My wife’s behaviour – thoughts?

First up I’ve read the basic forum rules & principles and totally understand [if it wasn’t obvious anyway] that this absolutely isn’t the place to ask for a diagnosis. I suppose what I’m really looking for is along the lines of first impressions as to whether it looks as if I ought to be taking proper steps to get a proper diagnosis, & what those steps might be.

Apologies also for the long rambling, and not brilliantly edited, post. A quiet pre-Christmas day at the office. It’s been mildly useful for me to lay everything out in writing because I’ve only just, really, started to join up the dots of it all.

A bit about my wife, then. In her mid 30s, has to date done very well at school, at university, & in her career, being intelligent by any yardstick and even more so diligent & hardworking. Almost everyone has mild eccentricities if you look hard enough, the one of hers that’s stood out is a tendency to, sometimes, get ‘stuck like a broken record’ on a [usually small & insignificant] problem, to an extent that it dominates her speech & sometimes behaviour. One example is that she used [not so much now] to worry about running out of petrol in our car, & would insist on filling it up after driving even a very small number of miles, even though it’s a small European car rather than a ‘gas guzzler’. Another has been having enough cash, by which I mean banknotes to cover everyday expenses rather than money in the bank [we’ve never had any real money worries] – when that issue was at its worst we had about £1000 or something stuffed messily into a drawer, some of which was certain to be needed quite quickly to pay some builders we were employing at the time, some of it not. It’s probably not relevant but I’ll also mention that she’s over the years suffered from bad, sometimes exceptionally bad, PMS.

The ‘broken record’ problem is something she shares with possibly her father & certainly her paternal grandmother, who has a minor reputation as a local ‘crazy’ & who has fallen out with many other family members over mostly fairly trivial stuff. None of these issues were really debilitating at all, not affecting her work life in any way [indeed, her extreme diligence has possibly been an asset] or her personal relationship [she’s always made & kept friends fairly easily] other than with me & perhaps her parents to a lesser extent. She’s good at mostly keeping the other side to her hidden. It’s also worth stating that she’s always been bad tempered in general. Someone who’s great to have around when the going is good, often the life & soul, but prone to a real blackness of moods when the chips are down.

Until fairly recently i had very much pencilled in these foibles as ‘quirks’ but over about the last 3-4 years things seem to have got worse. Our children have been kind of at the heart of this. We [possibly unexplained or possibly due to some mild physical problems that she seemed to have, polycystic ovaries or some such] took quite a long time to conceive our first child [who’s now 2.5 yrs old], after just over a year we ended up having IVF because, although we’d ‘only’ been trying for a year & she was relatively young aged about 32-33,. she badly wanted to be a mother and got very impatient. Many months’ bout of PMS, signalling as they did that she was not pregnant, brought about fairly hideous, almost animalistic rages. On one afternoon she had a ridiculous bout of rage at her mother, reducing her to tears via a prolonged [hour or more] verbal assault over some real but not at all urgent or desperately serious grudges. So we went through IVF and were lucky enough to be successful first time round.

The pregnancy was fine, albeit with a few health issues, as were the first 9 months or so of motherhood. I remember thinking after about 6 months that she, and by extension we, were about the happiest we’d ever been. After about 10 months or so things took a slight turn for the worse. When her periods came back the PMS seemed worse than ever [e.g. once when driving she came quite close to crashing the car during a screaming fit over nothing at me in the passenger seat], also going back to work [our kid went to nursery] was hard for her, she’d previously been pretty much ‘top dog’ in a fairly high-powered, stressful job, she struggled a little with going back & being, with changed priorities, merely one of the better people doing her job.

Things have been harder with the second child [conceived using frozen embryos from the previous round of IVF after a couple of months’ worth of trying ‘naturally’, when it became clear to me that her patience wouldn’t hold out any longer]. First of all the child got ill about midway through the pregnancy. Was lucky to survive, although was born on time & seemingly healthy enough – needs to have daily medication but there are hopefully no long-lasting issues. Things were a bit of a mess in the immediate aftermath of the birth. Some building work we’d been having done had overrun very badly, meaning that she had to spend a couple of months with quite a messy, dusty, house, with occasional loss of electric, gas, water, those kinds of things. The project manager who we’d hired to do the work turned out to be useless so, new baby in tow, my wife took this on, her blue-chip corporate management experience being well suited to the job. Although there were quite a few panics, tantrums, & so on, in some ways she seemed to enjoy the job, she’s always liked to keep busy. I was a little worried that this was stopping her from relaxing & from just looking after the new baby, but it all seemed harmless enough.

