Many of the folks who see me comment on how relaxed and calm I am. OK, for all you soccer and football fans who’ve seen me, you can quit shaking your head. I’m talking about in life, not in sports. I realize I’m a bit uptight when it comes to my sports. Honestly, I’m working on it.

But in my daily life, people see me as pretty laid back. I wasn’t always that way. In fact, during college and our early married years I really struggled with a life where things didn’t have a place and places didn’t have a thing. I always prided myself on not being quite as OCD as one of my friends, but I was still pretty bad.

To give you an idea of who I was comparing myself to, my friend Phil has an OCD maniac. We were both single guys living in apartments in the same complex. We worked for the same company, and parked right next to each other. We were also both from Illinois, living outside Dallas, TX…so we had a lot in common. One day I went to his apartment for dinner and noticed that his closet had little marks on the rod where stuff was supposed to hang. Next to each little mark was a hanger. Five red plastic hangers hanging together, followed by five blue ones. Since it was summer and neither of us had much money, there was nothing hanging on the hangers in his front closet. Just the hangers on their marks, spaced exactly three inches apart.

I’m pretty much of a smart aleck, so I made some snide comment about re-ordering the hangers. Well, you would have thought I’d committed a major crime. I finally got him to calm down, and he said “Do you want to see how organized I really am?”. Figuring it couldn’t be as crazy as my Mom’s perfect organization, I took the bait. We trooped to his hallway where his clothing closet was (these were really oddly designed apartments) and he flung open the doors. Red, blue, yellow, white, black hangers. Spaced exactly 3 inches apart. Long sleeve shirts were on red hangers. Short sleeve on blue. T-shirts on yellow…and so it went. Not only that, but the shirts were also grouped by fabric color.

Now don’t get me wrong. Phil was a great guy, and we remained friends for a very long time. Over the years we’ve drifted apart, but we still are in contact very occasionally.

The important point to note here is that he had everything PERFECTLY organized. In comparison, my organization was much more haphazard. Heck, I had metal hangers that didn’t all match. Or course, all the matched ones were on one end of the closet and the riff raff were on the other, but still…I was a comparative Messy Marvin.

Then I got married. I honestly married a wonderful woman who was willing to put up with my uptight approach to where things belonged in the kitchen. She dealt with me flipping the roll of toilet paper over so it rolled the “right way” (in case you don’t know, that means the new sheet is on the front of the roll, not hidden behind, nearly impossible to get to, against the wall…but I digress). She graciously handled my tucking in bed sheets, folding towels in thirds, and folding T-Shirts the way God intended to fold them. And she put up with those shenanigans for years.

Then we had our first kid. Graduate school (for me) along with full time employment as well as Medical School for her had caused me to relax my standards a bit, but I still fretted over not doing things right. You see, there was a right way and a zillion wrongs ways to do almost anything. Anything less than the one right was was, well, wrong. It smacked of failure.

But a kid causes you to change your perspective some. They demand a lot of your time, and sometimes a dish doesn’t get rinsed before making it to the dishwasher. Shoot, sometimes they don’t make it out of the sink after every meal. Heaven forbid, sometimes laundry doesn’t get folded immediately after exiting the dryer. I was learning, but apparently not fast enough for God. I needed a little bit more of a nudge to Chillness.

So we had twins. We had twins when our oldest was 22 months old. Yup, both deliveres were actually due on the same day, but like I’ve said before, our twin daughters we too cool for the womb and had to get out of there early. Eight weeks early. Little jerks!

So now we had more laundry. More dirty dishes. Messes everywhere. My OCD trained and ingrained brain was starting to form new neural pathways. Honestly, that might have also been caused by (1) lack of sleep, (2) lack of adult interaction, and (3) lack of oxygen from running around after three kids under two years old.

Things slipped a little at a time. More dishes piled up. Heck, sometimes the dishwasher didn’t get run every night. A couple times laundry didn’t get unloaded from the dryer right when the buzzer went off. A toy or two didn’t get put away immediately after play time. Yeah, it started to get crazy!

Fast forward 26 months from delivery #2 and well, oops we did it again, and our fourth daughter was born. We’re pretty consistent, so she was born three days before her due date…which was coincidentally three days before her oldest sister’s birthday. We managed to do achieve the near impossible…four kids under four years old.

The house started to look like a “normal” house. Laundry piled up. Sometimes it didn’t make it out of the washer overnight. It’s amazing what you can grow in there when the laundry sits. Piles of clean laundry would also breed and move about the house. Toys. Clothes. Kid-related stuff. More toys. It was amazing how many things didn’t have places anymore and how many places had things that didn’t belong. On a regular basis I thought my head would explode from an OCD-induced episode. But I managed to live through it.

Beds didn’t get made, and the odd sheet corner didn’t get tucked in. It was chaos I tell you, chaos!

And yet, there was this weird sense of calm that came over me sometimes. Sure, exhaustion and a sense of defeat played a role in that sense of calm. It’s hard to win a battle when you have four little girls who are way better at messing things up then I will ever be at fixing things up. But the sense of calm was often broken by fits of OCD and manic energy. On rare occasions the house “shone like the top of the Chrysler building”. Those were proud moments to this OCD-loving Dad.

Fast forward 19 months and our first boy was born. Then 18 months after that another girl. We managed to move just before our son was born, so that brought a whole new level to our disarray. But we had tons more space (the house was over double the size of the prior starter-home), so it was both better and worse. With that much space some of the clutter and disarray was spread all over the house. At times I could almost deal with it. The manic energy days were fewer and farther apart, but things still had a place and each place had it’s things.

So if you lost count, we were at six kids at that point. It think that’s where the breakthrough (or maybe it was a breakdown) happened. I started to just let things happen. I know that’s when it started because I started to relish sleeping in a bed where the sheets weren’t tucked in. We still used a fitted sheet on the bottom, but the blankets and the top sheet started going totally commando. And it seemed right!

We were living in Wichita, in a great big house.

Twenty-seven months later son #2 was born. That same week we bought our house in Hutchinson, opened my wife’s new medical practice, and basically threw all sanity out the window.

With seven kids, a house half the size of the last one, a new medical practice on board, as well as a newborn we were lucky to even wash the laundry or dishes. Or windows. Or the kids, frankly. Most of my lingering OCD tendencies went out the door too. They would sneak back in every once in a while (I had the most organized spice cabinet in the history of mankind for a while there), but for the most part they had been laid to rest.

Three and a half years later we welcomed our youngest daughter. By now I was actually pretty comfortable with living in constant chaos. I even somewhat channeled Jeff Goldblum’s Chaos Theory character from Jurassic Park. Chaos led to interesting developments, and trust me we had chaos.

But I had learned to chill about it. Yeah, I even managed to pick up the extremely hip term “chill” from my newly minted teenager. Things would be going to Hell in a handbasket, and she would say “chill Dad”. And I actually did.

So why does all this matter, especially to you? Well, it just goes to show that anybody can be rehabilitated from being too far to the OCD end of the spectrum. It’s possible to let life happen a little bit and enjoy the ride without having to organize, plan, and frankly manage everything.

So…what can you do to just chill and enjoy the ride more than you have been?