Friends With Benefits.

When I adopt something, it takes awhile before it really feels like "mine."

When I was 14 and in the beginning stages of a new disorder, specifically obsessive-compulsive, we had just adopted a stray dog from Hooterville Pets. He was filthy when we got him, being a stray and all. It took several days and several baths, but eventually he became Mine. Once he was clean enough.

Oscar, wearing grey, and Kevin, the one-eyed Pekingese. Yes, one-eyed. 

He thought he was Tough Stuff and he got in a fight with a bigger dog one time. I'll spare you the details.

When I was 22, I moved out of the home I'd lived in since I was born. I was in some of the deepest darkest throes of OCD, and it was crucial to me that my new homestead be positively STERILE, a wild departure from the digs I had grown up in. Well, my apartment had had dozens of denizens before me, and it was hardly sterile. But I took my bleach in hand and Had At It. At first, the place was foreign to me. It felt unclean, it felt strange, it didn't feel like home. But perhaps a couple of weeks into living there, it finally became Mine. Once it was clean enough.

When I was newly 27, I was newly engaged. My fiance and I bought the house together, but I didn't move in until we were married, because I was such a good little girl. I didn't move in, but I did clean it. Oh did I clean it. I remember cleaning it so furiously that anyone who entered the room I was currently sterilizing would utter an incoherent "GUH!" in shock at the sheer amount of fumes present. I was cleaning with a tub & tile cleanser that almost took the paint off the walls. I am positive I did permanent damage to my alveoli. But the lady who lived in this house before us was a--choke--Cat Lady, and we found cat hair in the most foul surprising of places. Including INSIDE THE REFRIGERATOR. What. So you know this here OCDer was just freaking out. I killed this place with fire before I would allow my husband to move in. And once it was bleached, tub & tiled, Cloroxed, and Lysoled to within an inch of its very life, it felt like home. It was Ours. Well, it was His, but you know, Ours.

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I mention all of this because last Saturday was my friend S's moving day. (S is becoming quite a fixture in this here blog!) Now, S isn't anything like me. A germaphobe she is not. In fact, she couldn't care less about such things. I've witnessed her child eat something off the floor of Starbucks. (And if she ever read this, she would have to concede this fact.) :-)  But she was moving into a new place on Saturday, and she had wrangled a bunch of friends to help her do it. She had the requisite beefy men to do the heavy lifting, and a gaggle of girls to to the packing and unpacking and arranging and so forth. But I was the only friend who volunteered, and energetically so, for the disinfecting.


See, I was the one who would go along and really truly clean. Yes, to clean ALL THE THINGS. Oh, sure, Kim was there before I was, and she had run a vacuum through the joint, and Rachel had put up some trinkets and doodads and made the place look homey, but I came along with my Clorox and my Lysol and my scrubby sponges and my clinical OCD eye for detail and really de-germed the fucker. I Lysoled down faucets. I Lysoled down handles. I Lysoled down doorknobs. I Cloroxed the inside of cabinets. The inside of cupboards. The inside of closets. I disinfected the countertops. The inside and outside of the microwave. The inside and outside of the refrigerator and freezer. The tops and knobs of the washer/dryer and dishwasher. I scrubbed and sprayed down the toilets and the showers and the bathtubs. I attacked the really grody gently used shabby-chic bedroom set that S had gotten off Craigslist for her daughter, and did so with a ferocity that would have pleased even the most OC of Ders.

All this, for my beloved S...who truly probably couldn't have cared less. :-)

But I did it because I  love S, and I care about where she lives and how she lives, and I wanted her home to feel like Hers. And I know what it takes for a home to feel like mine, so I did what I could for her. This was my contribution: Wet knees and dishpan hands and a sweaty brow and chemical burns fumes from here to right over there. I did it because cleaning and sterilizing and attention to nooks and crannies is my curse gift and sometimes it can actually come in useful instead of burdening me and everyone around me.

Love ya S! Hope you like your haven of purity! I did what I could for you, 'cos I lurve you.

This Is Not My Beautiful House

OCD is funny sometimes. Well, I mean, no, not funny, not fun. But odd. You might think that because I'm a germ nut that everything about my life is sterile and spotless and perfectly orderly. You might expect to walk into my home and find sparkling, pine-fresh perfection. But my house is far from perfect.

First of all, it's too damn small for the four of us, so it's cluttered. Stuff everywhere, on every ledge, on every shelf, on every countertop, in every storage bin, in baskets. Stuff. Stuffy stuff. Everywhere. And it really does bother me (sometimes to the point of a near panic attack), but apparently not enough to be arsed to actually do a massive overhaul and throw shit out.

