Cycling

Max has been pretty down lately and missing Sarah quite a bit. His sadness cycle is occurring while I am feeling more stable overall right now and less depressed. It’s probably better for only one of us to be really down and sad at a time. The other one gets to be the supportive one. We have our grief group meeting tonight too and we are both looking forward to that.

It’s been a little difficult juggling everything because an old friend of mine has been in town this week and I’ve been spending time with him too. Robert and I were very close in the era before I started dating Max and right before he met his husband Tom. He and Tom moved to Canada twenty years ago and live in a small town in Nova Scotia so we don’t get to see much of them.

Back before I met Max, I felt like I would never meet the right person for me and would never get to have a child. Robert felt that he would never meet someone right for him either in the lead up to meeting Tom. We watched lots of episodes of the old Sex and the City from the 90s together and deconstructed our dates over the phone and over brunch. Every person we went out with had a nickname. “So, do you think you’ll go out with Natural Deodorant again?” “Please tell me you’re breaking up with If I Could Turn Back Time.”

So many statistics are thrown at couples who have special needs children to the effect that their marriages aren’t going to survive. As far as I can tell, there are no actual studies that back up these statistics. It’s just one of the ugly disspiriting things you have to put up with when you have a special needs child, like stares, unwanted advice, using up all your sick leave. You get told your marriage probably won’t survive. Actually, most of the marriages I’ve seen that involve special needs kids are extraordinarily durable, because the parents learn to function as a team, as a well-oiled machine in which each person knows the many tasks necessary to get through a day. Of course, if one partner is too selfish or immature or can’t deal somehow with carrying their part of the load, then I suppose the couple would break apart. But as I said, I haven’t seen that happen too much.