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.

I was watching for signs of a depression but didn’t see anything, so I didn’t notice when he stopped taking his meds and then started sneaking money out of our bank account to spend it on junk food. Now, I know what you’re thinking… junk food? That’s his vice? That’s what you got to watch for with manic spending sprees? Yeah, it could be worse, but this guy can easily rack up a couple hundred dollars very quickly in just junk food.

And then, in May, I began noticing that he was acting a little off. It started out that he had some wildly creative ideas, but then he became obsessive about these wildly creative ideas – to the point where, if I tried to steer him off topic, that he would become out-of-sorts angry.

I vividly remember one afternoon, after saying that we didn’t have enough money to buy something he wanted, when he was outside doing some yard work with a rake. He was so mad at me for “crushing his dream” that he was beating this poor weed with the rake over and over, and then the rake caught a hold of the wire fence.

He was struggling to get the rake loose, cursing and yelling and doing everything you’d expect of a toddler’s tantrum, and the whole section of the fence pulled loose and flung into the air. Frustrated by the mess he was making, he screamed at the top of his lungs and threw the rake. All the while, I’m watching him from my comfy swing on the back porch, sipping my tea – and there was also this neighbor kid riding his bike on the street who had stopped at the end of the lane to watch him the entire time!

Clearly, something was amiss.

It took some investigating for me to figure out that he hadn’t been taking his meds for quite some time. He was very secretive about it – meticulously counting and hiding the pills so I couldn’t be sure if he was taking them or not. Later, he told me a story about hiding some pills he was supposed to take as a kid behind the stove, and his mom found them in the hair and grime, pulled them out, and made him take them anyway. Well, if I had known that story before, perhaps I would’ve been looking behind the stove for his Abilify.

This mania forced some major med changes, and my husband has not yet fully recovered to the level of stability from before. I’m not sure he will. I read somewhere that that happens sometimes – that a major episode will damage the brain enough that it’ll never be the same.

I used to long for the days before last spring’s mania or, more so, before he developed bipolar disorder – back when all he had was seasonal affective disorder, or at least that’s what we were told he had. I think I had to mourn losing that, that it’s healthy to spend some time mourning. But, after six years, I can feel myself accepting his bipolar more and more, every day a little more. I’m more understanding. I’m reading between the lines. I’m finding the human behind the mental illness.

I can accept his bad days, and I’m less wary about the good days. I relish his attention when he gives it, knowing that I’ll need to return the favor in a few days time when he’s depressed. I can see the ebb and flow. I know the good days won’t last, but neither do the bad days. Enjoy the good days, endure the bad ones with compassion, and live in the moment.

There was a time when my husband being in a good mood would thrill me. That was back when I thought there was still a chance that he would wake up suddenly cured of his cyclic bad moods. I now know that’s not the case.

I try to enjoy the good moods when they come. He doesn’t often have prolonged periods of bad mood, but prolonged periods of unstable mood where he’s happy one day and depressed/angry the next, followed by a few weeks’, maybe a month or two’s, worth of stable mood. So, he’s coasting along in a stable mood for, say, three weeks when something happens and his mood starts bouncing in and out of stability for the next, say, three weeks. It’s really quite annoying.

I can see he’s just as frustrated as I am at times. I can see that he’s truly trying to get to the root of the problem and trying to find stability. Hopefully he sees that I’m truly trying to support him without losing my own mind.

Lately, we’ve been looking at his work schedule. For the last couple of years, he’s been working two jobs. The reason is because the job that’s supposed to be full-time is a seasonal job; while it thankfully provides benefits year-round, the winter months are usually down on actual work hours. The second job, which is worked in the evenings and on Sundays, is meant to supplement the main job during these lean months, but in order to keep the job, he has to work these part-time hours year-round, even when he’s working overtime at the main job in the summer.

I have a job, but since I’m self-employed, the money is variable. We originally didn’t want to get in position where we were relying on what income I bring in, because some months pay a lot better than other months. But it doesn’t seem worth it for my husband to continue with these odd hours, some days working in the mornings and afternoons and other days working at night.