Plus, part of my OCD is that I show small signs of h...h..hoarding (YIKES)--I have an extremely hard time letting go of things even when they are of no use to me. It's not like I hoard newspapers, or Taco Bell wrappers, or cigarette butts--but trinkets and things that "just sit there," I can't get rid of. And my reasoning is because someone gave it to me. Someone cared enough to think of me, and someone spent money on it. (And if you remember, we was broke as a joke growing up, so I've never been one to waste my money, or someone else's money.) So how could I throw away, donate, or even re-sell something that someone gave me? Therefore, I have a massive amount of stuff around the house that Just Sits There. And yes, it drives me apeshit--however, I may have OCD but I'm also a lazy fuck.

Where was I. So yes, the house is cluttered. With things we need, with things we don't, with trinkets and nonsense and bullshit, and most of all with baby things. Toys toys toys. Everywhere.

Our house also gets pretty dusty, and if you look closely you might find that crap in the very corners/crevices of things that is so hard to clean out. There are always clothes on the bedroom floor. My older daughter's room can be a disaster. Our kitchen table is covered in arts and crafts and papers and pens and stray marks and spilled glitter glue. Our shower gets mildew or soap scum sometimes (but I do love me some bleach spray, and I use it liberally). My husband is middling-to-terrible about remembering to take the garbage out. Etc. I'll clean it up for guests, but like I said, if you look closely...definitely not spotless.

So OCD doesn't mean I live in a Stepford Home. Not to mention, believe it or not, there are Things I WILL Do. I will manually coax a hard poop from a constipated baby's butt. I mean fuck, I will coax a poop from a constipated dog!! We used to have a Greyhound who would get terribly constipated, and she would strain and strain, and I learned a trick: You everso delicately insert a matchstick, sulfur-end first, into their bum-bum (juuuust barely). And they will shit within seconds. I kid you not. Google it. But I did this, all for the love of the dog. I will do many things. I will clean toilets without complaint. I will let a cow lick my hand with its horrible, wonderful, slobbery slimy rough scratchy flabby tongue. I will kiss my dog on her head. I will kiss my baby's completely drool-covered mouth. I will let my cousin's tiny chihuahua lick Maya's cheek. I will chase down frogs in our yard and hold them. I even owned one as a pet ten years back, and I loved him so hard.

The frog I owned and held regularly: 

The frog I chased down just yesterday evening (after discovering him on our hot tub) and held:

I will even clean up three and a half, six, or fifteen feet (yes fifteen feet, it truly happened) of cat puke when necessary, and laugh about it, because if I hadn't laughed, I would have cried. 

Alas, I do not have photographic evidence of the fifteen feet of puke, but here is the three and a half. And I cleaned it up whilst wearing a very fancy red party dress after a Christmas party:

So, there ARE things I WILL DO. It's just that I, OMFG, wash my hands afterward. Imagine the hell out of that. (Well, truth be told I washed my hands four times after catching the wild frog yesterday, and applied hand sani twice. Bygones.) But see, I don't live I a complete bubble, and neither do my kids.

And our house is nowhere near pristine. It's kind of like, in my brain, it's not our germs I mind. I mean, we still always wash when appropriate when we're home, and let me assure you, the countertops (though cluttered) are Cloroxed whiter than Donnie & Marie's veneers, and everything you touch is as clean as a clean whistle what has been bleached, but it's like, as long as the germs of the world are sent to their foamy soapy grave down the drain the very second we enter our house, then I kind of let go a little, and hey, our germs are our germs and how can I get rid of every last one?

I some ways my OCD has gotten far, far worse, and the things I do to avoid germs/clean germs are much more extreme than they were, say ten years ago. But if you remember, ten years ago, I would Fantastik every inch of my apartment every single day, even though it was only I who lived there. So I don't know, I guess I'm more lax on vacuuming and scrubbing out every crevice of my own home, but much, much more freaky about other people's germs.

Still, even at home, I do find myself very anxious when it comes to so many things ("Did you wash after you changed her diaper? Maya, did you wash after you used your potty chair? Hey, I saw you wipe your nose with your hand so go wash. Did Naomi's binky fall down? Go wash it! Did you use hand sani? Maya! Sneeze into your ELBOW!" etc.). I am still constantly on yellow alert while at home, especially regarding what others are doing, but it's a different kind of anxiety than being out somewhere like a restaurant or the grocery store or certain people's houses. After taking as many measures as are practical, I can kind of be OK with our own germs.

That's the idea behind washing when we get home--erase the sins of the world and start fresh. For example, who cares if Naomi spits up all the hell over me? I can live with baby puke about my person.

(And so, clearly, can my poor sweet husband:)

Or who cares if I lay her right on the carpet, nakeypie, and she piddles on it?

(Here I am in the process of mopping and Anti-Icky-Poo-ing it up, and Naomi is in the process of inviting you to the Gun Show:)

Our germs. OURS.

