It’s early, and I’m in my living room on my second set of squats when I see the crumbs. The morning sunlight pushing through the windows casts shadows on the bits of last night’s tortilla chips under the dining room table, making them look ten times their size.  I take a break to rest my quads and examine the crumbs, briefly considering cleaning them up right then. Then I gaze back into the living room, over the polished leather sectional and the lint-free area rug and the armchair in the corner with the holiday pillow placed at an angle in the center.  I remember buying that pillow because there is a snowman family of three embroidered on it: one for me, one for my husband, Andy, and a small one for our son, Owen.  Other than the crumbs under the table, the house is clean.  Really clean.  It occurs to me that, objectively, it looks like no one lives here–least of all a seven-year-old boy.  I decide against cleaning up the crumbs, but on my third set of squats, I can’t stop thinking about them. 

A few days ago, I noticed Owen drop a bit of scrambled egg onto his chair at breakfast.  He snatched it up, glanced at me, and hid it in his fist.

My stomach lurched. “It’s okay, buddy,” I rushed to say. “Just put it in your napkin,” but Oh My God, what had I done?  Did I teach him to hide his mistakes from me? I wanted to cry and beg his forgiveness and drop a thousand crumbs onto the floor and never clean them up.

I was Owen’s age when I started washing my hands and couldn’t stop.  If I touched something I thought was dirty, I had to hold my hands rigid like claws until I could get to a sink, afraid of touching anything else and spreading the filth.  That winter, my hands cracked and bled, and they stung and smeared when I used the lotion the school nurse gave me. Sitting at my second-grade desk, if I tapped three times with my index finger on page 265 of my math book, I would also have to tap page 266 three times to keep it fair. 

I knew my family didn’t like it.  I could hear the apprehension in my mother’s voice when she asked me why I was walking with my hands glued to my sides—as though anything I touched would detonate a bomb.  It was in the instructive tone my oldest sister took when she modelled for me times when it was appropriate to wash your hands: “See, Stacey, I’m washing my hands now because I just pet the dogs,”  she’d say as she lathered up at the sink. What about the faucet you touched? I would think.  What about the doorknob or the paper towel dispenser or the side of your face when you pushed your hair behind your ear?  Didn’t she know that those things would be dirty forever? I  knew my family couldn’t understand why I washed my hands so much, but I couldn’t understand why they didn’t. 

In my teens, the OCD shapeshifted into its hungrier cousin, and it wasn’t just alarm I saw in my family members’ wrinkled brows and in the arcs of their frowns. Fear can look a lot like shaming, especially when it’s handcuffed to ignorance. It was the nineties, and education about mental health disorders, particularly ones you could see in the lines of your daughter’s ribcage, was limited to an occasional episode of Oprah. So, when my mother caught me measuring out my cereal and poring over cookbooks and grocery store flyers advertising sales on ice cream, and when she realized she hadn’t bought me tampons or pads in months because my period had stopped, she turned to threats. “If I ever catch you making yourself sick after eating, I’ll take you to talk to someone,” she’d greet me as I came out of the bathroom after dinner.  As if purging were the threshold to being sick enough to get help; as if getting help were a punishment instead of a solution.  

Now, every Thursday, Andy picks up Owen from school because I have therapy after work.  At four o’clock, I shut down my day and log in to my therapist’s Telehealth platform and talk to her for an hour while Andy makes dinner and Owen plays his special Thursday-afternoon video games. I usually come home to a set table, a boy on the couch, and a husband in the kitchen.  They know: Thursdays are for my “computer appointments.” Once, early in our marriage, I complained to my husband about how much money we were spending on my therapy.  His response? “I don’t care if it takes all of our money, if it’s what you need to be better.”  Marriage can be hard, and when it is, that moment, that statement, rolling off his tongue like silk, I don’t care if it takes all of our money, that’s what I come back to when I need to be reminded why I married this man, why we’ve worked for thirteen years.

In the car on the way to the grocery store, Owen asked me what I do during these appointments, and I told him that some people’s brains work differently from others.  I explained that I talk to a special doctor who helps me learn ways to work with that.  He pressed for more, and I tried to describe a brain that feels things a lot more than others.

“Like mine?” he asked casually.

I swallowed hard. “Maybe.” 

I read that therapists treat children with anxiety by first treating their parents’ anxiety.  I had been in treatment for years, ever since I was able to pay for my own therapy, long before my son was born, trying to prevent my mental illness from spreading like the germs I tried so hard to wash off when I was seven. But when Owen was two, I noticed that he would occasionally stop playing to put away a toy or book that had been left out.  When I mentioned it to his doctor at his next checkup, she acknowledged that genetics does appear to play some role in the development of mental health disorders but reminded me that having OCD doesn’t necessarily mean that my son will, too.  She told me the best thing I could do was to continue my own treatment and to model healthy habits for him, and not to make worrying about him another manifestation of my anxiety.  I understood this –that passing my mental illnesses on to Owen isn’t a guarantee–and I  believed on an intellectual level that this was true–but it didn’t feel true.   In my mind, the crumbs under the table have the power to make my whole house dirty in the way the clouds have the power to produce rain, and If Owen develops a mental illness, he gets it from me as directly as he got the shape of his eyes and the roundness of his cheeks.

