Odd Little Bedtime Behaviors

November 5, 1999

wrote:

> While I don't seem much of her OCD these days, I am wondering about a new

> thing that's coming up that looks a little OCDish. At bedtime mostly she

> says, " I feel funny like something's not right or missing. " I think it's

> that feeling we all get: " I'm forgetting something. What is it? " but she

> doesn't want to go to sleep until she figures it out. Once she decided it

> was that she needed her bedtime tape on. Another time she decided she

> needed to eat half of her school lunch that I packed right after she'd had

> breakfast because she was still hungry. Has anyone else seen this?

>

As I look back on the years before was diagnosed (at 14) I can

see a lot of odd little behaviors that were probably OCD-related. At

the time they mostly seemed like minor idiosyncrasies, and since we are

a family of eccentrics, I didn't worry much about them.

For a couple of years, for instance, she insisted on having the light on

all night when she slept. Then there was the year or so when she went

around touching things as she went in and out of rooms. She wouldn't

wear jeans for a while because they were tight in the crotch, hated the

seams in her sock toes, and cut the labels out of all her clothing for

years. (Interestingly enough, this is something that my best friend

since college has also always done, and it turns out that she probably

has OCD too. When we visited her recently in LA and she started talking

about some of her sanitation obsessions, began an interrogation

that pretty effectively had her diagnosed in five minutes.)

The good news is that these things came and went on their own. Since

you are so far ahead of the game in knowing that OCD is something Kelsey

is contending with, you can probably nip a lot of this stuff in the bud.

As for the stomach aches, had them for years on and off, usually

school-related. But she always ate like a stevedore and the combination

of puberty and eliminating high-fructose corn syrup got rid of them once

and for all. (I think!) In any case, she no longer has to read every

label for HFCS and the stomach aches aren't around. Amen.

Taffy in San Diego, wondering how you like the new library

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