It's not like I'm a Howard Hughes though. It's not like in public I'm a germ FREAK and then at home I collect bottles of my own piss or something.

For reference:

"Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects, so that he could insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains or other imperfections on people's clothes and demand that they take care of it." Yet...

"In December 1947, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. Hughes stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He subsisted exclusively on chocolate bars and milk, and relieved himself in the empty bottles and containers. He was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes, which he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides on yellow legal pads giving them explicit instructions not to look at him, to respond when spoken to, but otherwise not speak to him. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continuously watching movies, reel after reel, day after day. When he finally emerged in the spring of 1948, his hygiene was terrible, as he had not bathed or cut his hair and nails for weeks." [Later,] "Hughes only had his hair cut and nails trimmed once a year."

In other words, just because I am a germaphobe in public and much less so one at home (or, I should say, just as much of a germaphobe but notably less anxious), I don't think there's any danger of me ending up sitting naked in my bedroom with a pink hotel napkin placed over my genitals, watching movies for a year straight.

Or maybe I will. Maybe the next logical step with my disorder is where I jump from alcoholing-down my forearms after visiting a restaurant, to sitting nude in my attic, surviving on Lik-M-Aid and scotch, and collecting my spit in vials and urinating into empty wine bottles.

---

Anyway, So yeah. OCD is funny like that. You think that a germaphobe is a germaphobe in every aspect of her life, but it's not true. God how I wish for a sparse, gorgeous, immaculate home. I want people to walk in and remark with awe, "Oooh, it's a sparkly!"

And I'm never OK with the dust or the clutter, and it honestly has driven me to panic before where I am sobbing in my husband's arms, feeling so incredibly overwhelmed, but it doesn't rule my life. It doesn't invade my every thought. I don't (usually) obsess about things like dusty wedding pictures (or if I do, recall that I'm a lazy fuck), but if you come to my house and don't wash your damn dirty hands, and then you so much as touch my TV remote, I will play nice but then I will be spraying that fucker down with 25 seconds' worth of Lysol the moment you leave.

I Can Laugh About It Now...Right?

.....Right??

So my older daughter Maya had been struggling with a wee bit o' the old constipatoriality. OK she'd been blocked up. Her poops were getting less and less frequent, harder and harder, and more and more compacted (hey, you're at a blog called Poop on a Hot Tin Slide, you have to expect to read about poop sometimes). So when she'd finally go, they hurt her poor bum-bum so badly she'd cry. Then she'd be afraid to poop again next time, and she'd hold it in, and behold: the vicious cycle.

So after taking her to a doctor who checked out her bum-bum and related regions, I began using the age-appropriate amount of Milk of Magnesia for her, at least just to get things started, because let me tell you, when I was blocked up after giving birth to Naomi, Milk of Magnesia was my savior. I had not pooped in almost a week and a half, so I've never been so thrilled for my ass to act a sprinkler. Bum-bum pee. The squirts. The trots. Captain Trips. Oh I was in heaven. It was beautiful. Thank you, Patron Saint of Compacted Stool.

(I should mention here: The ADULT dose of Milk of Magnesia is 2-4 TBSP (tablespoons). I started with the minimum dose, a mere 2 TBSP, and very soon after had epic, epic shits, as heretofore mentioned. I don't even want to think of what additional TBSPs would do to a person. Wait. I might have an idea. Which brings us to the climax of this tale...)

OK, so the dose for her age is 2-3 tsp (TEAspoons). tsp. Not TBSP.

For a week, I'd been giving her two tsp a day, to no avail. Still horrible, painful poops. So I finally upped her dose to three tsp. Still no real results.

I was always the one who gave her the meds. Then one fine morning, my husband took the initiative and gave Maya her daily morning dose of Milk of Magnesia. I had set the teaspoon that I use, right beside the bottle of medicine. However...well, I think you can smell where this is going.

Suddenly, at about 7 pm that night Maya started having out-of-this-world diarrhea. She has been fully potty-trained for a year and a half, but when we started giving her Milk of Magnesia, we had proactively put her in pull-ups, just in case, because I had no idea what even two teaspoons would do to her (since the MINIMUM adult dose, two TBSPs, made me crap out my soul).

So that night, suddenly she's shitting all over the place. All over. Every five minutes she's shitting her pull-up, after we've just gotten done cleaning up huge messes, and then it's another round of poo.

Finally, after the billionth epic diarrhea, my husband sheepishly asked me if the amount of medicine I usually give her is, and here I quote, "the third line on the medicine cup." (The dosage cap that comes on the bottle of Milk of Magnesia.) My jaw dropped.

The third line on the medicine cup is three TBSP. THREE TABLESPOONS. One entire tablespoon more than I took, as an adult who hadn't crapped in 10 days.

