long-time marriage with bipolar husband I have been married to a bipolar man for 39 years and have raised 9 children and have a passle of grandchildren.But due to my husband's full-blown manic episode, he left me five months ago. Over the years I always wondered what was wrong with me because of various ways my husband behaved toward me. Wasn't I loving enough, sexy enough, good enough, forgiving enough or what? I perceived that there was something missing in our marriage, quite often, but did not understand that he had a disorder, until 11 years into our marriage, even though there had been times that he exhibited different behaviors. He would say and do things that made me question my self worth because I doubted him. I was trying to be a loyal and obedient wife, but things would come up from time to time that didn't make sense. Because he was and is a very intelligent man, I thought he was just a bit eccentric and that I must not be the kind of person who he could relate to. Because I was ignorant of bipolar disorder, I just thought he was super intelligent and creative and that I just needed to be more understanding of him. In 1982--eleven years into our marriage, he started hearing voices and having dreams which he thought were from God and started doing and saying things that were getting him in trouble with our church. It's been so long that I forget all the things he said and did at that time. I do recall that he would often wake me in the middle of the night, out of a sound sleep to hear his latest dream which he said was so vivid. Then he would lie there and interpret it to me. I thought he must be super spiritual or something. I remember being very hurt by some of his comments, through the years, and very scared sometimes. Sometimes his insensitivy toward me as I raised our young children and had so much to do, would make me angry. I remember one time I went in and kicked the folding closet door and it fell off its track. He wouldn't fix it because he said I had done it so I should fix it. So it hung there skeewompus for umpteen months as a testament to my ill temper, I guess you'd say. Because of the events of that time, during a period when he wasn't sleeping and was acting scary, I took my then two-year old and went to visit my folks in a neighboring town. I had to leave my 4 children we had at that time home in order for them to go to school. I contacted some men in our church to be aware of them and to check in on them and make sure they were safe. A few days later, I got a phone call from one of these men who said I needed to hurry and get home. He was afraid my husband was going to leave and take our kids, and he was cleaning out our bank account. So I rushed home and found him in a very agitated and sad state. He believed because the people in our area did not accept his vision that they should do various things, that the plauges in the book of Revelation were going to descend on the town in five months. He was trying to get a friend to buy all his cows so he could leave. Then he pitifully asked me to never leave him again. Long story short, I went to my doctor and told him my husband's symptoms. He gave me some valium to help him sleep because my husband had not been sleeping for over a week. I also had my husband go and visit with another doctor who was his close friend. The doctor later told me he thought my husband was either schizophrenic or manic depressive. At that time I guess they didn't know too much about this disorder and thought valium would take care of it. My husband took the valium one time and it did bring him down enough to calm him so he could sleep. But because he hated the way it made him feel, he quit taking them. Consequently when he is manic now he says he remembers that fuzzy feeling from that pill and swore he would never take anything that messed with his head, again. I remember that he was still strange all through the summer months, worrying about the gnats that he saw around the farm, which he wondered if they were the plagues that were coming. We got through that awful time by writing in our journals. I would write nice things about him and leave my journal sitting out and mark it so I could tell if it had been moved. He later told me that he would read what I said each day. And I would find his journal he left sitting out and read his thoughts which were quite disturbing to me. Because I had 5 young children and was 7 months pregnant, I never entertained any thought of permanently leaving him. I wanted our children to love their father, so I shielded them from the things he had said and done, as best I could, over the years. So they grew up thinking their father was just super smart and kind of eccentric. Consequently, now the older adult and married kids in the family have sided with him against me trying to get him medical help. They don't believe me that their dad has a problem. So half of my family will have nothing to do with me now. This is very painful as we have always been very close. Over the years my husband had other manic episodes interspersed with what I see now must have been depression. We have more photos of him sleeping in his recliner than not. We thought he was just tired from farm work in the summer, and in the winter when there was little to do, we just thought he was bored. I see now that he was depressed. Without adequate knowledge there was no way to judge what was going on in my husband's head. I just figured he was who he was and had no way of knowing that all men did not act like this. It seems that he would become depressed toward the end of the farm season, along