Lack of empathy. That’s what they call it. They being the experts, researchers, or whoever they are who know about these things. I call it, being a jerk.

I’m three months postpartum and, lately, I haven’t been feeling the best. I suspect a possible hormone imbalance, perhaps with my thyroid, but since mothers wake up several times a night at this point, it’s hard to tell if the reason I’m so tired and achy and a tad moody is because of simply not getting enough sleep or something more.

My husband thinks I’m a hypochondriac, although he refuses to say it. He just tells me that “it’s normal for women who’ve just had a baby,” since because he’s a man, he’d know?

I ask him what his opinion is based on, and he says he’s just assuming. You know what they say about assuming things – it’s a great way to make an ass out of you and me. I remind him when he had his wisdom teeth extracted this past spring and he nearly bled to death because of a clotting disorder, and what would have happened if I had just assumed it was normal to bleed so much out of your tooth sockets to fill a few gallon-size buckets. His response? Whatever I’m feeling isn’t that bad.

Must I remind him that I’ve given birth to three babies? That I’ve had two surgeries besides, kidney stones and bleeding ulcers? That my pain tolerance is more than twice as much as his? I have three kids, and a chronically ill husband, who depend on me to function at a very high level. I don’t show pain unless it’s serious, and I’m not going to complain about something seemingly minor – such as aches and pains – unless it’s ongoing and I’ve exhausted the list of possibilities. He thinks he’s dying when he has gas. The only time I thought I was dying, I actually was.

I suspect his lack of empathy is part of his bipolar or attention deficit disorders, but maybe it’s just the way he is. Either way, it drives me a bit batty. It’s one of the reasons that I find it hard to offer empathy when he’s feeling unwell – when the depressive episodes hit.

He rarely gets sick with common ailments like a cold or the flu, but his moods shift hard and fast more than a few times a year. And frankly, my immediate reaction to his sluggishness is often anger. Anger, because there he is AGAIN, annoyed with me that I’m not being more empathic when he’s given me reactions that basically constituted “suck it up!” when I’ve been laid up from hospitalizations. I clearly remember him, the night after returning home from my gallbladder removal, refusing to help me out of bed when I asked him because I could do it myself. Sure, I could but it would’ve hurt a whole lot less if I had help.

It seems that any illness that I’ve had, even the flu, causes his moods to cycle big time. We should always be prepared for a major episode after I’ve been in an Emergency Room. The last visit was in April for kidney stones, and it sent him into the highest manic and deepest depressive episodes I’ve ever seen since he’s been on a mood stabilizer, about four years. The whole hellish cycle lasted about six months. I was 39 weeks pregnant with this third baby and he was out-of-his-mind depressed when we went in to the doctor to change his meds. I gave birth the next week. Fortunately, it was an easy birth with virtually no recovery time needed – and by now, I’m used to taking care of me and my kids by myself – which gave my husband the time needed for the meds to work and for his moods to stabilize.

I suspect there’s something more going on behind his seeming lack of empathy. I wonder if it’s actually fear, if he’s secretly scared that if I am sick, that if my aches and pains aren’t some normal transient part of postpartum recovery, that his moods will destabilize again. He won’t tell me. I try to weasel his true feelings out of him, sneakily asking him different questions in a seemingly nonchalant way so he won’t realize what I’m doing.

And this morning, he was just about to open up, but then he stopped himself and said he didn’t mean what he was about to say, and wouldn’t tell me what it was. I think it was exactly what he meant to say, and either he thinks it’ll upset me or he doesn’t want to “make it real” by saying whatever it is out loud. But, I have a feeling that talking out his emotions is exactly what both of us need.

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    Last reviewed: 17 Dec 2011