Did your parents leave you with an Obsessive Compulsion?

Put on clean underwear because you might have an accident and end up in hospital!

I don’t think if I was hit by a bus or otherwise, people would be paying much attention to my underwear, and while it’s really too much information, I did follow the sage advice from my mother.

There was also brush your teeth or the girls won’t like you. So I duly brushed them and wore the enamel off of them. I still get told off by my wife for brushing too hard.

There were two life advisories that definitely became compulsions. The first is, “Don’t swallow until you have chewed your food to death.” Not quite the correct translation. The Dutch sayings don’t quite translate either, like “Don’t talk your mouth empty”.

They shared the importance of chewing each mouthful a thousand times, but clearly, it was a result of their war experiences. They were kids in the Netherlands when it was occupied in WWII and often went without food, so every bite of anything at all was precious.

They ate everything, one memory in my father’s autobiography was of his father coming home with a cat and matter of factly saying they wouldn’t get much of a feed out of that. It sounded like a sick joke, but it wasn’t. You may shake your head in disgust, but you try going with a shared family meal of onion soup, with a total of one onion and some water, between everyone in the whole family. This is what my father looked like as a young teenager in 1945. He could barely hold his own weight to stand up. I get it now, I didn’t as a kid.

I didn’t understand back then why they pushed it so hard, but my dinner table training was pretty Victorian. Strict and not much fun. I didn’t understand their war experiences at the time. The end result is that I remain one of the slowest eaters I know, just because of my conditioning. We didn’t always have great meals, but there was always plenty of it.

Maybe if I could turn back time, I could understand what these dinner sessions were all about. Reminds me of “Eat everything on your plate, remember the kids in Biafra”, and getting a hiding for suggesting we invite them over, at my rebellious 14 years of age. I tried that on my kids, but they had never heard of Biafra.

But the one that got me was a Golden book about a boy called Tommy O’Toole, who was always too late for things, so his parents called him Tommy Too Late.

The book had a clock face on the front, so you could change the time.

My parents read it to me in the morning and I would set the time, ready to go to kindergarten. They would read it to me at night. They would read it to me if I was late for dinner. If I was late getting ready for school, they would call me Tommy Too Late.

Basically, the premise for this golden book, was that if you were late, you would miss out on everything from meals to parties, to outings, you would miss out on them just as Tommy O’Toole or Tommy Too Late did.

I don’t know if I asked to read the book a thousand times or if it was imposed on me, but I remember a little dopamine hit when I adjusted the clock and got the time right as a little kid. As a consequence, I came to enjoy the book too.

The book did its job. Throughout my adult life, I have been anal about being on time. I learned in business that people don’t like you being early or late, and I became one of those people. I used to hate it when people were one or the other, and I was quietly pleased when people, perhaps brainwashed like me, turned up on the dot.

I used to get anxious going to important meetings when I got stuck in traffic, and almost always got to the airport within the prescribed amount of time you were supposed to be there to check in. I had time to swap a flat tyre on the way to the airport, I even had time on one trip, after realizing I had forgotten my passport, to drive home about 20km each way, to pick it up and still wasn’t late, even though I was almost hyperventilating from the stress all the way back in, and drove a touch faster than I should have with my wife and kids in the car. I was heading to NY, Florida, France, and Holland on a 10-day business trip, and missing one day would have been a disaster.

To this day, I will do everything I can to arrive for an appointment early and will wait in my car, or somewhere handy, so that I can arrive at exactly the right time. And on that note, it’s time to start work, and I’m not going to be late. :)