Back for now….

I haven’t been on here in quite awhile now. I am doing ok with my ED. I am almost at my normal weight now. I hate it but know that I need to be healthy and here for my kids so I keep telling myself that over and over when I feel like I am going to lose it with all this extra weight on me. I am still seeing my counsellor.

Anyways, now I am dealing with a more pressing issue than that of my ED. My daughter I am sure has severe OCD. I also have OCD but nothing to the extreme that she is showing. This is wrecking chaos in our entire house and our relationships with each other. My 17 month old son has started biting, pulling hair, pinching, hitting and am thinking that maybe he is getting frustrated by his sister who is 4.5years old. She is constantly taking toys from him so she can put them away. She has to always have everything put away right away or she tells me "she will have to do it later". She likes things in their place and gets very upset if they’re not where they are supposed to be. I caught her one night in her room silently crying, having woken up from sleeping, and putting her toys away. When I asked her what the matter was she said I forgot to put her ponies away. Another night she woke up to remove a picture that she had hung on her wall that day. Another night she woke up asking for water and when I said I would bring her some and that she couldn’t come into the living room to get it, she burst into tears and said then she didn’t want any because she would have to put the cup away right away. I then told her I would put it away so she agreed to have some water. Just last night I found her crying in bed with a hanger around her waist. When I asked her why she put it there she didn’t answer. I asked her if she was just playing and she said no. Finally, she told me that she did it cuz she wanted me to give her a hug. I took it off and told her that she can have a hug anytime and she doesn’t need to put the hanger there for me to give her one. The most recent and disturbing development however is her constant need to touch things. She is constantly stooped over touching the floor with her fingers. She also won’t step on cracks and if she does she has to go to whatever room the crack was stepped on and touch the floor. We are also not allowed to step on cracks and she will constantly tell us this and ask us if we stepped on a crack. If she sees us stepping on a crack she will then have to go to that room and touch the floor all over. I asked her once why she had to touch the floor and she said "don’t you see the spots"? If I don’t touch them then they will get smelly and we won’t be able to live here. We tried preventing her from touching but she gets extremely upset and starts crying. If we have to go out she refuses to go until all the rooms are touched. She gets mad and frustrated if we try to force her to leave without touching. She has said no a couple of times that nobody likes her, she has said while crying that her brother Tahir doesn’t like her anymore. I reassure her that we all love her and always will. But it breaks my heart to see how these behaviors have consumed her life and are making her feel left out, alone and unloved. She went from a carefree, happy go lucky little girl who could easily laugh and play to a girl who is constantly obsorbed in her OCD. One night she whispered in my ear that "sometimes I feel like crying because I want to stop —-touching—-but I can’t" then she said my feet hurt so bad because when I stop them I feel like I have to keep moving them. I feel so bad and so helpless. I don’t know what to do. I put a call into my mental health worker who said she would contact a child and youth worker she knows and get back to me. I am going to call whoever I can tomorrow and get help for my daughter ASAP….

Of course, I also feel immensly guilty for her symptoms. Did I give it to her? I know it’s genetic. Maybe I made it worse because she sees me cleaning all the time and now does the same. Now I try to get her to be messy. I have a word to all those parents out there who hate nagging their kids about being messy, "Embrace it, rejoice that your kid is ok with having things out of place" at least your kid has time to play, to laugh, to have fun and isn’t consumed with a need an unrelenting urge to have everything in it’s place, even if it means no playtime….