Wash, Rinse, Repeat

Sanitation and sanity have the same opening letters.

On a related note, as a child, I remember developing a nasty case of Zebritis. I was almost five years old when the disease took a turn for the worse and manifested itself in an obvious way. I awoke one morning to find several black, ball-point pen strokes seeping across my wrist. Though I could not read, there was also a word written between the lines. When I asked my mother who wrote on me…er, what was wrong with me, she said that the word read “Zebritis.” It was an illness, she explained, that people contracted by washing their hands too much.

Naturally, I didn’t get it. I thought that any preschooler had to wash his or her hands many times a day. Hands were dirty little playthings, and at times I could even see the dirt. Therefore, they had to be scrubbed, then re-scrubbed. It made sense to me, and since the Zebritis never came back in its terrifying written form, I figured I was alright.

My primary obsessions have always centered on contamination. The accompanying ritual, hand-washing, plagues me even now. I am afraid to touch almost anything, and my wrists are always flexed slightly upward. As my ex- almost brother-in-law described it, my hands are continually perched in a “mantis-like” position.

Hiding my symptoms wasn’t always easy for me. Mr. Whittaker, my sixth grade teacher, once told my class a story about a good friend of his. It seems his friend, upon learning some scientific facts about germs, couldn’t stop washing his hands. He would touch something icky, like dirt or some other horrific form of nature, and then he felt compelled to wash his hands. He would touch his jeans, for example, and then wash his hands.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

I suppose Mr. Whittaker was attempting to explain my behavior to the class in a roundabout way, and it certainly was nice of him to try.

At one point during that same year, we had a substitute teacher who reported me to the school nurse. She was concerned that I had a bladder problem of some kind because I requested the bathroom pass so much. Little did she know that I was having a torrid love affair with the gritty hand soap in the elementary school restroom.

The washing is worse in times of stress. Sometimes, after my daughter was born, I would scald my hands as a punishment for some perceived sin. Guilt is a powerful force. And the force is strong with this one.

My grandmother used to cover my hands in Vaseline and socks at night so that my hands wouldn’t get so chapped. Now I have special goat-milk lotion I can put on at night. I still randomly bleed, sometimes in front of other people (and usually without noticing until they point it out to me).

Yesterday I washed my hands at least fifty times, until my knuckles were bleeding again. It wasn’t intentional, I just happened to be cleaning. Cleaning days involve a lot of germs. The vacuum is dirty. The mop bucket is filthy-dirty because you have to pour the dirty mop water into (gasp) the toilet. The list goes on. I even wash my hands after handling something as innocuous as dirty laundry.

I don’t know what I did before antibacterial wipes. Good for toilet seats, doorknobs, and despite what the warnings say, the occasional use on your palms. So as I stare at my filthy computer keyboard and fantasize about washing away these squirming germs on my hands, I bid you adieu.