Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and my husband

The other day my husband took our 3-year-old son to a water park. Most people, when they go to water parks, leave their electronic devices in some kind of locker. My husband decided to take his with him as they walked through the park. At one of the “rides” where the little kids run around in the water my husband tried to get in front of our son to take a picture with his cell phone and he fell. He was fine; his phone submerged.

Fast forward 24-hours and a replacement phone was on the way. Now my husband had the task of transferring all of his photos from his old phone to a data card so he could put them into his new phone. My husband takes a ton of pictures on his phone. You could say he is obsessed. The photos are mostly of our kids. It is actually like a photo journal of the time he spends with them except the pictures are a crappy 1.5 mega-pixels and will never go anywhere other than his cell (and to the friends and family on his distribution list.) He had well over 400 photos he needed to transfer, one-by-one, over to the data card so that he could put all of those picture into his new phone. It was three days of hell… for everyone in the house. Had it been me I would have just said forget it. I would have looked for a dozen favorites and moved on — but not my husband…. losing even one photo would have been like letting a memory disappear forever!

I am convinced my husband has undiagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ^[1]. I am not sure how OCD is officially diagnosed, but anyone who knows my husband can tell you, he’s got OCD. He probably has Attention Deficit Disorder ^[2] as well (ADD)… but maybe not, because put on a baseball game and he can sit for hours — unless he happens to see some dirt on the floor or he notices a DVD in the wrong place. It is actually quite entertaining to see how these two things, the ADD and the OCD, play off each other. However, he’s really managed to make it work to his advantage. Below are three things that his OCD helps enable him to do that impress me…

1. Rarely does he lose anything! Everything has a place, whereas, on a daily basis I am searching for my keys (why the hell I can’t just put them in the same spot every day is beyond me.)

2. At work he manages a ton of different projects, does his “day” job, and has people calling him for random shit all hours of the night, not necessarily because he is the only one that knows how to get it done, but because the people calling know if they ask him for it — come hell or high water — it will get done.

3. Cleaning. Oh my goodness… can he clean.

I will leave the three things that his OCD helps enable that infuriate me for another blog.