- Date posted
- 2y
Restrictive
I didn’t know I had OCD until this year but I’ve know from a young age that I have disordered eating habits. My cousin thought I was anorexic when I was 7 but at that point I just had ADHD and my appetite couldn’t hold my attention. My life kinda stayed that way, very unintentional, but always commented on, until I was 12 or 13, and grasped the concept of body image and what food intake meant for it in the early 2000’s. I learned to count calories at 15. It wasn’t all the time. My ADHD was going untreated so I guess I would hyperfixate for a while and then lose interest. Looking back, my OCD has had steady, overarching themes that live in the background until the ADHD part of me craves the stimulation from them and latches on. Morality, existentialism, crisis prevention, lack of control. When I feel like I have no control, I start restricting food intake. When I perceive a crisis situation, I act accordingly and then catalogue minute details so that I might preempt the next one. When I feel amoral, I ask for reassurance. When I can’t get a grip on reality or think of how boring the afterlife sounds, I ruminate, because who can reassure me when the answers lie with the dead? Everything went out the window when I had my first kid. All of it. Like starting from scratch. Except. I vowed to never let my disordered eating affect my children. I fucked up in the first week. My baby had lost weight because I was starving myself and trying to exclusively breastfeed. I fixed the problem. A crisis situation, and I’m good at reacting, even if I suck at preventing. I ate, I drank, I supplemented formula until I didn’t need to anymore. But now I was checking. Every day, putting my baby on a scale, logging numbers, feeding times, naps, spit-ups, diaper changes, convinced my spouse to get an echo dot so I could log feeding times hands-free. Logging my own meals and fluid intake and pumping sessions. Watching my child’s growth chart on the app as though it would change moment by moment. When I stopped having to supplement formula, I was probably overproducing, but baby didn’t think so. Started outright rejecting the formula and seemed to want to nurse 24/7, even after introducing food. I had succeeded, but I was still checking. After going from the 63rd percentile at birth to the 6th, in his first week of life, my child reached the 97th percentile for growth by 8 months old. I did it. There was nothing more to check. But had I overdone it? That felt like a dangerous thought. All I did was augment my milk supply. The rest of the time I went by baby’s appetite. He sure did spit up a lot from months 3-5. But that was because I was doing both breastmilk and formula, right? I started going round and round in my head to find something to confirm. Solid proof that I had not overdone it. Doctors approval at visits did nothing for me. Didn’t trust those fuckers at the time, because I’d TOLD them I had history of disordered eating. I’d TOLD them I was scared of how it would affect my baby. They just said my body wouldn’t limit milk production based on calorie intake. (So for anyone struggling with that, YOUR BODY WONT PRIORITIZE FEEDING A BABY IF IT THINKS YOU ARE DYING. So if you’re starving yourself you won’t make milk. Maybe this is common sense for people without eating disorders, but I was up front about mine, and it took a long time for me to stop holding my doctors responsible for my failings. I drank like a liter of Gatorade and then filled it with water after and drank that too, every day. Easy calories to start and then the more you nurse, the less you can ignore your appetite) Anyway, I was at this point and already had been, inflicting my disordered eating habits on my child. That was the only thing I knew without a doubt. For his entire first year of life, checking his weight, logging his food, checking his weight chart in the app religiously. It seemed so normal. The doctor recommended I track his weight daily when he was diagnosed with “failure to thrive.” Failure. This child couldn’t fail at anything. One week old. There was nothing that he was supposed to do on his own. The source of a “failure” is the person on whom responsibility falls. So aligned with what I always see clearest in my mind: my failure. And I was doing it again. I put the scale away. Deleted the app. Stopped drinking Gatorade every day and stopped tracking my food and water. One way or another, I was being led by my child’s appetite now. I set up a snack cabinet that he could reach and showed him how to get a snack and bring it to be opened. Nursing only on his time. Lunch and dinner whenever I thought of it, or when he showed interest. And now he’s 3. And he has a brother. And I don’t know how to find a happy medium. They need stricter routine and so do I and so does my spouse, but I’m so afraid of taking it too far. My spouse had a manic/psychotic episode last year and got diagnosed bipolar 1. He’d been having cyclical anger management issues for about a year and a half that I’d chalked up to my fault and having to do with my own cycles, but the cycle started shrinking steadily the more stress he was under. Then I got pregnant again. It was happening almost weekly and I knew it wasn’t me by now, but when his disorder is in control, he speaks with the words of my own. It was really hard to deal with. He took it too far once. There are places my doubts can’t touch, and he spoke his venom on my child, in front of my child. I made him cry. I was so mean to him. I laid into him with every vulnerability he’d ever shared. Every insecurity. Shamed him. He deserved it then. I want to feel bad, but I don’t to this day. There was no delusion to hide behind, only his abhorrent behavior and lackluster emotional regulation, suddenly a crystal clear pattern. Because by then, I knew what tantrums looked like. I calmed down enough to deescalate and we agreed he needed to get help. He did. His doctor put him on an antidepressant and it sent him straight into mania. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Now my OCD has its claws in something it never did before, and I experienced so much trauma that I don’t know what is rational and healthy coping behavior half the time. But it is so apparent that part of it is not, because up to this point, I’d gone my whole life undiagnosed. I’m scared to take the actions I need to get our family back on the path to stability because I am afraid I will create an unsustainable system, or that it will be sustainable but my spouse won’t adhere to it, cause stress that could send my spouse into an episode. Worst of all, I worry that he doesn’t or shouldn’t love me, that I am always making things worse for him, and by extension, our kids. Just venting, but if anyone has advice I’m open.