Married to Bipolar

Life is hard.

Don’t marry someone who’s only good when things are easy.

I knew that immediately about Trevor.

We met 3 weeks after my mother told me she was moving to be closer to me; that she could no longer live by herself.

Trevor didn’t run away. He didn’t have any idea what he was signing up for, sure, but he didn’t run away.

He stuck around through 3years of my mother’s demise and eventual death.

My mother arrived two months after we met, and he stuck around. He took her car to the UHaul place; he went out to dinner with us on the first night. He came to her appointments, he visited her in all the places that she would come to live. He listened to hours… just HOURS of my distress and despair and frustration and sadness and utter grief.

He Showed Up.

Our relationship began on stress. hahahaha. It is true.

And it has continued since that first day. Bipolar is just one of the many stressful elements of our relationship.

And I think that’s our key.

That’s our foundation. Showing Up for each other.

I learned as much as I could about bipolar disorder, as fast as I could, because it’s a new relationship – you need to cut & run as fast as you can, before you get squashed, before your kids get squashed. I needed to know what I was dealing with, IF I could deal with it.

I had to make fast decisions, draw lines, create boundaries immediately, much faster than I have ever with any other relationship, friendships included, because man, this would hurt badly if it fell.

So everything happened at rocket speed.

It had to.

We’ve had 2 moves ourselves, and 5 moves of my mother. We’ve bought and sold 6 properties. We’ve had so much family drama, kid drama, house remodeling, tree removal, oh the health problems, don’t get me started on all that is kidney stones.

Not to mention that we stopped drinking in all this madness, mainly because if we had continued drinking through the madness, we wouldn’t have survived.

We Show Up for each other.

Nothing about our life has been easy…. except us. We have been great since the first day we met. We have been easy. We haven’t had a struggle with showing up for each other. I’ve never questioned the future of our relationship.

We have proven that we can get through just about anything.

except a full manic episode with psychosis. That, we haven’t experienced together.

It’s like the looming elephant in the room that everyone is waiting to happen. When will Trevor go manic, what will happen, will we survive.

I don’t know.

I don’t have a crystal ball on that one, any more than if I’ll get hit by a bus on the way to the grocery store.

I’m not sure what the odds are in either case.

But I’m going to keep waking up and showing up for us.

That is my vow.