Identity

“OCD is mean.” Those were the first words that came to mind for my son when I asked him how he would describe himself. My heart sunk. I have so much more work to do as this little boy’s mamma.

Battling the OCD flea has taken center stage in the first 7 years of my son’s life. The two years since his diagnosis have been filled with trips to therapy, psychiatrist visits, daily and sometimes multiple-time-a-day exposure therapies and ongoing cognitive behavioral coaching around specific daily behaviors.

We’ve reached a bittersweet point of acceptance with OCD. We have our son back. Yet, we’re armed and ready to strike at the next assault. One of those recently was checking for spiders. Yes. It’s normal for a kid to be creeped out at spiders. What’s NOT normal is waking up at 3:30 AM and refusing to fall back asleep out of fear and ransacking the house with the vacuum in one hand and with spider spray in the other, looking under rugs and re-visiting the same spots over and over again unnecessarily. I knew it was OCD when he paused on our way out of school to inspect a tidy and perfectly spider-free corner outside the school. He crouched down close to it and shared matter-of-factly that there were probably spiders there. He then looke to state that there were probably spiders there and pointed to a drain pipe to ask if I thought they came from there. That is NOT normal.

This time was different. After asking me the question about whether I thought they were coming out of the drain pipe I simply said, “That sounds like an OCD question,” – refusing to answer. I prayed he’d recognized it for what it was. His long term management of this means he needs to be able to identify OCD on his own and fight back on his own volition. Without skipping a beat he piped up in response. “Yeah, OCD REAAAALLLLLY wants to know that!” BINGO. Hallelujah, a sweet victory that melted my heart and put the best smile on my face. We can do it. HE can do it.

Maybe his identity will be in conquering hard things. Maybe it will be in the empathy he has developed or the sense of humor that helps make hard and awkward things more palatable. Whatever it is, I’m grateful to get the opportunity to with each victory give us space to focus on other things to nurture his identity – not just OCD.

Peace & Victory.

JM