My husband is bipolar. Here’s how we’re coping.

As I write this, my husband, Lee, and I will be celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary. We got married on a stormy spring day and we have a wedding photo of Lee carrying an umbrella over my head to protect my hair, dress, shoes, and makeup from the raindrops. Years later, it was my turn to carry the umbrella when a metaphorical storm threatened our family.

At 35, Lee was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. There are different types of bipolar, and symptoms vary with each person. I won’t go into the laundry list of the issues he has had to face in his life because I don’t want you to think this information can or should be applied to others. 

Also, there’s enough stigma around mental health, and I don’t want to add to those misconceptions by naming particulars. However, I can speak to the experience of being married to and living with someone who has had to deal with chronic mental health issues. 

So here it goes...

Facing and reframing my fears.

First, I had to address my fears head-on. Sounds easy, but it was daunting. I was a new mom, in a Ph.D. program, and I felt as if my husband was on a runaway train without me, headed toward a cliff — and I was powerless to stop him.

A big fear of mine was failure: the possible failure of our marriage, not being able to save Lee’s life during a time of depression, or of protecting our son from shifting moods and family discord. Numbers circling the Internet suggest that 90% of marriages end in divorce when one spouse has bipolar disorder. And, the risk of suicide more than doubles for those dealing with psychological-emotional distress. I’m not necessarily saying that these were things we dealt with first-hand, but the numbers are alarming. 

With professional help, I realized that it was not my job to “save” Lee and that I, alone, could not “save” my family — and, for those who need to hear it, you can’t either. If I kept trying to do it all, I was going to do more damage than good. Eventually, I eased off the pressure that forced me to make sure everything and everyone was always “okay.”

The truth was, it wasn’t okay. I wasn’t okay. And Lee was definitely not okay. Once we came to that truth, I could face my fear of letting down everyone and everything. And, I finally gave myself permission to feel. Feeling all my complicated emotions was my first step in being okay. 

So, with my fears acknowledged and new truths lying in front of me, I found that I could only fail if I acted in a way that intentionally hurt myself, Lee, or our family. This does not mean hard choices suddenly became easy or that it didn’t hurt to make the decisions I was faced with. In fact, the process of emotionally stripping down to the bare essentials is as comfortable as jumping into a cold swimming pool in the middle of winter (FYI, I don’t like cold water and anything below 75 degrees is winter in my mind.).

But, by embracing the discomfort, I began to feel powerful instead of powerless. I know it’s cliché, but I never knew how strong I was until faced with this challenge. If I could find strength in sitting in my vulnerability — thank you, Dr. Brene Brown — I could sit with my husband while he navigated his. That was how I could help, and not feel compelled to fix, save, or enable.

Moving on. 

There’s no such thing really. We will not move on from Lee being bipolar, but we will move forward. Mental health is not a dark, shameful secret in our family, we allow it to sit in the room with us… we laugh about it when it’s funny and take it seriously when it’s not. Honest communication is our family’s love language, and it’s how we show each other that we care. 

Our child, Finn, only knows what is age-appropriate, and both Lee and I agree that is an absolute must. We do not allow him to shoulder too much information, nor do we think he needs to be sheltered from what he is capable of understanding. 

For now, Lee and I will toast to 10 years — through hell and high water, we got to this milestone together. Our story is more like a fable than a fairy tale, but it’s ours. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but yesterday was pretty good and maybe tomorrow will be a little better. 

And, if it’s not? We have an umbrella.