Pediculus Humanus Capitis. *scritch scritch scritch*

OK. So. Lice.

I think the first time we got lice--and you know this is gonna be a good story if it starts with "and the FIRST time we got [a plague]"--was when I was about seven and I went to after-school daycare at the Young Men's Christian Association.

We suddenly had a mandatory "lice check" one day, and lo and frickin behold, I "tested positive." I was stunned. Lice? What? Me? I got sent home. We treated the situation the best we could. It was all new to us, but my poor single mother dealt with it in between working 8 billion jobs and shit.

I remember that the YMCA had a couple more random checks as well, and I got sent home another time too. Talk about humiliation. You go into the nurse's office and you don't return. HMMM. WONDER WHY. WHERE'S JO? LICE MUCH?

When I caught The Lice (and I will forever blame this one girl Gwen and her licey ways), my family did everything that we should have done. We repeatedly shampooed our hair with Rid, we sprayed the carseats, the hairbrushes, and combs, we froze the cloze, we bugbombed the house while we stayed in a Travelodge motel (forever after referred to as The Lice Motel). But if you recall, our house was the Pit of Despair, and we had clothes and laundry and mess and junk and crap and bullshit everywhere; i.e., plenty of places for those crafty lice to hide.

At some point, through heroic efforts, we kept the lice at bay, but only temporarily. It seemed a battle we were always...er, battling.

The next major lice war I remember, it was when I was in 5th grade. I had newly discovered boys, a certain boy in particular. I was in love with one Mitchell Marchant. Love, I tell you. Young young love.

I had also discovered the phone. (This was before my phone phobia.) I was on the phone all the time with Mitchell. I would hide in my mom's room for some semblance of privacy, since that was the farthest that the phone cord would stretch. This was before cordless phones, child, and long, long, long before cell phones. We would talk until the wee hours. And by that I mean 8 pm.

Well, one day at school, the nurse was doing her rounds, and it was time for one of her mandatory lice checks. Got-damn those mandatory lice checks. One by one, she took everyone into the back of the room and carefully combed through their hair with a pick and a magnifying glass.

My turn came.

LICE!! FUUUUUUUUUCK!!!

I was sent home in the middle of the school day. I was mortified. Because that only meant one thing. And worse, Mitchell knew it only meant one thing: His 5th grade telephone girlfriend had lice.

Well, my family did the old routine lice treatment: shampoo, spray, bugbomb, Lice Motel. Rinse, repeat. RINSE, REPEAT. After a few bouts of it, we were done. Again.

Then came 7th grade. And gym class. After (sooooo not) sweating it up during gym, all the girls wanted to share my awesome Sassy hairbrush, since I was the only one who ever thought to bring one. I obliged, wanting desperately to be cool. And like Gwen in those YMCA days of yore, Megan Hughes proved to be my downfall. One day, I noticed how good it felt to deeply brush my hair. I kept brushing. And brushing. Scratching, if you will. And the next day, Megan Fucking Hughes was sent home with lice. And guess who had shared my brush the week before, in gym class? Megan F. Hughes.

That day I went home and looked at my scalp up-close-like in the vanity mirror.

Wham. Lice.

SHITBALLS AND A HALF.  Would it ever end? Fuck you forever, Megan Fucking Hughes.

And this was particularly bad timing. My brother was being baptized that very night. We had found out like two hours before that we had lice. That's right, he was about to become a CHILD OF GOD and here I was, realizing we had a PARASITE OF SATAN on our very scalps. And I was the one who had to tell him. I have to say, he took the news graciously. You can't very well accept the bread of life and the salvation of God and the peace of the Lord and then flip the fuck out on your little sister for catching lice for the 84936584378th time. We treated our hair, prayed to the Patron Saint of Bloodsuckers that headlice couldn't be transmitted via baptismal font, and hoped that we were done with this shit.

Thank you sweet tiny God, we were.

It never happened again.


Finally, victory. Headlice? GTFO!!

Anyway, it may have taken 84936584378 times, but it was at this moment at the age of 12 that a phobia was born. From this point on out, every request to borrow my hairbrush was denied. DE-MOTHERFUCKING-NIED.

People hated and resented me because of it. I was a veritable gym class pariah. It was mortifying at such a tender age. But I stood my ground and said no, you may NOT borrow my hairbrush. I was as afraid of lice as I was of someone vomiting. If I saw someone scratch their head, I was instantly on red alert. But because of that, we never caught lice again.

But that doesn't mean I am not still paranoid to within an inch of my life, especially now that Maya's in school.

And no. You may not borrow my hairbrush, EVER.



I leave you with this:

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.

Because Wouldn't This Permanently Fuck Up ANYONE?