about August, and toward December/January he would start to become manic. I grew to hate January because it seemed that was when he became the most strange and unpredicatable. I always explained it away for this or that reason. But with the advent of he internet, I have been able to do so much research and have come to a great understanding of the disorder my husband has been dealing with all these years. My older children find it hard to understand that I now desire to end our marriage because of the emotional trauma I am constantly suffering and which I am just worn out from handling. They believe that gee if mom and dad who seemed to have a rock solid marriage for 39 years now decide to split, there goes their foundation and example of solidarity. They don't understand that one must protect oneself from extreme emotional abuse in order to survive. My journals were full of times of great anguish because of something he did or said. But I would just pray harder, and try harder to forgive him, and try to be the best wife I could. And that is how I went on from day to day. It was not all bad, of course. He was a generous and kind and loveable man. He was a good provider, to a point. Until he got greedy for more and more land and placed us into deeper and deeper debt. He was very sociable when he was manic and was always studying interesting topics which we all conversed about. When he had periods of normalcy, he was a very spiritual and good man. He loved his children at those times. He felt love from him. But those times have become increasingly absent during the last 5-10 years. I homeschooled for 18 years because of various things coming into our public school I only agreed to do it because my husband said he would support me in helping teach the subjects that I felt inadequate in teaching. It was a good experience but very hard, since he didn't hold up his end of the bargain to teach certain subjects he had said he would. But we persevered and graduated all but one child who opted to go back to public high school, and they went on to college and various fields of endeavor. Three of the last children, who are all adults, opted to come home in recent years, or stay home and delay their own plans, to help their father on the farm when all his farmhands quit. I started to notice the last five years becoming increasingly lonely for me, as my husband started into male menopause. I felt like something was really missing from our marriage and often expressed to him that I felt like we were just roommates. There was a lack of intimacy and lack of real caring coming from him that hurt me. I felt like I wasn't able to be the loving and kind of person I should because my love was often ignored or met with with a kind of disregard for my feelings. Many times I would try telling him of my feelings about something, and he would just look at me and walk away. Or at other times he would say, "Well, I can't be a woman." Meaning that he could not be empathetic or understand on a feeling level. This was a major problem throughout our marriage. I see now that he just wasn't able to do that because of his disorder governing him. To make this long epistle shorter... I have been living in hell for the past five months since my husband left me during the week he started becoming very very manic. The week he before he left me and our four children here at home, he started some very bizaare behaviors that were scaring us. He became obsessed with various topics and would talk about them for hours. He started switching topics of conversation right in the middle of a sentence and start talking to someone else. He started calling everyone in his address book, to talk to them about random things. He started talking to the poor store clerks about his obsession with various Constituional principles, or making rangom and poor jokes to total strangers. closed out our joint account at one bank, opened his own account, got a safety deposit box that I have no access to, created a business account at another bank, and was spending us into oblivion the week before he left. Because we have to be careful to have enough money to start up the new farm season, I would question some of his extravagent purchase he suddenly started making. This irritated him that I would question him. He started whistling a tune everywhere he went. He never whistled before. It was driving us crazy and making me worried. We noticed that he was very red in the face and that his pupils were pinpoint and very scarey looking.It was almost like he wasn't really there and that some alien had taken over his body. It was like he was looking at us from behind a glass wall. He wasn't sleeping at all, and would get up at all hours to do calculation on various number correlations he could see in the Bible and was obsessing about them. He would stop people and ask if they wanted to hear about nesting sevens as he called it. He would get very agitated if our children would say no they didn't want to hear about nesting sevens again. One morning, during this time, he demanded that I wake all our children because he wanted to read them an article out of a health newsletter. It was before 6:00 a.m. I asked him if he could read it maybe at breakfast, in an hour or so, because it was awfully early. He grew angry and said I would have to read it to them then and make sure I did it. He showed me the article. After reading it, and seeing he had underlined random words, I asked why he wanted me to read this to them. They already new all about the trouble in the world and the conditions in our nation. But I had each