by Margaret Radisich Sleasman

Created on: October 06, 2009   Last Updated: October 08, 2009

Being OCD or ADHD were not diagnosed medical conditions when I was growing up; it was just something people considered as eccentric behavior. In my family it was common behavior and not considered strange; now that I look back, I can see that most of us were not only ADHD, but OCD as well. At this point, I am not sure if it was an inherited trait or habits that were learned and passed down from one generation to the next.

My son was a very clean boy and would not let anyone touch his plate, glass, or utensils except me; I guess because I was his mom and he figured I was germ-free. He took after my uncle in this respect too, who would not eat on a cracked dish, and if anyone washed his coffee cup, he would throw it away. If someone would walk by the table when my son was eating, he would start blowing the air and waving any invisible germs away that may have fallen off that person. The one thing I always thought was hysterical was that when he would take a plate, bowl, or a utensil out of the cupboard he would always wipe it out with his hand or blow on it to be sure there were no germs on anything - mind you, his hands were not always clean when he did this; but in his mind, the germs were gone.

Both my son and my uncle were quite obsessive-compulsive. My mother and I were too, but we weren't germ-aware as much (right) as they were "if you chew something on one side of your mouth, you had to chew another bite on the other side for the same amount of times." And the touch thing, if you touched something, you had to touch it again with the other hand. If we ate gumdrops, we had to have an even amount of each color; and again, one piece of the same color on each side of the mouth. Yes, an itch would be scratched and then you would have to scratch again with the other hand on the opposite side. And, heaven forbid that we would step on a rock because we would have to find another rock of the same size to step on with the other foot - this sometimes took hours. I guess we were (are) OCD, now that I think about it. Actually, I still do the chew and touch things - and it is very, very hard not to do the rock thing, but sometimes I overcome!

Hearing aids and false teeth are not something an ADHD/OCD person can deal with. Actually, we have trouble with heavy sox and shoes, seams, neck tags on clothes, and jewelry. My grandmother on my mother's side had her teeth pulled out; the dentist made her a set of false teeth. I think she put them in her mouth at the dentist's

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