My husband has been in a great mood. Very productive, easy going, good sense of humor, happy… No, no, it’s not mania – at least not yet. Hopefully, we’ll skip that this year.

Last year, my husband did well all the way through winter. It was his first winter in eons that he wasn’t struggling with bone-chilling depression. I thought we had caught a lucky break.

Then, on April fool’s day, I went into the hospital with a blocked kidney from a stone. It was enough to shake my husband’s stability, looking back at it in hindsight.

My husband and I do not think alike. This is true. We both comprehend this fact. But I don’t think either of us actually understands what this means as it relates to how we relate to one another, nor do we truly realize how very differently someone with attention deficit disorder thinks when compared to someone without ADD.

The other day, I woke up in the usual way – to a messy house, left in the wake of my ADD husband. An open drawer here, a dirty bowl there, crumbs and something gooey on the counter, a hot pad and a spatula on the floor, last night’s supper dishes on the table, a butter knife sticky with peanut butter on top of the stack of bills, a calculator in the fruit bowl…you know, the usual…when I happened upon a tub of very gross, dirty dishwater in the sink and a wash rag marinating in the mix. Eewww!

We had had a discussion just the night before about not leaving the wash rag in the old dishwater and to just dump the tub of water when he was done washing something. It’s a discussion that, like all of our discussions, we’ve had over and over. And as usual, he swore up and down that, yes, he agreed that leaving the wash rag in the dirty dishwater was as gross as I found it and that, yes, he would remember to dump the water this time.

It’s been a rough week or so. My husband has been in such a negative mood, and any time I’ve tried to broach the subject, he either shut down emotionally or blew up in a rage.

It’s not bipolar disorder, though. I’m becoming more and more convinced that his “rapid-cycling” bipolar is actually just a product of his attention deficit disorder combined with some rotten coping skills, particularly his habit of avoiding all uncomfortable feelings.

He tries to pretend that he’s not feeling the way he is, as if by ignoring it, those feelings will just magically disappear. But anger, frustration, bitterness, sadness, jealousy, and any other strong emotion don’t just go away; instead, they fester. Upset feelings that are ignored are like a cancer. They’ll eat you alive.

When he’s in these states of mind, his being is permeated with whatever negative emotion started it. The emotion is like a runaway train; nothing can stop it, until it finally runs out of diesel. At that point, my husband is emotionally spent – empty and exhausted.

He’s finally ready to switch gears. All the negativity has oozed out of him, contaminating his home and his workplace, leaving angry and hurt family members in the wake. It had to get out of him, one way or another; if not by him expressing his feelings in a healthy way, then by getting out of him in any way possible. It turns my husband inside out in the process, but apparently – no matter how painful and exhausting the whole deal is – it’s much more preferable to my husband than to talk about his feelings.

My husband was diagnosed years ago as having Rapid-Cycling Bipolar Disorder. And for years, I took that diagnosis at face value – anytime that he got a little moody, well it was because of his bipolar disorder. But now, I’m starting to wonder if it’s just that simple.

We went on a mini-family vacation this past weekend. Let’s just say that the first half of the two-day vacation was hard, on everyone.

My husband was very moody. The kids were walking around him on eggshells, and I was wishing that we had left him at home…or the side of the road. Surely, me wrangling three kids and a bunch of luggage alone would be far more enjoyable than dealing with a moody man.

At face value, I could say that the vacation triggered his bipolar disorder. But once we got to the bottom of it – I’m never one to avoid the issue, although my husband certainly wishes I would sometimes – I learned that that his moodiness was more an issue of me and him having different vacation styles.

He likes to have an itinerary – to go from one source of entertainment to the next, on a set schedule so as to see and experience as much as possible. I like to be much less scheduled, to have a list of things I’d like to do but to not worry if I don’t get to all of them. What happened was that on the first day of our vacation, we left a little later than planned and was able to do most of what we both wanted but ultimately didn’t have time to swim at the hotel pool. Not a big deal to me; apparently, quite a big deal to my husband.

I must have some sort of amnesia. For years, I had myself convinced that all the miscommunication between me and my husband (due to the attention deficit disorder), and the up-and-down nature of his moods (due to the bipolar disorder), didn’t begin until sometime after we tied the knot.

Last night, I realized – or remembered? – that wasn’t so. This relationship we have, with all its joys and triumphs, trials and tribulations – we’ve actually been doing it the same way from the beginning.

I have been reorganizing my bedroom. Since having my third child, I’ve come to terms that I will likely never again be a clothing size 4, as I was pre-baby, and so am ready to pare down on my clothes, many that I haven’t worn since college.

I have a lot of clothes to sort through, so to take a break from the monotony, I also went through my jewelry box and my other bedroom items. Among the belongings on top of my dresser is a memory box where I keep special photos, cards, and notes from friends and family – much of which is from way back when, before I was married. I hadn’t looked through it for years and had forgotten all the love notes in there from my husband when we were dating, before we were even engaged.

There’s a new book available for couples that I’m excited to read. Attached explores attachment style as a relational dynamic.

Attachment, or bond, or connection, is based on Attachment Theory, which stems from research exploring how parents and their children relate to one another, and how this affects the child later in his life. I know a little about this: I work for Attachment Parenting International, which promotes an approach to childrearing that encourages a secure parent-child attachment.

