Introduction
“If someone came to you with a story like mine, seeking an annulment, you’d think they deserved one, right?”
I sat in my boss’s office, tensely occupying the chair intended for parishioners in need of counsel. In my role as parish secretary, my boss was also my pastor, who was preparing me and my fiancé for marriage. Less than two years later, he would be our daughter’s godfather, but today, as usual, he was battling my doomful certitude that husband and children were a hopeless pipe dream. Although my wedding date was only a month away, this ongoing war against my own mind seemed too exhausting to win. Worse, I was not convinced that I ought to win.
“Well, yes I would,” said Father, “but not if it was you.”
*****
Joe and I have been married for seven years. Seven years is not so long in the context of a lifetime, but it seems long in light of our transformation. As parents of four, our life is characterized by a chaos of toys and crumbs, decisions, squabbles, and insatiable needs. It is also characterized by the peace of a vocation accepted; a peace I almost rejected out of fear.
When I consider how close I came to walking away from this life, I recoil as from the edge of a cliff; yet my next impression is of the vastness of God’s mercy. You may reasonably wonder how anyone could be so terrified of choosing the wrong path that they might actually choose the wrong path. OCD is like that: a self-fulfilling oracle of doom. Do you know who is not like that? The One who said, “For I know well the plans I have in mind for you…plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope.”[1]
This God had plans for my welfare, yes, but not for my welfare alone. His plan was also a future of hope for my husband, and for the four new souls we would bring into the world. It was for the future communities that would embrace our family. It was for the church, destined to grow through the baptisms of our children. It was for souls who have yet to be born, throughout and beyond the breath-like span of our earthly life.
Due to my weakness, the path to this future was twisted and difficult. Due to God’s power, it was a medicinal path that healed and corrected me. Like Paul, I found God saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”[2] It was not despite my weakness, but precisely through it that God brought about his plans for my welfare, and not for woe. And so, with Paul, “I choose to boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me.”[3] For this reason, more than any other, I choose to share my story. My message is one of hope. Ours is a God of mercy.
Section I
Chapter 1: Childhood
The Pathetic Penitent
The year was 1999. I stood at my parents’ bedroom door at eleven p.m., gripped with dread. These nightly visitations were so miserable that only a greater terror of the alternative could have induced me to continue them. The conscious embarrassment of bothering my parents, and still more of speaking aloud my most shameful thoughts, exacerbated my misery. My parents had taken to calling my habit “confession without absolution,” grieved to see my suffering, yet powerless to help.
I forced myself to speak. “I think I might have committed a mortal sin.”
“Tell us about it.”
“Well…I…” Tears welled up from dual springs of fear and shame. “…might have eaten within the hour before Communion.”
“Really? When?”
“Does…does it count if there is food between your teeth that you swallow later?”
I am sure if I had been aware of anything beyond the haze of tears and dread, I might have seen the glimmer of a smile on my father’s face, but not much of one. Only now, as a parent myself, do I understand how it feels to see your child in pain.
“No, I don’t think that counts.”
“But are you sure? How do you know? Have you read it somewhere?”
“I…well, no…but trust me. That’s not what the rule is about.”
“But what if it is?”
“Even if that counted as food, there’s no way that could possibly be a mortal sin.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Mortal sin requires grave matter, for one thing.”
“Isn’t eating within the hour before communion grave matter?”
“I’m sure you didn’t do it on purpose.”
“But I could have been more careful. I knew I had eaten breakfast earlier. I should have brushed my teeth again.”
“I really don’t think it was a sin at all.”
“But what if it was?”
Crushing a Crush
I was eleven years old. Two years had gone by since that first flare. My undiagnosed OCD ebbed and flowed, but I was growing up. I even had a crush on a boy from our parish homeschool group. He was kind and funny, albeit a little younger than me.
Then, rather suddenly, the feeling turned dark and oppressive. What if what I was feeling was…wrong? Fear grappled with happiness. Almost instantly, the fear won. I no longer felt butterflies or joy when I thought of my friend. I could not risk feeling something wrong.
