Shall we call it chapter one?

January 24, 2024

Or maybe that’s a bit exaggerated…since this isn’t actually a book and I’m not actually writing a chapter, or even an actual writer at all. But let me give some context to this maiden voyage blog post first by saying that this project is part of a radical acceptance for me – A radical acceptance of my husband’s disease, of the turmoil it has caused for our family over the last 8 years, and of the change of course for our life plans that we had so carefully laid out. The idea was conceived only just recently, when I finally realized after years of fighting Marco’s disease that I cannot actually change it or fix it, but that I can only accept it and work with what we’ve been given. As they say, you don’t get to choose the hand you are dealt, but you can choose how to play it. So that is what I’m doing.

Marco and I met in 2004 and started dating shortly afterwards. We were super young and pretty much had no idea what we were doing or what we wanted, we just knew we were crazy about each other and when you’re young and in love…well, that’s really all that mattered to two lovesick teenagers. Our whirlwind romance found us pregnant after quite literally only a month, and we welcomed our first son in 2005. Obviously we had no business having a child, we had zero money and no solid plans for our future, but we absolutely adored our boy and we embraced parenthood like it had been the plan all along. We got a little apartment, we worked, and life was mostly pretty good. Our relationship at the time was pretty volatile, but I always chalked it up to us being so young and so unprepared for so much responsibility so fast. We certainly had our fair share of problems during those first years, but we always somehow managed to find our way back to each other through all of them, and we ended up welcoming two more sons in 2008.

Because the purpose of this blog is to share our mental health journey, I feel it’s important to share with my readers that a large portion of “our fair share of problems” in the early years were essentially Marco acting impulsively, me reacting to his actions, us fighting like hell, and then making up without anything ever really being resolved. Admittedly, it was pretty toxic when we were young, but you learn these things as you live. Knowing what I know now, I’m no longer so sure that his behavior the was a natural product of his youth and immaturity, or if perhaps it was the first signs of the more insidious condition that would end up so heavily impacting our life. It would take us over a decade to figure out exactly what that was, and what a journey it has been.