He’s reluctant to use my money. He feels it’s his job to provide for his family. I think that’s primal for men, much like raising children is for women. He applied at a couple of other jobs, but so far, none of them have as good of benefits as my husband’s current job. And, truth be told, his current job – I’m referring to the main job, not the part-time one – treats him very well. He’s moved up the ladder and his boss shows his appreciation with regular pay raises.

Part of his reluctance is because in years past, I got kind of upset when his hours dropped off in the winter. It was because of the economy – his job is building houses – and I didn’t quite realize that this rather seasonal pattern to his job is just the way it is. Now, though, I’m used to it. It’s just the way it is.

For the time being, I’ve convinced my husband to reduce his hours at his part-time job to just days when he’s not already working the other job and to make sure that he has at least one weekend completely off a month. He seems satisfied with this arrangement – both of us sharing the responsibility to make the final ends of our monthly finances meet.

More than that, I hope that the more regular schedule will even out his moods a little bit. It’s more complicated than this, I know: Spring is here and the winter depression is lifting, but we have to be watchful for a summer mania. Regardless, I’m hoping the change will do him some good.

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.

Until that point that morning, I was doing really good reminding myself that things left out by my husband that I perceive as easy to put away is due to his ADD. But looking at the rag saturated with the greasy, milky brown water, I had a flashback to a time when I wasn’t so understanding – a time when a word would’ve flashed across the window in my mind, a word that begins with the letter A and ends with the word hole. Not a nice word. But a common word used to describe someone with undiagnosed ADD. I quickly tried to push the word out of my mind, but the accusatory side of me was winning.

As I reached for a spoon to fish out the wash rag, to dump the tub, I had what people commonly refer to as an “aha moment.” A thought occurred to me: This was a perfect example of how differently my husband thinks compared to me.

I wish he was better at describing it to me, but while I’m able to think of countless things at one time and am able to take in multiple distractions but filter it to the one or two that I need to focus on at the time, he is not. My husband can only think of one thing at one time and only the loudest, brightest, or otherwise most noticeable distraction at one time.

So, while he truly meant to follow through on his promise to take care of the dishwater last night, since he didn’t do it at the time of argument, something else caught his attention right away and the thought to return to the dishwater honestly didn’t cross his mind again. After all, dishwater isn’t very loud, bright, or otherwise noticeable.

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.

During one of these states, a friend of my husband’s suggested that perhaps my husband was simply bored with life and to encourage him to make some change to liven things up a bit. I was willing to try anything, so I asked my husband what he would do if he could do anything in the world and money was no object.

He told me that he would move across the country and find a new job at a berry farm and start his life over again, by himself. So, without showing any emotion on my part, I asked him what was stopping him – thinking that perhaps he’d say that he loves his family too much. No. He said, fear.

Clearly, he wasn’t thinking straight – he was trapped in his negativity and was looking for a way out, especially since he’s completely changed his tune about abandoning his family now that the negative mood is past – but I think he’s spot-on with the fear bit.

Fear is what gets him in these messes in the first place, and it’s what drives that runaway train. He’s scared of rejection to the point that he ignores his own God-given emotions, effectively turning himself into a monster, like the Hulk. But it’s not so simple as telling him to talk out his feelings, that I or whoever won’t reject him, that it’s healthy and normal and OK to disagree with people, that working out conflict is actually a great way to become better friends.

It’s not that easy, because the root of the problem isn’t his fear of being rejecting by others. That’s secondary. What’s actually ground-zero in all this is that my husband doesn’t like himself. He’s had ADD all his life but wasn’t diagnosed until his 30s. He’s had a lifetime of earning the reputation of a screw-up, and his most-practiced coping strategy is to hide from possible rejection – to become everyone’s “best friend,” to never disagree with anyone, to never get emotionally close to anyone. Because, in his eyes, he is what everyone has led him to believe all these years: a screw-up.

I admit that I was one of those people who told him he was a screw-up for many years, before he was diagnosed with ADD. I do regret that very much. I think I’ve done great damage there, and I’ve tried for the past four or five years to fix that. But whatever repair I’m doing, it’s going very, very slowly.

