After All, Your're My Wonderwall: Marriage and Bipolar Disorder {Part2}

With my husband's permission I am going to write out the story of his breakdown and diagnosis of Bipolar 2 in the first year of our marriage and it's effects on our life since. This story will be told in segments. The stigma of Bipolar is enormous and has not begun to decrease in power as it has with other mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety. This story intends only two things: to be entirely honest in it's telling, and for that honesty to help break down some of the scleloderma stigmata of it's truth. In writing this I am assuming a level of respect toward my husband and his story in the comments, as well as an understanding that this is a man I love deeply and have committed myself to.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT { Part Two }

The next day was this: silence and slow moving pictures, a movie made for him about him starring him without him. He worked and when he came home his wife was weeping on the phone in the kitchen and the baby was crawling on the tiles and the boys were in their room yelling. He felt a hard place in his chest become harder and expand. It felt good, like a back brace feels on a pulled muscle, supportive and strong.

He was not aware and this felt like a good hard drunk. The silence began to push inside his brain and hurt. The drinking began and he was a quiet drunk. He saw his wife look at him and her face was twisted and strange and he looked away quickly and was able to live in the silence in his pictures. His family was for someone else. He was for drinking and at 8pm he passed out. The next day he drank and passed out and the next day.

One night after the baby was in bed his wife sat on the couch next to him and touched his face looking at him. His mind was a hundred still pictures moving and making and her hand and her gaze were distracting. She made him feel an ominous pull, something tugging something tugging something that at the end was black and diseased and half dead. He drank and offered her the drink but she would not. Then she was talking and crying and sitting on his lap. She pressed his hand against her breast and he felt her heartbeat quick like a rabbit and her hot mouth on his mouth and they were making love. She stopped him and held his face and made his eyes with hers, and whatever she saw there stopped her from looking. She held both his hands to her rib cage and his hands could give her something his face could not. Afterward he passed out and in the morning he heard her crying in the kitchen.

Time passed with this hard brace inside of him and his mind clicking and filming pictures and work and drinking and his wife kept climbing into bed with him crying and pulling his hands to her body. He felt the memory of feeling sorry for her.

In the hallway she stopped him one evening and her hair was wild, her eyes swollen and the blue hard and shiny. She demanded he tell her what was going on. Didn't he love her anymore? He thought it was best to help her, be honest, so he said, no. The boys were in the bathtub and the baby at his feet. His wife drew her hand back and slapped him so hard across the face that he was looking at the smudged hallway wall when she finished. The noise from the tub stopped and the baby cried. His wife was sobbing so hard she heaved as if to vomit. He left the hallway and closed a door behind him to drink and pass out.

Weeks passed and his wife was making whatever plans she was making, he couldn't be sure he knew. If she had told him it left with consciousness at 8pm every night. He drank and she cried. Her mother came over almost every day and helped with the children and sometimes made his wife leave the house. This was when he felt something. He was sitting with the bottle in his hand, planning to drink, and he remembered his wife saying Something is wrong, this isn't you, I think you need help. And he remembered his wife's face for the two years after the divorce from his ex-wife, when his wife now was his best friend. He remembered her face watching his for the hours no one else would watch. He felt a sour place that churned and bled, his heart picked up the foul blood and pumped it until it reached his brain and he thought I do love my wife. And with this the movie stills all exploded into sound and he could hear all the voices in each room of his brain talking and yelling and ordering him around and he began crying and he felt afraid.

His wife came home and he asked her for love and she gave it. He felt the baby's hands on his ankles and picked her up and found his arms were shaking. He saw the baby's calm smooth face and large blue eyes and he was able to understand that if he did not love this family then he was lost to himself.