of them read the article and they were puzzled because they saw no real news in it that they weren't already aware of. He started saying hurtful things about me to our children, often taking one or the other aside to discuss my supposed failings. This really made them sad. Eventually he started claiming to have revelation for different children and how this one needed to write his book about a certain figure from the scriptures. If she didn't write it for him she was being disobedient he said and God would not be pleased with her. He would obsess about talking to one or other of our three daughters here at home, and would go to them throughout the day. On another day it would be a different daughter who would receive all his irrational thoughts about something. He said one daughter could hear through walls. Some of the things he said would have been quite funny if it were not so tragic. At midpoint of the crazy week, I went to a religious leader who is also our local pharmacist and took my three daughters with me to also witness to the things that my hsuband had been saying and doing. He was very kind and sympathetic and tried to refrain from smiling at some of the things my girls said about the things their father was doing. I told him it was okay to laugh. Some of it was quite funny. He concluded our meeting by saying that he was very seriously ill and yes, he did sound like he was bipolar and that he needed medical help. Over the course of that week before he left, I visited with other religious leaders, and they also visited with my husband and came to the same conclusion. I also took one daughter and we visited our local doctor. He also said he needed medical help but that we could do nothing unless he wanted the help. Which he did not. He said he was not going to have anyone messing with his head and that I was the one with the problem, not him. One daughter became his confidante. After he left us, he would call and want to have her come over and talk with him, sometimes for hours. She would come home very distraught over the things he had said about us. After he left, to go over and live with his aged parents a mile away, I had to take some money out of our joint account in order to make sure I would have something to pay the monthly bills since he had left me with nothing. He later said I stole money from him and told that to everyone he came in contact with. A week after he left, he was telling everyone he was divorcing me. I was shocked. My son living here was so hurt. "Mom, I just got through emailing my friends and bragging how you and dad have been together for 39 years, when everyone else's marriages are falling apart. How could you do this? You and dad didn't even have an argument." I said that was true. We had not even had a discussion about our marriage and now he was claiming he was divorcing me. I didn't hear from him for two months. I was frantic and didn't know how i was going to survive without any money. A neighbor gave me some to buy groceries. My 90 year old father gave me what he said was some money he had set aside for part of my inheritance when he dies. He told me to retain a lawyer so I could put a freeze on our assets or my husband wouldn't have anything left. So at the advice of a local religious leader and the advice of my dad, I sought a lawyer's help. He advised me to file for divorce and then if we reconciled, then the proceedings would be stopped. That it would be easier to do that than just have a legal separation, and later decide to divorce. He was a religous and very compassionate man and I felt he sincerely wanted to help me. I said I didn't know how I could keep paying for his help. He said he would stand by me even if I could not pay him, eventually. In the meantime, my older children have "divorced" me and I seldom get to see my grandchildren. They think I am just being weird and hard-hearted, and that becauseI refuse to get marriage counseling with my husband, that somehow I am at fault for everything. They have put pressure on the younger adults here at home to make me do whatever I can to save the marriage. They are essentially using what my therapist calls "religious blackmail" to get me to do what they think I should do. One daughter told me that I need to set a good example for the grandchildren, by showing more love and forgiveness toward my husband, and how this is really affecting them. My older children do not understand the trauma and terrible things we have been going through, nor that their father has been bipolar all our married life and that because he refuses to get medical help I can no longer live around him. I said I would see a marriage counselor if he would get medical help. He refuses. But because he is constantly calling the older children, and because they do not live around him, he sounds normal to them. They agree with his irrational thoughts and reinforce his delusions and paranoia. I was told by a religious leader who has seen my husband and knows he has a problem, that unless all our family got on the "same page" in supporting me getting him medical help, that he would feed off their words and feelings against me and he would persist in his paranoi and irrational thinking. And he has. Now, instead of him being the "bad guy" for leaving me and wanting to divorce me, I have become the "bad guy" for being the first for filing for divorce and for refusing to seek marriage counseling. They don't understand that this is not just a marial spat and a lack of communication. I said, yes, it is a problem because I cannot approach anything on an emotional level, or talk about