The stimulants do him wonders on the ADD front, they really do. But it’s those coping skills – those bad habits – that I really wish he had a pill for.

Like dumping his coat on the floor right inside the door…and not coming back to pick it up when he has a free moment, just stepping over – or on it – on his way to the TV.

Or leaving a food wrapper on the counter instead of taking the extra two steps to put it in the trash can. Or not taking the overflowing dumpster down to the end of the lane for the weekly pick-up.

I know these are all symptoms of attention deficit disorder, but to me, it seems as if he’s purposely implying that I should clean up after him, like he’s trying to make my life harder.

It wouldn’t be half as bad if not for his reaction when I confront the issue – at once, putting me in the position of the parent and he the teenager. At once, narcissist and victim. Again, just another classic ADD/ADHD symptom. Sigh.

When I first learned that his behaviors were due to ADD/ADHD and not the choice to be a jerk, I thought knowing would be easier. And I suppose it is. But it’s still not easy. I can tell myself over and over that he’s doing something because of how his brain is wired, but it doesn’t make it a whole lot easier to deal with. I’m not going to suddenly start picking up his mess for him, and telling myself that he’s leaving his stuff everywhere because he has ADD/ADHD only makes me slightly less annoyed.

I try to be compassionate and understanding, I do. But I’m no maid. We have three young kids; I have my hands full trying to keep the house clean between us four, not including my husband. I expect everyone to clean up after themselves – taking into account age and development, of course, as the baby is obviously too young to be bound by this rule – because, well, we all live here.

No one likes housework, but it needs to be done and it’s a lot more enjoyable for everyone to work together than for one person doing the chores alone. That, and everyone lives here, so everyone should share in the responsibility.

But, yes, I do need to account for the fact that my husband as ADD/ADHD and he doesn’t think the same way and he’s going to leave rooms in a mess. I still believe that it’s his responsibility, but I try to be accommodating by not getting too bent out of shape if he takes longer to get to it. Personally, I pick things up right after I get them out – cook the food and then do the dishes right after the meal, take the garbage out when the trash can is full and then replace the bag right away, put the folded clothes into the dresser drawers right away instead of leaving them sit on the table for a couple days – because it’s a heck of a lot less daunting to do it a bit at a time, for me, than it is to create a pile of work and then spend several hours trying to sort it all out. But that’s just me.

I also fight not taking his actions personally. I catch myself cursing under my breath and have to tell myself that he’s not doing whatever to be mean, that he’s just not really thinking through the consequences or that he’s not good at organizing himself. It’s an ongoing struggle for me.

Years ago, I was given the advice to just do everything that he wasn’t doing, but I found that the more I did for him, the less he did – until it was almost like he was losing his life skills! Like suddenly he couldn’t figure out how to set his alarm clock. So, that didn’t work. Now, I don’t do things for him – I do nag a little, but whoever said that wives shouldn’t nag didn’t have a husband with ADD/ADHD who was just as content to let his wife be his servant. Mind you, he’s not maliciously taking on this attitude. He isn’t! He just…well, he doesn’t even know he has this attitude.

No, it’s not easy trying to be an equal partner to a spouse with ADD/ADHD. And I have no magic answers. I read books and I try different tips, but every marriage is different and not all those tips work. Probably the best book I’ve read is Is It You, Me, or Adult ADD? by Gina Pera. It gave great insights to how people with ADD/ADHD work and why the non-ADD/ADHD spouse finds the relationship so frustrating at times. In fact, I think I’m going to re-read a couple chapters tonight.

I did a strength-weakness analysis several years ago when I decided to start my business. I wanted to make sure that I was cut out for entrepreneurship and that my choice of business venture was appropriate for me.

I learned that I am a great project manager – that I can see both the big picture and the small details, that I can stay on track, that I am a good researcher and analyzer, that I can come up with out-of-the-box ideas and follow through on them long-term.