Let me put this in perspective. Thanks to Home Ec, I know that 3 tsp = 1 TBSP. So he effectively gave her NINE TEASPOONS, when the recommended dose for her age is 2-3 teaspooons. He gave her three tablespoons, when a mere two tablespoons liquefied MY innards.

I did not murder my husband that night, but legally, I'm pretty sure I had every right to.

So that was a rough patch. Not only dealing with epic diarrhea everywhere and the germs that entailed (giving her shower after shower, trying to deal with a pull-up that's about to spill its contents, just everything about it)....but finally the ass-pee seemed to end, and poor, exhausted, terrified Maya eventually went to bed.

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CUT TO THE FOLLOWING EVENING, 

20 GOT-DAMNED HOURS LATER.

The next night, the squirts had long since stopped, so I thought we were well into the clear. No more Milk of Magnesia had been given (obvi). Suddenly, as bedtime drew near, all at once I heard bloodcurdling screams coming from Maya's bedroom. I ran in and beheld the sight of a massacre. An ass massacre. An assacre.

There was diarrhea all over Maya's underpants. There was diarrhea all over Maya's legs. There was diarrhea all over Maya's feet. There was diarrhea all over the carpet underneath and around her. And somehow, SOMEHOW, there was diarrhea all over on her Drawing Weasel.*

*The Drawing Weasel is what Maya calls her four-foot-tall painting/drawing/art easel, the kind that stands up like a tripod. Quadpod. Whatever.

I had every right to go ballistic on my husband, but all I could manage was to go stone cold, break into brain sweats, swallow my vomit, say a quick prayer to the Patron Saint of Bum-Bum Germs, and extraordinarily loudly announce to that man that he himself would be cleaning up every square centimeter of this crime scene, that he would be solely responsible for its total and complete disinfection, that he would be washing the child, and that divorce papers would be served in the morning.

I was just in total shock. I mean, if the thought of bum-bum germs on the handle of a shopping cart make me seriously (seriously) panic, and if the fecal microbes on the tabletops at restaurants give me tremendous anxiety, what was I to do with diarrhea all over the carpet? With Actual Shit on the carpet?? The CARPET for sweet baby Jesus' sake! The light. light. light. beige. carpet. Diarrhea. Carpet. I considered killing it with fire, or running away and never coming back.

After my husband was done man-cleaning "cleaning," I went in there and re-cleaned. OCD-stylee. I'm p. sure I emptied an entire can of Lysol Garden Mist-Scented Spray. I sprayed it all over the Drawing Weasel. Then I sprayed it all over the Drawing Weasel again. Then, then, I SOAKED the carpet with it. I sprayed and sprayed, in small circles, over the area of doom, for tens of minutes, until the carpet was positively drenched with Lysol. Then I coughed, tried to swat away the oppressive fumes, and sat back in defeat, because what more could I do?

My worst nightmare. Bum-bum germs. Sprayed out my child like a tommy-gun, all over her bedroom. Every time she plays at her Drawing Weasel, I have to restrain the urge to say, "Let's go wash your feet, love."

On that note, I'd like to end with a soliloquy from Maya that she gave the following day. I sat there, typing furiously, transcribing her oration word for word:

"Diarrhea is not funny. It is kind of bad poopies. It's liquid last time. Three tablespoons of diarrhea and one cup of Milk of Magnesia. Daddy gave me a little too much last time. Diarrhea is the thing that makes your bum bum hurt and makes your tummy really hurt. And it's liquid and it has water and poopy is just like water and water is just like--usually I wipe my own bum bum. Diarrhea is kind of not liquid and kind of yes liquid. And sometimes--I didn't toot. And if you drink not too much juice, not too much cocoa, and no bum bum medicine water, just drink water bottles, and not much water bottle parts, but usually you watch a show and you have to go pee pee and poo poo and sometimes Cheerios helps but not very much Cheerios and not very much fiber cereal, and I don't like milk, but I like water with no medicine in it, and usually I watch a show and then I feel like I have to go poopy. We can't eat very much peanut butter, right? Neosporin doesn't usually help your bum bum but you can use it for that. So we went to the doctor every minute ago, and the doctor fixed me, and it's liquid, kinda liquid, and sometimes it's diarrhea, and diarrhea does come out your bum bum. DIARRHEA!! The doctor put the stethoscope on my tummy to make sure how much my poopy doesn't come out. And she checked on my bum bum but it doesn't hurt, so she got gloves on her hands so she doesn't get bum bum germs on her hands. If there's germs on your hands from a bum bum, you better wear gloves and wash. And then throw them in the garbage. Then you eat fiber cereal. Fiber cereal comes out of your bum bum in a line, them a lump, then a line. And that's all about diarrhea. Can't talk about it."