Given my line of work, Attached is exciting in that it illustrates the effects of attachment style beyond childhood.

In the original research, there were three attachment styles identified: secure, anxious, and avoidant. Secure defines a healthy respect and love between two people in a relationship. People with anxious attachment styles crave emotional intimacy but fear rejection at the same time. Those with avoidant tendencies appear to be emotionally distant, seeming not to care about intimacy or rejection.

As you can guess, a relationship between two securely attached people is very stable. Adding anxious or avoidant into the equation complicates matters.

On the Attached website, there is a quiz where you can figure out your attachment style and learn how the book can help you and your current or future relationships. In trying to help their situation, someone with an anxious attachment style will try to change their way of thinking and acting – which is a good start – and try to do the opposite of what they usually do, so someone who tends to avoid conflict will then try to confront during conflict.

The problem is, rather than address the underlying insecurities, they’re still avoiding them; while the behavior has changed, it’s no healthier than it was to begin with.

Marriage would be so much easier if only one person was needed to make the union work. Then, when your spouse was having a hard day or week or month or year, you could just carry the relationship until they got better.

But, of course, marriage doesn’t work that way. It’s designed to be a single entity made up of two separate beings – you and him, or you and her. And if one person is having a difficult time, it can sometimes make for a very long day.

My husband’s moods are tied to mine. Maybe a better way of putting this is, his self esteem depends directly on however I feel toward him. There is nothing healthy about this. I’m no therapist, and he doesn’t go to a therapist despite much encouragement from me and his doctor, so I’m only stabbing in the dark to try to help him find another way to boost his self esteem.

In the past, I thought that doing a hobby or a job that he did really well would help, and while I think it has helped his self image, his sense of self worth is still related to whether I’m happy with him or not.

The problem is, as we all know, conflict is a normal part of relationships. It’s how relationships grow, and if resolved in a healthy manner, conflict can lead to both spouses becoming more emotionally close to one another.

One of the hardest things about someone in the family having bipolar disorder is that it’s not an illness that can be managed just by popping a pill. It requires lifestyle changes, and for the person who has bipolar disorder to be successful in their treatment, everyone else in the family needs to adopt those lifestyle changes also.

This point has hit home especially hard since I found out that I have celiac disease. At first, to lessen the changes for my family, I tried going gluten-free just myself and allowing everyone else to eat any food they wanted, without the burden of reading labels. But I was soon confronted with mighty temptation, issues with cross-contamination, and the extra cost and time and energy needed to make a “regular” dish and a gluten-free dish for every meal.

So, last week, after a long talk with my husband, we decided to purge the kitchen of all food items that I cannot eat and that everyone in the family will be eating gluten-free, too.

During this same period of time, my husband was off work for a week or so – he builds houses for a living, and business is slower in the winter months – and he was able to get a full night’s sleep, consistently. We both started seeing a great improvement in his mood stability, and I mentioned to him that perhaps we revisit the idea of him going to bed earlier in the evening so that he can get more sleep every night. His concern was that by going to bed at 8 p.m., he would miss out on family time. So, I said that everyone would be going to bed at 8 p.m.

Denial comes in many forms. Sometimes, I play doctor, convincing myself that my husband doesn’t actually have the bipolar illness but rather that his mood swings are a symptom of some other condition – often one that, conveniently, is much easier to treat.

It’s true that in addition to bipolar disorder, my husband has attention deficit disorder (ADD), obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), and narcolepsy. So, it’s a bit more complicated than managing just the bipolar disorder. But the mood swings are definitely the most difficult to manage – and bipolar disorder is certainly the one illness of all his disorders that I would pick, if I could, to trade for something else. Narcolepsy is a bit difficult to treat, too, but ADD and OSA are just so darn easy to control compared to bipolar.

I was ambushed by denial last week after it was discovered that my own mood swings promptly cleared up with diagnosis and treatment of a previously overlooked autoimmune disease. A major part of my maintenance treatment is in a restricted diet. I felt so much better that I thought, perhaps, the same sort of diet might do some good for my husband.

Admittedly, his American diet probably does need some adjustment, but when my brain isn’t swirling in a delusion of denial, I know without a doubt that there is no diet that will treat bipolar disorder.

I remember the first time I felt childbirth contractions and how the worst part for me was not the pain, but rather the anticipation between the contractions, knowing that another one was coming. Women are advised to take the breaks between contractions as rest periods; it wasn’t until my third baby that I was able to do this.

The only purpose those breaks between contractions served me was a time for the anxiety to build. However, I must admit that once I mastered overcoming the fear of contractions, childbirth became much easier.

Bipolar disorder is kind of like labor in that the sufferer is sometimes ill and sometimes not. My husband has periods of depression and periods of mania and periods of stable mood. And when he’s in that stable mood, after a while, I get in my head that the illness is gone. Logically, I know that’s not the case. My emotional brain, however, takes over and locks the logical brain in the closet of my mind so that the only one I’m listening to is the wishful emotional side.

So, for me, the breaks of stable mood don’t tend to be a time of rest necessarily, or even a time of worrying about the next episode, but actually a time of complete and utter ignorance – if I’m not careful. And if I’m not careful, the come-and-go nature of bipolar disorder will lend itself to “surprise attacks,” even though it really shouldn’t be a surprise – a stable mood doesn’t mean that bipolar disorder actually ever left!