I also learned that I get bored easily, so I fill my life with a lot of activities and can sometimes overwhelm my schedule. And even though I am good at estimating the time needed for a project, I tend to procrastinate because I get stuck on a certain interest or just plain need a break, which of course just adds to the overwhelmed feeling.

My husband and I are progressing on our discussions of turning his gardening hobby into a business. A couple days ago, I urged him to do a strength-weakness analysis. It’s more than a matter of writing down what your good and not-so-good points are; you have to come clean with yourself, you have to come to terms with some aspects of yourself that perhaps you had hoped you could change but that are really just a part of how you work. It’s so much easier, though, once you accept yourself – every part of you, the good, the bad, and the ugly – as you are.

It also allows you to objectively work on areas that need improvement. You don’t waste time trying to convince yourself that, “if I just try harder, it’d work out.” Knowing that I procrastinate, I learned to pare down my to-do list and to lower my expectations of what I can get done in a day or week; rather than being disappointed if I don’t get my to-do list done or, on the contrary, stay up until the early morning hours trying to get it done, I prioritize tasks and then work down the list, carrying over undone items to the next day.

And knowing that I tend to overschedule myself, I only add one new project at a time, leaving plenty of time between new projects to be sure that I can handle the new workload without overloading myself.

So, what did my husband find out about himself? That he can be very creative and is a hard worker, but his motivation only lasts in short bursts. He gets bored easily, so he needs a lot of different projects, but he’s easily distracted by small details, tending to overlook how all the details systematically fit together to form the big picture. Organization and time management can be a challenge, especially in complex projects.

He can take this information and try to work on weaknesses if he wishes, as I did. Or, he can try to find someone to work with him who complements his weaknesses. And that’s how we are trying to work together as we move forward. It turns out, if you look at each of our strength-weakness analyses, we have the potential to complement one other quite well. He enjoys the physical labor of gardening, but while he can come up with some wonderfully creative ideas related to marketing, plugging them into an overall business structure is quite boring and a bit daunting for him. For me, this seemingly mundane work gets my blood flowing.

Of course, we still have to work with the challenges of attention deficit disorder and, at times, bipolar mood swings. And we have our usual gender differences in communication and conflict resolution. But even with these factors, we can find ways to complement our strengths and weaknesses. In fact, if you look above at his analysis, you’ll find that it has a lot to do with his ADD/ADHD: highly creative but also easily distracted, a lot of different interests but difficulty in organizing them. So, in effect, we’re already a step closer to learning how to work ADD/ADHD in to our relationship – it’s a matter of not viewing every ADD/ADHD characteristic as a negative, but seeing how they can be strengths in different situations.

It’s a huge plus for me that he enjoys physical work. I do, too, but am restricted by arthritis. I like the thought of kneeling in the dirt and working the soil, but the reality is, if I got down there, I’d have a really hard time getting back up. It’s just not in the cards for me. And it’s a huge plus for him that I like organization and time management and all that “boring” stuff that comes with managing a business. I’m sure he likes the thought of being his own boss, doing things his own way, but ADD/ADHD presents certain limitations for him. That could change – after all, ADD/ADHD coaching can be very effective – but for now, I can help him reach his goals by complementing his differences with mine.

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.

But instead of talking to me about it, he tried to suppress it, telling me that it wasn’t a big deal to him either, but getting moodier and moodier through the day – until he exploded the next morning. As soon as he got the problem out – actually saying what was wrong, instead of saying that nothing was the matter when there was clearly something the matter – he was fine. Perhaps a little shaken up – it takes a bit to recover from a big emotional outburst – but happy and relaxed within a couple hours.

This is not bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder doesn’t care whether you’re suppressing your frustrations or opening up about them. Bipolar disorder doesn’t care whether you have an itinerary that everyone is following or not. This was plain, ole avoiding the issue and watching the upset feelings bubble up to the surface, despite all hope that they’ll just go away.

Does he have bipolar disorder? Yes. There is no question that he battles with recurrent depression. But obviously not every down day is due to a depressive bipolar episode. Sometimes, and increasingly more often as he is not on the right med combo, it seems that those down days are due less to bipolar disorder and more to something a little easier to deal with – well, potentially. Thankfully, people can be taught better coping skills to replace their bad relationship habits, but it’s no overnight fix.

