiet being has grown Leah, pieced together of bits that I remember from a younger me, informed by the busyness of the last seven or so years, and changed by marriage to a man who pushed me to be, and to be me.

I love what’s growing up out of the soil of my empty garden.  I like my new church, my new commitments, my new community, my new tasks.

But most importantly, I’ve been able to find peace in the quietness.  I forgot that I used to be a daydreamer.  I find myself standing at my windows contemplating the shining green of a mallard’s head and I don’t know how long I’ve been there.  I’m pleasantly surprised when Andy walks through the door after I lost myself in a book and forgot the time.

I know that not everyone can take a year off from work like me.  And I know that not many housewives would enjoy as quiet of a life as mine.  But I know that for me, I needed time to rediscover myself and to build a new life and atmosphere for my husband and me.  It had been too long of fighting the prison that my thoughts laid over our life; too long of having others dictate what I should and shouldn’t do.

I know stillness now, and I can feel God’s healing and speaking in the midst of it.

Thunderstorms.  I don’t like thunderstorms.  In fact, thunderstorms were my very first panic-driven fear.  I had a very bad experience at age 11 with tornadoes and thunderstorms in Kansas that I won’t go into, but suffice it to say, it left me very scarred when it comes to storms.

This is not my pic, but I've seen a similar sight. And I hope never to see it again.

For years I couldn’t go for a walk in the summer without analyzing the skies and checking every available weather report.  Severe storms had me running for cover in the basement, occasionally in hysterics or the shakes.  It wasn’t OCD, it was just very strong, deep rooted fear.

I’ve gotten much better over the years, leading me to view this fear of storms as one of my first truly conquered fears.  As I grew up I conquered it naturally… and then the final blow was placed by living in Philadelphia where we were fairly sheltered with the PA mountains on one side and the ocean on the other and storms were infrequent and weak.

And then we moved to Ohio.  And natives might think I’m ridiculous but storms here remind me a bit too much of some of the storms of my young childhood in Missouri and Dallas, blowing off the flatlands.  The air turns eery and grayish green and electric, the sky grows still, and finally the winds come, winds I forgot living in mountainous Pennsylvania, in homes nestled among forests and hills.

In Pennsylvania the thunder boomed, reverberating off the hills.  Here it growls, spreading over open lands and skies.  Here you can feel and hear storms coming and going from miles away, whereas in Pennsylvania it seemed that they moved quickly beyond the next mountain.

And so the old storm fear has reared its ugly head… although only twice since we’ve lived here.  Once I ended up in my thankfully freshly cleaned bathtub (the only room where I could not see the storm or lightning) with a tin of muffins, a slew of pillows, a book and the overhead fan roaring to block out the sound of the wind and rain pounding my little corner apartment.  Last night I awoke in the middle of the night with that prickly feeling that comes with impending electricity and still, warm air about to be swept away and ended up in the guest bed, tucked into two inner walls, with the box fan on to cut out the sounds and the light on to minimize the lightning.

Both times though, I found hope.  I found hope in remembering what it was like to hear thunder and lightning and be able to push aside the fear and hysterics.  I found hope in my ability to keep that fear monster from clawing its way out in panic.  I found hope in being able to objectively view it as one more chance to view God as a refuge and comfort in my distress, instead of just feeling helpless.

And in that I found strength, both times.  Because with my OCD, I’m usually playing a mind game, needing to remind myself that really, there’s nothing to be afraid of.  With a storm, there is something real and tangible to fear.  When the tornado sirens sound, there’s something threatening me that I completely can’t control.  And to be able to push back against that real and present fear, to be able to drift back off to sleep in the midst of the storm as I focused my mind on resting in God’s arms, gave me hope for my OCD struggles too.