I'm going to write about a new obsession I've been having lately. I have never worried about this before so much, and I don't know exactly why it has escalated now. I remember a couple of times in the past few months being worried if a toilet flushed while the laundry was going, somehow thinking that dirty toilet water would somehow make its way into the laundry machine through the plumbing system. I remember one time my husband was taking a shower and I had a load of laundry in and because I think of him as "contaminated"--I was worried that when the shower water drained it would go into the laundry. At that point I simply stopped the washing machine and resumed when he was done. I know logically, at least I think, that the plumbing system is set up in a way that dirty water wouldn't contaminate clean pipes unless the plumbing system itself was not put together correctly or is malfunctioning. Here goes the what-ifs again. What if our plumber set it up wrong? What if dirty water is being put through those "clean" water pipes? It's bothering me enough to where its changing how I do the laundry the last few days, which has become even more time consuming to me.
For example yesterday I was washing my daughters underwear. I try to do my laundry when my husband is not home, so I don't have to worry about the toilets flushing, but of course he doesn't know this bothers me and I am not sure how he would take this information. We have never gotten into detail about my OCD and I don't think he has any idea what is all involved in it. So....I had only about 22 minutes left in the load, it was rinsing out and I go downstairs and he had just flushed the toilet. So I had to stop her laundry and rewash it again. Then I still didn't feel comfortable with it, because I didn't want there to be a chance of having toilet water on her clean underwear, so I hung her underwear up to dry (I am currently line drying clothing right now, this will be discussed why in a future post), and rewashed it again this morning. I'm washing it once now to "de-rid" the underwear of any germs. Then I will go upstairs again and wash it again. Then I will feel like it is clean, at least as clean as I can get it.
Also after he leaves in the morning I have been running a cycle on the washer quickly to "flush out" anything that might be in the pipes. Then I try to get all my laundry done, before he comes home at the end of the day. Right now this works well, because I am working from home this summer, so it is easy for me to get laundry going during the day. Once school starts in another few weeks, I am going to have find another solution as I work part-time (part of that from home, part in the office). So on the days I go into the office I won't be home to work on the laundry during the mornings.
Has anyone else struggled with this particular obsession? If so, how did you deal with it? Can anyone give me information as to how plumbing better works. Maybe if I had some good information, I wouldn't be SO worried about. I'm still going to worry about it, but maybe it would lessen the degree a bit...
No comments:
Post a Comment