The good news in all of this is that we’re discovering that my husband’s bipolar disorder isn’t as serious or as overwhelmingly treatment-resistant as we once thought. The good news is that if my husband can overcome some of his poor coping skills – like suppressing his feelings and trying to avoid a confrontation – it has the prospective to improve his overall quality of life and perhaps temper the bipolar mood swings when they come. And the great news is that perhaps this past weekend’s getaway isn’t the last vacation I ever take with my husband.

There were a lot of people who didn’t like the original post, but there were also a lot of people who did. And many of those people do have bipolar disorder themselves.

Granted, I was a bit unwell myself at the time and that translated into one inflammatory post, but I still believe the essence of it is true: Bipolar should not be used as an excuse for rotten behavior. Rather, people need to take measures to try to prevent a bipolar episode that will lead to rotten behavior.

Or, conversely, people need to recognize if they are indeed using their diagnosis as an excuse for their behavior, when in fact they do have control over their behavior. While the majority of people with bipolar, I hope, are people who truly want to be stable and to treat others with care and respect, it is naïve to think that there aren’t people with bipolar disorder using their diagnosis as a means to an end.

It happens in the general population; it’ll happen to the bipolar population, as well.

I have made some tweaks to the original post. Here it is…

What prompted the original post was that my husband’s coworker said it was OK for him to hit his wife during arguments because he has bipolar disorder and was currently in an episode. I say not. Not at all. If hitting people was a symptom of bipolar disorder, it’d be listed as a symptom in the DSM. Bipolar causes lack of insight and impulsivity and terrible errors in judgment, and it can be a reason for hitting people, but it is not an excuse. This man should be feeling great remorse, and then use that guilt as an impetus to getting well. It is never OK to hurt someone, whether or not you have bipolar disorder.

I am sick and tired of people using their diagnosis as an excuse for their rotten behavior. Unless you are currently in the throes of the psychoses of mania or the delusions of depression, you DO have control enough over your behavior to not do something really bad, like hitting your wife. Even if you are depressed or hypomanic, you are still in touch with reality – your impulse control may be well-the-hell off, but you are still “here” enough that you know that you’re breaking a window or abandoning your family or telling your boss to shove it. It’s not like you’re doing something and then later have no idea what you were doing; if that’s the case, then you are in fact psychotic and this article doesn’t pertain to you and you need to see your doctor immediately.

As you’re doing it, if you know inside that your behavior is extreme, you have some control to stop it. You may not be able to stop it while you’re doing it, but you can head it off…you can walk away, stomp out the door in a huff before you put your fist through the wall. You can’t stop the bipolar mood swing, but you can keep yourself from killing people – which means that you do indeed have control. Otherwise, murder – what I would think to be the ultimate in lack of behavior control – would be listed as a symptom for bipolar in the DSM.

If you can stop yourself from killing someone, you have the capability to stop yourself from doing less rotten behavior. It may be difficult, but you’re not too far gone to no longer have free will. Again, if you cannot keep yourself from killing someone, and this includes yourself – if you think about it obsessively – this article does not pertain to you; you need to see your doctor immediately.

While the moods that come with bipolar disorder can make rotten behavior really tempting, that rotten behavior is not in and of itself the symptoms of bipolar. The DSM lists such symptoms as risky behavior, not specifically hitting people. There’s a reason. It’s the moods that make bipolar what it is. It’s what you do because of those moods that ruins your life and signals to you and others that you need to see a doctor or spend some time in the hospital.

Bipolar is a mood disorder, not a self-control problem. True, there are people with bipolar disorder who have self-control problems, such as those with attention deficit disorder, but it is not correct to say that everyone with bipolar disorder has self-control problems. And that’s what this abuser was doing – he said that it was bipolar causing him to hit his wife, when in reality, he is causing himself to hit his wife; bipolar is making it easier for him to make that choice, because hitting his wife is how he is expressing his bipolar symptoms.

