Or maybe it was. Maybe I was just too young to recognize what I was dealing with, but for the most part I always thought our first decade together was pretty normal. I worked, Marco worked, we bought a house, we were raising kids. Our problems seemed pretty normal, everyone around us had similar highs and lows in their relationships and honestly depression never came up. Marco played softball all the time and went to work every day. We used to barbeque with friends and family on the weekends, and we often had family dinner nights with his parents. Holidays were aways a big family event, and there were a ton of happy memories made. To tell you the truth, I remember a lot of our problems those first 10 years, but I really don’t remember Marco ever being sad. Maybe briefly, but never like lay in bed for days, don’t shower, can’t eat kind of sad. But there were other signs back then.
There were the cars. Marco would get an impulse to go buy a car at any given moment when he got bored or just decided he wanted it, with pretty much no consideration or warning for me. Once, he bought 2 new cars in the same week, financed them both because he decided he didn’t like the color of the first one and he couldn’t take it back. Sometimes there was excessive drinking, episodes of not sleeping, often times accompanied by aggression. Sometimes there were other women. Often times all these things came all at once, pretty much always with no warning to me. Now that I know what I know, I can look back and say with confidence that these behaviors were signs of mania. But back then, I always just assumed it was a natural reaction to stress. We did separate many times because of this, but he was always so sorry after these episodes and I never could tell him no. We always ended up back together and it always felt right as rain.
In 2014 we ended up pregnant with our 4th son after a period of separation. Our families were really excited for us, our church was really supportive, and Marco and I looked at it as a sort of new beginning for us. He was extremely attentive to me, he was an excellent provider during that period, and we were really just very peaceful and stable for a period of time. We actually did some therapy during all of this and I remember thinking that something felt different, like we had both grown up enough to handle this this time around. That was probably one of my favorite times in our life together because it was just so peaceful and everything seemed easy. Unfortunately, it didn’t last.