A few days later, the iron grip of dread dragged my limp, browbeaten form to my mother.
“Mom?”
“Yes?” There was a pause, as shame and fear once again welled up. I forced back tears.
“Is…is it…wrong…to…to like somebody?”
“To like somebody?”
“You know, to “like” them. Like-like.”
“Well, no.” Relief flooded me for a moment, followed by a small regret for what I had done to my innocent crush.
“I mean, at your age, you wouldn’t want to let it consume all your thoughts, but it’s not a bad thing to like someone.”
Consume all my thoughts? No, it hadn’t consumed all of them. Maybe too many, but I could be careful about that next time. Now this was a rule I could follow.
Left to my own reflections, I tried to revive feelings for the kind boy who had no inkling of his role in my internal drama. The feelings refused to revive. Fear, it seemed, had killed my delicate sentiments. Little did I know how many times this battle would be replayed before happiness would strike a blow for itself.
Lady Macbeth
I was washing my hands in the kitchen. They were chapped and painful. The iron fist of dread once again brought tears to my eyes.
“Mom, can you get AIDS from a public bathroom? From touching the toilet seat? Or the wall? I touched the wall in the bathroom at the bus station earlier.” I was fifteen now.
“I’m sure that’s basically impossible. That’s not how people get AIDS.”
“But it’s not completely impossible, is it? What if someone with AIDS had just used the bathroom?” I burst into tears. “It’s not that I’m worried about dying from AIDS. I’m worried that I’ll give it to you guys. I don’t want to kill my family. And it would also be a mortal sin.” I started washing my hands again.
“Really, honey, I don’t think that happens.”
“I heard a story about someone who got it from the dentist once.”
“That is very rare.”
“But it’s not impossible.”
“You can’t live like this. You don’t have to worry about these things!”
“I can’t help it. I can’t stop worrying. I hate it! I hate it!” I was sobbing uncontrollably now.
*****
Although I loved to cook, I couldn’t stand the idea that I might contaminate my family’s food with germs from raw meat or eggs. My hands cracked and bled as I washed them over and over again. I felt dirty after using public bathrooms until I had changed clothes or showered. Always I was afraid that these things were mortal sins, and there were other contenders as well: sins of thought, intrusive images that filled me with guilt. Before I approached Communion, I would sob in the back of the church, terrified that I was about to eat and drink my own damnation.[4] Often, rather than risk damnation, I preferred to endure the perceived judgment of the congregation by staying in the pew, watching my family go up without me. Shame and fear ruled my consciousness. My mom stopped bringing our family to daily Mass, afraid that my harrowing communion battle was going to ruin my relationship with the Church forever.
My bleeding hands began to ring a bell in my mom’s memory. She thought she had heard of people so afraid of germs that they wash their hands until they bleed. She did some research.
“There is a name for what you’re going through. Everyone has unreasonable fears occasionally, but when these obsessions and compulsions take up too much time, it is called Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. From what I have seen, the threshold for diagnosis is three hours a day.”[5]
“Three hours a day? I don’t know. I think about this stuff a lot, but it might not be three hours.”
“Honey, I think you worry and wash your hands and do all these other things for at least three hours a day. It looks like they have treatment for this. We could get you therapy.”
“Therapy! No, no…I don’t want therapy.”
Rejecting therapy, I continued to fight the OCD myself, armed with only a label. Even establishing that slight degree of distance from my intrusive thoughts helped undermine their credibility. Holding my ground in a sometimes uphill battle, I graduated high school and headed to college.
[1] Jeremiah 29:11-13
[2] 2 Corinthians 12:9
[3] Ibid.
[4] 1 Corinthians 11:29
[5] While this was the information my mom found circa 2005, the most updated formulation of this criterion is that, “The obsessions or compulsions are time-consuming (e.g., take more than 1 hour per day) or cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” (DMV-5, p. 237)
Catholic and OCD 