Whether or not someone with bipolar disorder has self-control problems, he or she needs to get help if they feel pressure to do extreme, rotten behaviors. Way back when, my husband hit me during a bipolar episode. But then he went and got some help. This is excusable. What is not excusable is to hit someone, say it was because of the bipolar, and then “forget” or refuse to get help. Not caring is not the same as a self-control problem.

In the general population, there are smart people and there are people who do stupid behaviors over and over and someone could label them as stupid. Not that they’re necessarily unintelligent, but that for whatever reason, they are doing stupid things and then not taking action to learn from those mistakes or to prevent them in the future.

It stands to reason that the same case can be found in the bipolar population. If you are bipolar but are using your diagnosis as an excuse to keep on doing rotten behavior, like hitting your wife, you are the bad labels being thrown at you: You are lazy if you choose to keep hitting your wife and not getting help, you are selfish if you choose to keep hitting your wife and not getting help, you are a jerk if you choose to keep hitting your wife and not getting help. You are NOT lazy, selfish, or a jerk if you are bipolar and you’re doing something about it! You may not always be successful in stabilizing your bipolar, but you are trying – and that is what separates you from the people with bipolar who just keep hitting their wives and using bipolar as an excuse.

If you have bipolar but you are continually working to get stable, even if you’re not that successful at it but at least you’re trying – because I’ve talked with people who have tried EVERYTHING out there and nothing works to stabilize them, whether it’s because of sensitivities to meds or just plain resistance to treatments – then this article is not for you.

But if you ride the mood swings with no thought of taking on the work to try something to stop the roller-coaster, if you blame everyone else for your problems (“you made me hit you because you made me mad”), this is who this article is chastising. Those are the types of people with bipolar who are giving everyone else with bipolar a bad name. If you want to get well, even if you’re not right now, you’re with the majority of those with bipolar (at least I hope it’s the majority). I’m talking about those with bipolar who give everyone else a bad name – the people who hit their wives or do some other bad behavior and say, “Well, it’s because I have bipolar. I can’t help it.” Yes, there is something you can do, and should be doing: GO GET HELP!

You are not bipolar. You are you. You just happen to have bipolar. Bipolar makes it a lot harder to live a stable, good life. But bipolar is not your identity. You have the ability to make the choice to try to get better, or to continue doing rotten behavior and using bipolar as an excuse. You may not always be successful – it can years to find the right meds or therapy exercises that will help stabilize you or head off a coming episode, or you may never be all that effective – but at least you care. At least, if you hit your wife, you can feel remorse.

You have the full ability to make choices, even if you have bipolar disorder, and I hope that anyone out there who is hitting his or her spouse takes a page out my husband’s book and makes the resolve to get better…rather than using bipolar as an excuse to keep doing it.

You have to take into consideration each of your personalities, skills, life experiences, hopes, and dreams as you work out the challenges together – and you have to work intimately, every step of the way.

Yeah, owning a business together is a lot like marriage…and dealing with bipolar together has a lot of similarities. Here’s an illustration:

My parents own a sheep ranch together. Both do the grunt work, my mom is in charge of the bookkeeping, my dad is in charge of marketing, and both make management decisions jointly. They talk to each other about everything, whether about the farm or the family. My husband’s parents also live on a farm. But his father is in charge of the farm, and his mother is in charge of the home. I’m sure they talk, but each leaves the respective decision-making up to the appropriate person.

My husband and I live on a small acreage. We have a large garden, a flock of chickens, and a few sheep. Our sheep are a profitable enterprise, and we’ve had some success with selling eggs and garden produce to my husband’s coworkers and passers-by. My husband is very interested in trying to make this less of a side business and more of a money-maker. I would like to support him, but I want to go forward very slowly and carefully. I already own a communications business, one I started six years ago after working in the industry for a more than a decade. It takes a great deal of time and energy, and the thought of a second business doing the same is a little daunting and I’d like to help my husband ease into the responsibilities.

