I find this blogging thing fascinating. It never ceases to amaze me how open and honest people seem capable of being in a blog as opposed to real life...if someone sat and ranted the way people do in real life, they would be treated like a total freak and people would run a mile the other way in case they catch this disease called "sharing". Especially the British. Americans love to talk, love to discuss things. They are happy to hear your life story and you only just met them five minutes ago. They will I might add probably forget every word you said five minutes after you're gone but it's the thought that counts eh? When they say "Have a good day" they genuinely mean have a good day. They just like people to be happy. We the British on the other hand are miserable misogynistic self-centered unfeeling race. We don't want anybody ELSE to have a good day. We want to have a good day but it's an even better day if it's at somebody else's expense. I like to talk to people and people tend to respond by talking to me. This seems to make me a bad person according to certain members of my family. At a family gathering once I got talking to this girl and she was telling me all about how important it was for her girls to go to private school (local schools in London being crime-ridden slums apparently), how they cdn't afford to have another child because they wanted the best for the two they had, among other subjects. She even at one point asked her husband to get her a drink so if she wanted to get away from me she had several opportunities. But as far as my sister-in-law was concerned, she was obviously just being polite, tolerating me, and I was persona non grata from then on. My father let slip some time later that she had made some comment about how much I talked and people didn't like being bored by me. Wdn't it have been nice if she cd have had the decency to talk to me face to face and hear my side of the story. Maybe I was the one who felt her friend was boring me but I just cdn't get away from her! I bet that scenario never occurred to her. As it was I reckon the conversation was absolutely 50/50 but I guess her friend had never talked to her like that so it must have been me that was the problem. My point here is how these blogs give people that opportunity to have a rant, commiserate, celebrate or educate and boy do people not grab that opportunity. I found one this afternoon in which this woman was giving an almost day by day report on the difficulties of living with a schizophrenic husband. I admired the detail, the honesty of her descriptions of her husband's hospitalizations and her own depressions. I found myself reading it with such enthusiasm it reminded me of the above situation and I thought you know what, I bet if you asked that girl how she really felt about us talking for so long as we did, I'll bet she'd say the same thing. Sometimes it's wonderful therapy and sometimes you just find you have so much in common with a complete stranger when those closest to you won't give you the time of day. I got the feeling this girl wanted to talk to someone and I was there. Contrary to my s-i-l's opinion, I was NOT the only person talking in that conversation and she seemed to miss that point. I got the distinct impression not many people were in the habit of listening to this girl and she seemed to welcome the opportunity to talk just as much as I did. Isn't it sad that being interested in others and being willing to share their problems makes you a bad person?

When is enough enough?

It's not like I haven't been here a thousand times in 20 years but every time feels like the absolute last time I can bear. And yet I'm still here. Truth is I can't move, I can't leave primarily because I just plain ain't got the strength. Not because I cdn't live without him (cuz believe me I have reached the point where I soooo cd!) but I mean I really ain't got the physical strength. That's one of the worst things about ME, there's so many things I want(ed) to do with my life and this illness has robbed me of the opportunities. I don't really like moaning like this. I try to keep as optimistic as possible because otherwise I wd have curled up and died years ago. but when is enough enough? When do you reach that point where you have to concede that nothing is ever going to be right with this man, that he is never going to admit or accept that he has problems that are nothing to do with me, that my life is never going to be any better than this!!! god that's depressing enough all by itself. This is as good as it gets.

I put into Google "living with ME/CFS and a bipolar partner" and every page was about either one or the other but not both. Somehow I doubt I am the only person in the whole world who lives like this. Maybe they're all too busy trying to survive to bother writing blogs like this but there must be somebody who can sympathise. Of course that's not including the child. If I looked for people who have ME, live with an undiagnosed bipolar partner AND have an autistic son, I somehow doubt I'd find many pages. If you are out there please let me know. Even if it is just to have a bitch about it all, there must be someone out there who feels as desperate and in despair.

Is there a point to this rant? At this point, I don't think so because I have nowhere to go with anything. I can't move out cuz the child can't be disrupted like that. I can't bear living like this, tensing up the minute I know he's home, dreading what he's going to find to scream about now. I just need to get this all down cuz I really believe someone needs to hear what I live with so when enough really does become enough, there is a record of my side of things. So being as I have to be here, at least I have some way of releasing all this frustration and misery.

We've had a couple of weeks of him being half human and relatively normal but the little things start happening again. He went away with the boys for the weekend and my son and me had the best weekend in years doing absolutely nothing. Not surprisingly when it's just the two of us, we have no stress, he does what I ask, he doesn't argue about food or anything else, and we have a totally chilled time together. Over the weekend, I had put whatever plates etc in the dishwasher. First thing Monday morning, I find him handwashing a load of dishes. We have a dishwasher and yet he had taken the plates OUT of the dishwasher, leaving one plate and one bowl and all the cutlery in the dishwasher (why?!) and handwashed them. Sorry am I missing something here? is the dishwasher there for decoration? Why did he leave one plate and one bowl? I spend my life trying to make him understand the problem is him getting these "manic" episodes where he is looking for things to do and excessively screaming about trivial things and generally acting like the only person who exists and matters in this life is him. He does not see behaviour like this as a problem. The dishes needed washing. Yes but they were in the dishwasher, why did you need to take them out of the dishwasher and do them by hand. No doubt he will justify it by bleating on about how much energy the dishwasher uses, how it wasn't full so it wasn't right to put it on half full, how he had to do a few glasses anyway so he did the plates as well (oh he left about four glasses in th edishwasher too btw). Amazing how if I only did part of a job because I ran out of strength and energy he wd be screaming. I can't really expect most people to understand why this seemingly little thing is so upsetting to me but I think it sums up the problems. It was completely unnecessary to do, he left 1 plate and 1 bowl and all the cutlery so it cdn't have been that important yet he doesn't see the fact that he was even doing something so unnecessary is Manic. Then this morning, my son is sitting there waiting to go to college because his father said he'd drop him off, I'm sitting there in tears and having a bad time trying to get going and he suddenly tells me to turn the tv off and starts trying to discuss the itinerary of our upcoming holiday!!!! Is this the time and place? How come when he wants to discuss something I have to turn the tv off because it distracts him but when I want to talk to him about something he doesn't even have the decency to take his eyes off the tv and actually listen to me! If he's on the phone I am not allowed to try and say anything to him yet the other day when I was on the phone he came up to me and started showing me a little ornament as tho I'd never seen it before and started trying to tell me it was broken apparently or whatever and when I pointed out that I was on the phone, he just gets angry and stomps of ranting. There are so many instances like this every day, I don't know how much more I can take. They all sound like such small things but when you have to live day in and day out with this unreasonable irrational manic response to every tiny little thing in life, it really is too much to cope with.

Fellow ME sufferers will understand, bipolar sufferers might relate, parents with autistic children can relate to how difficult THAT is but even I can't quite believe myself how hard it is to live with all three! I think that's the point, most rational human being wd not still be living with it after twenty years. How much easier wd it have been dealing with this child if it was just the two of us? Wd his father be as bad if we had a "normal" child? I don't even need to suggest how different things wd have been if I didn't have this illness. The fact is I do and I do have these other difficulties to deal with so I shall just put my best Sagittarian foot forward and carry on regardless. I think I just need to do this more often. I feel so much better for just letting it all out. Maybe there is someone somewhere who can help tell me how to keep up this positivity cuz I'm beginning to lose it.