OCD

When I was 48, I was between jobs and visiting my parents for a few weeks in the summer. I was sitting in the living room when my dad brought in the mail and handed me a newsletter that had come in the mail saying I might like to read it. It was a generic “seniors” newsletter but I didn’t have anything else to do so I looked through it. 

I read a letter to a senior counselor by a woman talking about the changes in her husband since his retirement. It said he had started buying lots of baseball caps or keeping different beer cans and that he didn’t want her to drive so much or do some of the things she normally did away from the house. The advice was that this was obsessive/compulsive behavior that had been brought on by the change in lifestyle her husband’s retirement had caused. 

I remember looking up and as if for the first time, seeing all the piles of clutter, the railroad and train pictures, knowing the stacks of model train boxes and model train displays in the basement. Thinking of the endless flashlights that my dad had brought in the house. He’s obsessive, I thought.

I had a friend who had discussed her OCD condition with me so I was familiar with the term but had never noticed it in my own father. How could this be? I reason that since he had always been that way that it seemed normal to me. I’d just chunked it in with the rest of his “weird” behavior. Now I was beginning to see different strands of his behavior.