My mother raised my three sisters and me alone.  Even when my parents were still together, they weren’t. In fact, I  don’t have a single recollection of my mom sleeping in a bed with my dad.  From my earliest memories during the waning years of their marriage, he slept in the bedroom and she slept on the couch.  After their divorce and for the duration of my upbringing, she would come home exhausted from her job as a secretary in Washington DC and from her two-hour commute to and from the city.  She would usually collapse onto the couch shortly after dinner, sometimes still in her skirt suit and nylon pantyhose.  One night when I was in high school, she was asleep on one end of the couch while I watched TV or finished my homework on the other, and I heard her murmuring in her sleep.  It was unintelligible at first, but then, just as clearly as if she were admonishing me from the front seat of her station wagon or at dinner over London broil, she said, “Don’t be silly, Stacey, it’s fine.  Stop worrying so much.”  I looked over at her, her eyes closed, ashen brow furrowed. 

Don’t be silly.  Your hands aren’t dirty.  You haven’t gained any weight.  You’re such a worrier. It’s easy for me, now,  to feel contempt at the way my mother invalidated my anxiety, trying to convince me that I was being ridiculous. I have had years of treatment that has taught me I was never silly.  I was sick.  But how could my mother have known any better?  All the therapy, the thousands of dollars for it, the society that has become more educated about mental illness—none of that was available to her.  When I want to blame her for threatening instead of treating, for lecturing instead of listening, I try to imagine what it must have felt like not to know what to do with a child plagued with mental illness.  I think of her sunken face, her own mind tormented by her anxious daughter’s fears, even in her sleep.

Our mothers’ and fathers’ times no doubt whisper in our ears when we parent our own children, despite all the ways we—as a society and as individuals—have changed since then.  When Owen was just barely old enough to understand words, he threw a proper fit when Andy and I told him it was time to leave the playground.  In an attempt to shush our screaming son, Andy admonished him, “All the other kids are going to see you cry.”  

That was my husband’s father speaking, a product of a time when crying was shameful and feelings were weakness, especially for boys.  I could hear my father-in-law’s voice, pitch-perfect to my mother’s, and my body stiffened and I told Andy never to say that again—and he never has.

Now, at seven, Owen cries a lot—probably more than most kids his age.  He cries from anger and frustration and disappointment.  He cries when he hurts himself and when he is happy. His soccer coach gave me a copy of the speech she made about Owen when she named him the “Most Improved” player at the team’s annual banquet.  A few months after receiving that award, he came out of his room before bed, freshly jammied and hair wet from his shower, holding the speech.  “Mom, when I think of how far I’ve come,” he said, his eyes getting misty, “I just…I could cry.”  

“I know Buddy,” I replied, smiling and running my fingers through his damp hair.  “It’s okay to cry.” 

Always.  Always in my house, it’s okay to cry.

It’s also okay to be angry, to forgive, and to offer ourselves the same grace we offer others—and to be patient with ourselves when we can’t. 

On the night after Owen hid the egg at breakfast, I sat on his bed, waiting for him to brush his teeth so we could read together. After I heard him shut off the water and switch off the light, I watched him hop on one foot out of the bathroom and into his bedroom. He likes to hop.  His shower/bedtime routine consists of getting undressed in his room and then leaping onto the carpet runner in the hallway before jumping into the bathroom for his shower. He’s totally naked, and I’ve always grinned when I catch a flash of him, leaping like a long, sinewy frog from one lily pad to another.  I’m happy he’s still not embarrassed to be naked. Sometimes, I even feel a tiny bit of triumph that I’ve managed to keep the body shame away from him for this long. But tonight, the fear overshadowed the victory. 

“Mom, I like to play this game where I can only hop once on the wood floor and twice on the rug.”  He demonstrated by hopping back to the bathroom and into the bedroom again, and I watched him, focused as a dog hearing a siren in the distance. He hopped twice over to the bookshelf.

I took a deep breath, steeling myself. I smoothed  my forehead and the edge in my voice. “That’s a fun game. But now, can you hop a million times back onto the rug and then do the silliest dance you can think of?” Pleasepleasepleaseplease. 

He grinned, interested.  I don’t usually encourage silly dancing right before bedtime.  “Why?”

Because I need to know you can.  Because you might also be tapping on your book pages at school.  Because if you are, it could be because of me.  “Because it’s fun,” I tell him.

He does, and we both dance.  

Tags: Eleanor Kelley, mental health, OCD, therapy