My husband shares a lot more about his thoughts and plans than he used to. He readily brings up a topic for discussion when it would require money. I hold the purse strings in this family, especially after his last manic episode. We live on a tight budget, and I need to make sure that bills are getting paid and we are able to get groceries before we buy something special.

But, he is less inclined to discuss other parts of his plans with me. If I’m going to be a part of something, I must have an active position in the management of that something. I cannot stand idly by, watching him celebrate triumphs from afar or deal with difficulties on his own. Maybe it’s my oldest-child, Type-A personality, but this is the way I work. The farm and home are not separate entities in my mind; they’re intertwined, each benefiting the other.

So, I need him to talk…about everything, from major purchases all the way down to what variety of green beans he wants to plant. He’s not used to checking in on everything.

I understand the need to have freedom in marriage, the need to have your own “thing” going on. But it’s dangerous for this thing to be something that requires money or a lot of time, when there are four other people in the family – not to mention, when one of these people has a history of impulsive spending. Who’s to say that one person’s thing should be allocated a higher percentage of the family money, or time, than another person’s?

To encourage my husband to talk more, to involve me more on his plans for this budding business, I have been talking with him about plans for my communications business – asking for his thoughts on pursuing new clients, going in new directions, and of course buying new equipment.

I’ll ask him to look over finished drafts as a test subject before the client sees it. I’ll get his input on ideas for projects I’m pitching. I’ll involve him on organizing my office, such as building a shelf. I try to appeal to his interests, of course; he would rather read over an article related to agriculture than one about breastfeeding.

For the most part, I’ve left the selling eggs up to my husband. I did help him register the farm with the state regulators. And I’ll help customers who knock on our door. But most of his customers are through his job, so he does make most of the decisions regarding this side business. But the garden is a little different.

It takes more labor – the planting, weeding, harvesting, etc. – and with my husband already working a full-time job, he will need my help to keep up on it all. So this is why I want him to talk to me more about all of his plans. With both the eggs and the garden, a good portion also goes to feed the family, and so the plans to sell products needs to be balanced with the needs of the home.

So, to remind my husband to talk to me about what he’s thinking regarding these ventures, I start the conversation. I ask him questions, and I give him charge of the projects, but I don’t hesitate to share my opinions or to suggest setting parameters. Our home, acreage, family, and our respective jobs all work together, and while one may be my or his “own thing,” everything together is “our thing.”

And that’s a lot how it is when supporting a spouse with a chronic illness – he has bipolar disorder and ADD and I have celiac disease, and we each have to take charge of our “own thing,” but together, bipolar-ADD and celiac are “our thing” and we have to support that. I hope that makes sense.

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.

Many were sweet. They made me smile and sometimes chuckle at the cheesiness of young love. But tucked in there were also quite a few notes apologizing for something. Not just one or two, but several, many. And the memories began flooding back.

What I had chosen to remember for all these years was a greatly edited version of a whirlwind romance that suddenly changed direction after we were married. But the truth was, it was always a little bumpy. Back then, I thought that it’d eventually get better – that we’d outgrow our problems. It didn’t quite work the way I imagined it would.

But it is getting better, over time. Our problems aren’t necessarily going away, but we are outgrowing our immature ways of dealing with it, and one another. We’re not the perfect couple, and if anyone had been paying attention way back when, they probably would’ve advised us against getting married. In fact, I think they were a couple naysayers.

And there were many times in the last decade that either he or I thought we made a terrible mistake getting married. And there were several moments – a few longer than a moment – that we very seriously considered not being married anymore. But we gritted our teeth, bit our tongues, and pushed through the bitterness to reconnect.

I remember my mother telling me that the first 10 years are the hardest for any marriage, but that after 10 years, things get much easier because both people start relaxing and learning how to work together, instead of trying to work to control the other. All this time, I hoped that was the case at the same time wondering if it was really true. And I’m not naïve enough to think that all our challenges are over, but it does feel easier the last year or so.

I hope as our marriage continues, that things get better and better, and that someday, we’ll be a tribute to how an imperfect, even improbable, marriage can evolve into a truly great, admirable, couplehood.