real issues, or he just shuts down and says he needs to leave, he can't take it anymore. It makes him agitated if I show any emotion or talk about anything that is emotionally charged. He shows no love or empathy toward me, nor real communication except upon trivial topics such as the farm, random thoughts about this or that persons' operation or whatever. It's very lonely never being understood nor being able to talk about anything but trivial things. Anyhow, this whole thing has been one big emotional roller coaster and nightmare of all sorts of feelings as I face an uncertain future. I have been a homemaker and farm wife all my married life and have never worked outside the home. At my age I don't think I would be hired for anything except flipping hamburgers. I need to go back to school or something in order to be job marketable. I have been seeing a marriage counselor who is also a therapist, for the past 5 months, in order to receive help in getting through this and to remain strong enough to do what I feel I must do. I still love my husband. I think. I'm starting to wonder since the real him has been quite absent for many years. But the family all want me to put a marital bandaid on our marriage, as it were, in order for us all to go back to having great family get togethers and the same relationships we have enjoyed. But so much trust has been lost and so much has happened, we can never go back and recapture the same times again. I still want to have a cohesive and caring family, but I see now that I cannot do what they want in order to hold it all together. Things will be different, and I'm so sad about that. But I hope to find some measure of happiness free of the emotional manipulations that I have had to put up with my whole married life. I have to take care of me first and do the hard thing in showing my girls that one should never allow themselves to be emotionally beaten into servitude and obedience to anyone. Especially to a spouse. I want them to know that marriage is a partnership and it's not about obdience to a man because he is the husband. I want them to learn that sensitivity, empathy and feelings really do matter and that each must work to try and see what the other feels. I want them to not give up not matter how hard it gets, and to endure troubles as they come, patiently, knowing that eventually in a normal marriage, that things will even out. But for a bipolar marriage, unless the bipolar spouse will get help in dealing with their disorder so that relationships can be maintained in a somewhat normal and stable fashion--I want them to know that there is a time when it is right to call it quits. I do not advocate divorce lightly. It was never ever in my thoughts as a way out. I had the word and even worse, I hate what it does to families. I am all for working through troubles and enduring the ups and downs in a normal realtionship. But there does come a point that one must ask, can I sacrifice my soul upon the altar, for this man who shows me no love and who constantly has me questioning my own sanity? My therapist said that the sign of a sane person is that he will ask, when things get weird in a relationship, "Am I crazy?" Because, a person who is mentally unbalanced will seldom ask that, and a bipolar person will most often accuse everyone around him as being the one with the problem. My husband says he loves being in super genius mode and he will not do what it takes to live with me or our children here. Essentially everything he thinks is about him and how others can serve and do his bidding. His thinking is rather narcisstic, in essence. Marriage is a partnership and a growing together of two personalities, and a helping each other be the person they can become. It is not a relationship where one lords it over the other person and the other must bow down and be only a cook, bottle washer, and back scratcher. I do not look forward to eventually living alone. I do not see me ever remarrying after having had my life wrapped around one man for 39 years. I don't know if the other half of my family will ever see the truth for what it is and come to see what I sacrificed in staying with their father so they could have a happy and stable childhood with both parent present. Basically we had a good life, thought lacking in some respects due to their father's disorder. I was the one who was the shield against irrationality and so on, in order that they would be able to love and respect him and grow up feeling secure in the love we had. I want them to understand that despite the bad times they have no way of knowing because that is not privy to the children, that I loved my husband and tried my best to get him help so that we could continue our marriage. But because I cannot make him want to get help in order for us to continue--I had to do what I had to do, even though it is the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life--divorce half my self of which he was. Truly, there is not enough understanding of the devastation that untreated bipolar disorder can cause, nor that it is treatable, nor that the person with the disorder is still loveable and capable of carrying on a somewhat normal life. I hope to be instrumental in helping others understand the implications of this condition that devastates relationships, even after many years of striving to hold everyone together. Thank you all for letting me unload. This is only a small portion of what has been going on, that I wished to share in order to show that it is possible to endure a bipolar marriage. Up to the point where the breaking point is reached. | 
