Less Is Good, and Other Lessons My Kids Taught Me About OCD by Sarah Bradley

My six year-old son comes to me, his hands damp from the sink and smelling like lemon soap.

“I washed for two Hail Marys and then another 30 seconds just in case,” he says, breathless. “Is that good?”

He’s been playing outside with his brothers; his hair is matted to his sweaty forehead, his cheek smudged with dirt. We have a laminated sign next to the sink, an installation from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, that shows cartoon hands immersed in soap bubbles next to the written text of the Hail Mary prayer. He always follows it closely.

I brush his wet hair back from his face. An old voice inside my head says Yes, that’s good, exactly what I would have done. But a newer voice—one that’s only emerged after eleven years of parenting, three years of therapy, and one 18-month long global pandemic—speaks first.

“That’s more than enough, bud. Next time, just one or two Hail Marys is fine.”

I don’t recognize this new voice myself; when the words come out advising less handwashing, they sound foreign and wrong. Irresponsible, even. Handwashing is good—double and triple handwashing is even better, right?

Not always, and certainly not when you’re me: a mother who pulled herself back from the brink of an OCD-induced nervous breakdown just in time to realize she was about to start causing some real damage (to her mental health, her marriage, her relationship with her kids) if she didn’t learn that more isn’t always better.

That too much of anything, if it’s done for the wrong reasons, can hurt you.

 Let me back up for a moment. I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, a form of anxiety that revolves around having recurring irrational thoughts and feeling compelled to respond to them with specific behaviors to make the thoughts go away.  

This feels good at first, like scratching an itch. You had anxiety, but then you got rid of it...good for you! The only problem is that this isn’t a healthy way to cope with anxiety—and the more you do it, the more you need to do it. Now you’re caught in a vicious cycle, a web of irrationally-connected thoughts and behaviors, and participation isn’t voluntary anymore.

You’re trapped.

People can have OCD that centers around a lot of things, but mine is germs (it’s called contamination OCD). My life is a constant visualization of invisible contagions making their way into my bubble—rubbing off doctor’s office chairs onto my clothes, hopping from one sick kid at the playground over to mine, floating across the aisle at the movie theater from the lady coughing in seat F8.

Or at least my life was like this for more than a decade, through marriage, motherhood, and major life changes, until the day I took my kids to the zoo and realized, with sickening clarity, that I was not okay. That what I assumed was a reasonable amount of anxiety for someone who had always carried around an anxious heart and mind had slowly, sneakily, subtly turned debilitating. That I was basically a pot constantly on the verge of boiling over, and I was expending a tremendous amount of energy trying to keep the water from accidentally spilling out where everyone around me could see it or, worse, be burned by it.

I’m smiling in the pictures from that day three years ago, but I know what I was thinking: there are too many people here. Too many sticky, dirty hands. Too many unwashed surfaces. Too many kids crowding into small spaces, too many runny noses, and not enough hand sanitizer in the world to make me feel comfortable with any of it.

I could tell you that I don’t know why the zoo was my breaking point, but that would be a lie. When I dragged myself back to my old therapist a few weeks later, she asked me what had changed; why, after all this time, I was finally able to say, “Hey, this is a problem and I can’t ignore it anymore.”

So I told her: I didn’t want to hurt my kids.

They were old enough now to know that their mother cared much more than all the other mothers about what they touched and how often they washed their hands. They were old enough to ask why we had to stop by the zoo bathrooms again, for the third time, to wash up, and they were old enough to recognize that Mommy was only half-listening to them chatter away happily in the car on the way home because her mind was still back at the zoo, wondering if she had done everything she could to protect them from germs.

And that, in some ways, was the true problem—even more than the OCD or the anxiety, it was the belief that I could do more than I was capable of. In all of the appointments with my surely destined-for-sainthood Catholic therapist, the one thing I kept walking away with was the idea that, for me, doing less would actually be better for my kids. More is not always good, and it’s not always healthy, and it never leaves any room for God.

 If I think I can do everything, where does He fit in?

Without my kids, I might have persisted in this belief no matter how bad it was for me. (It never fails to amaze me how much hurt we can inflict on ourselves, or how easily we forget that we are God’s own children.) But I could never intentionally hurt my kids, and I didn’t want them to grow up with the mother I was about to become that day at the zoo. I didn’t want them to act like me, or think like me, or be afraid to leave room for God the way that I was.

 The only way to prevent any of that from happening was to change. To try out the whole “less is more” approach in my life. It took me a very, very, very long time to get comfortable with that idea, and even longer—including most of these last 18 pandemic-filled months—to actually give it a chance. Change is hard, and it’s even harder when your personal worst-case scenario is playing out in real time around you (a viral pandemic when you have contamination OCD is like discovering that an alien race of spiders is taking over the planet when you’re arachnophobic, FYI).

I couldn’t keep doing things the way I had been and I couldn’t escape this new reality. That left me with only two choices: sink or swim.

If it were only about me, I might have sunk. But because I have my kids—my three beautiful, wild, soul-lifting sons—I swam. I’m still swimming, honestly; some days it’s easy and other days it’s like treading rough waters with sharks circling at your feet. Some days I want to scream “Don’t touch that until you’ve washed your hands!” and other days I hear myself say unfamiliar things like “It’s fine, a little dirt won’t kill you.” 

And some days, my youngest son comes to me with the weight of a strange, confusing world on his shoulders, asking me if he washed his hands long enough, and I say yes: Yes, you did enough, and even if you didn’t, that’s okay, too. God will take care of the rest.