You know what? Maybe all this self-evaluation, exploration, introspection, and reflection is bullcrap. Maybe it didn't start with my filthy, fruit-fly infested dump of a house. Maybe it didn't start with surprise!water breaking. Maybe it didn't start with watching doctors at their own doctors' office exit the lavat'ry without washing their fucking hands.

Maybe I am trying too hard.

Maybe it all started with that one time when I was 18 and was on a roadtrip with my two best friends, and somewhere down near Smith River, CA, we picked the least expensive motel we could for the night, and upon settling in for some sweet dreams, we found a human turd under the duvet cover.

Origins.

Rest assured, fans, that there will be plenty more Things I Do posts. But for now, I'd like to delve into the origins of some of my main issues. See, the things I do, the way I am, all have very real origins. I have very real reasons for why I am a germaphobe, why I obsess, why I...compulse. I know that the very idea of sterilizing your kids or refusing to go to a mall play area is ridiculous to most of you, but hopefully this will shed a little light on how it all began.

My tales will take a lot of backstory. But story is what you're here for. Right? I mean, besides information on my upcoming seminar, "Tips 'n Trix on Maintaining a Gorgeous Homestead While Chemically Poisoning Your Loved Ones," or my upcoming book, OCD Like Me.

ORIGIN #1: GERM OCD IN GENERAL.

I grew up in a filthy, filthy house. Well, let me clarify. As a small child, our house was actually quite clean. Until I was two, my mom was married and she kept up a very nice home. After the divorce, she became an in-home daycare worker, and the house was always spotless. (With Polaroid Instamatic evidence to prove it!) I remember my mom washing and waxing the floor, I remember fresh shiny countertops, and I remember that we had a separate playroom just for toys, so everything was kept in its place. But somewhere, somehow...I don't know, with my mom being a single mom often working multiple jobs at once, life must have been kind of depressing. She has been an office worker, a janitor, a construction worker, hell she even sorted labels at one point to earn a few pennies. She often did many different things all at once. We were broke as a joke, and she did what she could, and that meant working, and being gone an awful lot. (And being gone an awful lot meant kids left to their own devices to create an awful lot of mess.) Later, she became a school bus driver, and often worked very late hours.

Point is, what single mom of two bratty, messy kids wants to come home at 11 pm and clean up the whole house (especially when you're getting up at 4:45 am the next morning for work)? The whole thing had to feel unbelievably overwhelming to her. And if she did have some kind of undiagnosed depression, well, do you really think she had the motivation to scrub down the shower every Saturday morning? And we kids were almost no help at all.

So our house got progressively messier. To the point where it could only be described as filthy. Not cluttered, not messy. Filthy. Disgusting. I have crystal-clear images in my head of the kitchen, where we would sometimes have 7 or 8 paper grocery bags brimming to the top with ancient, stinking garbage, even spilling over onto the floor, and cat bowls filled with crusted-on food, and the sink so full of dirty dishes that that the sink was unusable. The dirty dishes slowly encroached upon other surfaces too, until everything was covered with either old food, dirty dishes, or outright trash.

The rest of the house was full of crap, too, sometimes literally, since we had  a billion pets. (At least the poop got picked up--it didn't sit around or get shellacked as though on a hot tin slide--but still, our carpets were grotesque.)

The laundry room was crammed full, piled up to my shoulders (this is not exaggeration), again, to the point where the laundry machine was unusable. So, like the dishes, it just kept piling up.

The bathroom was a health hazard. Truly. The tub & shower walls itself--I don't know why no one thought to just spray on some fucking BLEACH, which would have at least helped. But the shower & tub were coated in an inch of grime, dead skin, and massive amounts of mildew. The ledge where we kept the 10,000 bottles of shampoo and soaps and conditioners was covered in swamp water. The bathroom floor was covered in wet, used towels, since we only ever used towels once (instead of hanging them up) and then just chucked them right there on the floor, so you can imagine what dozens* of wet, mildewing towels covering the floor might have smelled like. Or maybe you can't. I hope you can't. The one chore I did have was the bathroom. It was always my job, when it came to that one day a year we might clean. I always did a good, thorough job, but I practically had to kill it with fire. I should have worn a Haz-Mat suit, I honestly should have.

*We had approximately 90237498372543 towels. You would too, if you had dozens on your bathroom floor, and dozens more filling the laundry room to the ceiling. I think we just bought more as needed. Christ.

Oh, and the cherry on top, I had pet mice. Their cage, for some reason, lived in the bathroom. And I, being lazy and 11, never cleaned their cage quite often enough. And even when I did, even when I gave my mice baths (I literally let them swim around in the sink for awhile), the cage stunk by the next day. Oh the stink. Ohhhhhh the stink.