When the building work stopped, my wife seemed to struggle to settle back down to quiet normality. She seemed to want to try to put the same amount of energy into regular housekeeping as she had done managing the building project. Some of her behaviour has been a bit, to my untutored eye, a bit ‘OCD’-ish, not so bad as to really disrupt or lives, but bad enough to be quite troubling to me. Three important strands of the behaviour are doing laundry [especially of the young baby’s clothes], doing grocery shopping, and buying toys for our 2.5 yr old son.

On laundry, basically she gets unreasonably worried that we, especially the baby, will run out of clean clothes. The washing machine and/or dryer seem to be on at some stage most days, not unusual for a family with small kids perhaps, but also in our bedroom, at the end of our bed, at any point in time there 2-3 fairly huge piles of clean baby clothes, where they come from I’m not sure, a mix of newbought, gifts, & handmedowns, safe to say we’re not likely to be short of babyclothes even if we had to go a few days without washing. The frequency with laundry pops up in her conversation with me and others is quite striking. It’s dangerous to try to mess with this obsession.
Quite recently we got back from a week’s holiday with a case or two of dirty washing, but also, at the of a long drive, with two hungry kids [and a hungry husband] who needed to be put to bed. In the car I asked her if it was OK if we ate & put the kids to bed before doing the washing, she readily agreed, but quite quickly [at a point when I was juggling the toddler & some food in the kitchen & , she was supposed to be putting the baby to bed] blurted out that she wanted to do the washing straight away, & asked me to get it from the car, when I refused she exploded into a very upsetting [to me] rage.

Grocery shopping, a bit similar I suppose, she can’t bear to run the risk that we’ll run out of food, even though we live in an urban area no more than about 100m from a good quality 24/7 supermarket. I started to notice that we were throwing away quite a lot of food at the end of the week, just because we were buying it a lot quicker than we were eating it. One particular source of waste was a big tray of fresh vegetables that we get delivered to the house every week & can’t easily eat through. When I suggested that we stop buying these so often her solution was to out & buy a really huge stove soup making pot, meaning that we’re now accumulating a couple of freezer bags’ worth of homemade soup every week.

I shouldn’t go on for too much longer. The kid’s toy thing is similar – he has quite a lot more than he’ll ever need, with the collection getting bigger week on week. There’s a minor obsession with adding new furniture & fittings to the house, & with redecorating. Sometimes the baby [who my wife generally has a very good, close, bond with, has breastfed very well & so on – I don’t particularly see this as something a classic post natal issue if that makes sense, rather it seems that pregnancy & childcare issues have brought existing issues closer to the surface]

I suppose in a nutshell – does any of this sound like anything serious? If so, what might I do?

How likely might it be that me doing stuff to help [e.g. being better round the house, I am often far from perfect in this regard] might help?

Hi,
It sounds to me, like your wife has been through major changes in the past several years. Two small children and a big change to her work life. Some of what you're describing does sound like ocd to me. Pregnancy and post pregnancy hormone changes can wreak havoc with ocd, as well as, stress (two small children) and lack of sleep (again, two little ones.)
Another thing to think about, was the desperation to have these children. She wanted them so badly, and now having them... small children push you to your limits. There is not a mother in the world who hasn't thought at some point, "I am not cut out for this" . But if she is having those thoughts after wanting the children so badly (PERFECTLY NORMAL), its bound to cause her MORE stress and self doubt, which will make things worse.
The obsessions you spoke of... laundry, food. It sounds like she feels like the responsibility all lies on her to make sure things are (for lack of a better word) safe. Did she grow up lacking food? Those kinds of things can make you hyper responsible.
ocd is an anxiety problem. Do you think that she is , in general, a worrier or has high anxiety?
I've dealt with ocd for a good deal of my life. There are meds that help. There are also things that it's just easier to acknowledge as "quirky" and do it, as some obsessions I can't seem to get rid of.
I can see how this affects you and the family. How does it affect her? Is she bothered by it?
If you tell her she's obsessed with laundry and needs help, she will not react well, if you ask her about her anxiety level she may agree she needs some help with it.
The thing you can do most to help her, is continue what you're doing being supportive. If the patterns don't interfere to much, patience is everything. If it does interfere to much, and you worry about the safety and happiness of her , the kids and yourself, try to get her talk to someone professional. (I know easier said than done). You're both under a great deal of stress, don't forget to love each other.

a belated thanks for the reply, some food for thought here.