It's not easy having Bipolar Affective Disorder and being married. My moods rapidly cycle. It's hard to love someone else when you don't love yourself. Sometimes I have to be selfish and take time out for myself. Sometimes I feel like I can't even function as a human, let alone a wife.
With my moods, at one moment I'm up, the next I'm way way way down. It's hard to live happily ever after when you hit rock bottom and get out of bed. It can be dizzying for my husband when one moment I'm lower than low and the next I'm bouncing around the house wanting to do everything at once. However most often I find myself on the depressed side of my disorder. I can also be the angriest, crankiest bitch when I want to be. My flight response is so ingrained that every other week I've decided it is probably best that I leave the relationship.
It's hard to love your husband when you can't even love yourself. It's a bloody horrible thing to say, but there are days where I feel that there is just not an ounce of love in my body that I just muster to share with anyone. What little I have, I give to my children. Unfortunately sometimes he misses out. That makes me feel like a really shitty person.
There are weeks where I have to take time out to focus on my own mental health, leaving my husband behind to deal with all of the stress and responsibility. This past two months I have been in a psychiatric hospital three times. For a minimum of two weeks at a time. During that time he has had to endure his own issues that have made life harder for him than it should be. What makes me feel even more terrible is knowing that I am not there for him when he needs me most.
Sometimes the illness takes over and I feel like I don't even want to get out of bed. I either start the day not wanting to get out of bed and have to get Husbfriend to look after getting the kids organised for school/care while I stay in bed, or I start the day OK and then find myself in my bed with no way of getting out again. Then he finds that instead of just coming straight home and relaxing, he has to do the child care run to get the baby to bring home to the lazy wife. On these days I am lucky to have showered, let alone made dinner.
However other days I decide that I want to get everyting done at once and I start cleaning every room at the one time. Pull all of the crap out of every room and put it on the dining table. I zip around from room to room doing bits and pieces here and there, only to find that I haven't actually achieved anything much and it is time for dinner and all of the shit that I have piled on the dining table needs to be shoved back in to the rooms they came from and I have wasted a whole day.
Thankfully through all of this I have a kind, loving, caring man who is a pillar of strength in our family. Without him being the person that he is, my marriage would have dissolved a long time ago. I do realise each and every day how lucky I am to be married to a man like him. I'm looking forward to getting this illness of mine managed enough for me to be able to be at least half the wife this amazing man deserves.
Hello, Sinda. I'm hanging on the last sentence of this blog post - your wish to get your illness managed enough to be "half" the wife your husband deserves. First, I'll let you know that I am on the inverted side of your direct experience - I am in a relationship with a man who goes through these trials...deep chasms and high revelations...incredible aptitudes to transcend dimensions seamlessly or like in a stark, rude midnight awakening. And it took me soooo long, so long to get it. First, I tried to figure out "this" from "that". When one "side" of him seemed present, I figured the other was asleep. When I was used to one continuum, his Minotaur awakened. And I got scared. But I've grown with him. And he's no longer a cataclysm of personalities to me. I understand that there is enlightenment on all levels. In grief, expansion, restraint, euphoria, solitude, amorphism, the surreal; in simplicity, ecstasy, wholeness, rejection, anger, futility... etc. This is the human experience, un-repressed. I respect the rawness in you. The truth is, that your husband probably does too. And you need to work toward no goal of "fullness" because you are already so - complete.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much. I wish you lots of love and luck xx
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