My own bedroom had no visible floor. It was entirely, entirely covered with everything under the sun. Clothes, clean and dirty, toys, crafts, papers, anything and everything. There was nowhere to walk except ON everything. As prepubescent, I guess I didn't really care. The only time I cared was when it was my birthday, and time for a party, and time to invite friends over, and that required massive amounts of cleaning, done almost entirely by my mom (because we were unruly, undisciplined children who would show no responsibility for our own chores). I genuinely have no idea how she did it, but by the time I got home from school and it was almost time for my birthday party, the formerly near-condemned house was clean. A lot of time, that involved shoving things under the bed or hiding them in the brimming laundry room, but she did her best. However, the second the house was clean for a day, it became a dumpster again. It was truly the Pit of Despair. (Hereafter, POD.)

Occasionally, I would clean my room, and I even enjoyed Pledge-polishing every surface regularly, for awhile. A short while. Then, POD.

And please don't get me started on the garage. We're talking Hoarders, on an epic scale. Even to this day. If the time ever comes for my mom to move out (she still lives in the same house I grew up in, and while it's not foul and revoltingly filthy anymore, it is truly worthy of a Hoarders episode--possibly even the Hoarders special two-hour season finale), or, God forbid, she's around no more, instead of ever attempting to clean out the house to sell, I'm pretty sure we will have to go all What's Eating Gilbert Grape and just burn that fucker down.

Anyway. I have a hard time remembering exactly when my "issues" started, but I remember they started subtly. I started wearing shoes in the house at all times, or at least socks, so that I could take them off when I got into bed and have fresh clean bare feet (or stocking feet). Because the carpets were that dirty. If you steam-cleaned them, the water would have been black. It's like, how much more black could it be? And the answer is none. None more black.

So I started wanting my very person to remain clean, even if that meant just my feet. That was around age 12 or 13, I think. The next memory I have of being really bothered by germs was in middle school, still around age 13, and watching the girls exit the lavatory without washing their hands. I explicitly remember one time my BFF and Spanish class partner, Joy, was about to leave el baño without washing, and this was our conversation:

Me: Joy, aren't you going to wash before you leave?
Joy: Why? I showered this morning.
Me: ...

I must have blocked out the years in between 13 and 22, because I can't remember how the "being a little bothered" became outright germaphobia. But when I was 22, I was done. I wanted to move out. Main reason? So I could have a goddamn clean house and keep it that way. Keep it MY way. Keep things where I wanted them. Not have none-more-black carpets. So out I moved, into my cute little apartment. And then it began.

First and foremost, it was a no-shoes apartment. Shoes inside would simply not be tolerated. I had a sign on my front door that my mom brought over for me, and it gently warned visitors, "Kindly Remove Thy Shoes." (This was a throwback to my much younger days, when my mom had a sign on the inside garage door that read the same thing. She didn't want dirty-oily-garage-floor dirt coming into the house, you see. This was pre-POD times.)

My apartment was my sanctuary. Even though no one ever wore shoes in the joint, I vacuumed almost every single day. Why? you ask. Because, I answer.

I DAILY wiped every counter, every surface, every doorknob and faucet and touchable, with antibacterial Fantastik, sprayed onto a paper towel. (This was before they invented the love of my life, the miracle wonder that is Clorox wipes.) I disinfected constantly, even though it was only I who was living there.

I never once, in my five years of living there, used the common washing machines (because, gross). I took all my laundry to my mom's, where somehow miraculously over the years, it had become accessible.

Oh, and I began the habit of washing my hands immediately upon entering the premises.

From there it all just took off. I began what you would consider the downward spiral into germ insanity, and what I would consider the upward spiral into healthy germ awareness and beautiful hygienia(TM). Yet over time...the germ thing burrowed, tunneled, and ferreted its way deeper into my brain...and I went from washing my fruit with soap, to practically stroking out if a server's thumb touched my salad as she served my plate to me. And the list of Things I Do grows and grows. And, while I still think that the Things I Do make SENSE, I am beginning to realize that they are extreme, and that the list of Things I Do is constantly growing and taking over more and more of my life, and it's becoming harder and harder to be the way I am.

Not gonna stop me from washing the top of my soda cans, though.

So now you have a little idea of where, and why, I began to want to live in an antiseptic bubble. A lot of people grow up to become exactly like their parents, or do things in the very same way, or be unable to escape the vicious cycle, but I did exactly the opposite. I wanted out of the POD, and into my own sterile heaven. This little germ of OCD (zing!) might have always been in my brain, it might always have bloomed, but God knows that month-old molding spaghetti still on the stove, and unidentifiable horrors on the carpet, more than contributed to my obsessive nature.

So there you have the origin of my OCD. In general. Basically. For the most part.

Next up: ORIGIN #2: WHY I AM ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED OF THE FUCKING COMMON COLD.